Yoga for Health, Happiness and World Peace-12. - Swami Chidanananda

25/06/2018
12.

Usually the non-understanding occidental says "No! You should not control your senses; it is suppression; it is depression; it will create various sorts of neurotic complexes". It is only when self-control is thrust upon someone, against one’s wish, that it may bring about certain psychological aberrations like neurosis and complexes and so forth, because of the inhibitions.

But this is not so in the case when one voluntarily takes it upon himself knowing its value, blessedness, importance and its immense benefit. So, when anything is taken upon oneself voluntarily, there is no adverse or negative reaction upon the psychic. This is a point very few people understand, and therefore, there is a lot of controversy about self-control as exercised by the Yogi.

Yoga is an ancient science, which has a very great relevance to us in this age of free indulgence, sensuality and sense control. We are all hedonists. Modern man has got the peculiar idea that life is meant to have a good time.

"We have all come here to drink and be merry and dance and wine and dine and to have a good time".

This is a colossal blunder. Life is duty. Life is meant for a sublime higher attainment. Failure to recognise this supreme higher goal of life is a woeful blunder on the part of modern man and invites various types of diseases by rushing headlong into sense-indulgence, by thinking that life here is only in order to satisfy the senses.

Even animals do not do it. Even though all their life is in sense satisfaction, they take it up to a limit and not beyond. If a calf or a cow is ill, it gives up eating; it does not take any food. No matter how much you try to force it to eat something, it would not eat. So it is with a dog or a cat because they have got their own instinctive built-in-sense. They know where to stop and when it is harmful.

Whereas man, due to his indulgences, has perverted his taste. His senses were given to perceive the universe as windows of knowledge, to gain knowledge. That is the main function of the senses. To see the world around and to learn about the world to gain knowledge.

To be continued ..