HOW TO OVERCOME TEMPTATIONS - 5

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HOW TO OVERCOME TEMPTATIONS - 5

Baba said, "For a greedy man there is no peace, neither contentment, nor

certainty" in Sri Sai Satcharitra, Ch. XVI, XVII.

An old man of eighty met me. His hair were white and he walked with stoop. With

tears in his eyes, he said to me: "Even at this age, I feel drawn to the sins

of flesh. My body is become old, my limbs have grown feeble, but the pull of

pleasure is stronger than ever before!"

Yes, desire is insatiable. There is the classic example of Henry VIII, called

the "Great Widower." He married one women after another. He married six times.

His lust was insatiable. He had to break off with the Pope of Rome. He said:

"What does it matter? I shall set up a new church, but I must satisfy my lust."

Kama cannot be quenched. The more you seek to satisfy it, the more you add fuel

to its flame. Kama, desire, lust, reigns over man’s unregenerate senses. His

reason is clouded: he cannot discriminate between right and wrong: and there

are no depths of degradation to which a man, under the influence of kama, will

not stoop.

In our days, in the city of Pune, there was a man who lived happily with his

wife for several years, until one day he met a girl. Lust woke up within him.

He lost his appetite and sleep. He but desired to marry the girl. How could he

do so? In Maharashtra, there is a law forbidding a man to remarry during the

life-time of his wife. So he hatched a plan. To his wife he said: "You have not

moved out of Pune for some years. Why should not we go out for a change to

Mumbai?" They travelled by a night train on a moonlight night. There were only

the two of them in the compartment. While the train crossed Lonavla, the man

called his wife to the door of the compartment, saying, "Come and see the

mountains in the moonlight; how wonderfully beautiful they are!" The wife, not

knowing what was in store for her, looked out through the door at the

enchanting valley. Suddenly, the husband pushed her from behind, and down she

went, her body rolling on the slops of the lofty

mountains. The man thought he was rid of his wife and would now be able to marry

the young, pretty girl. Destiny had decreed otherwise. Early next morning, a

shuttling engine passed by. The engine stopped at that spot for a while. The

engine driver heard moanful sounds. Curious to find the origin of the sounds,

he went and looked down the mountain-side, and saw the body of a woman lying in

a cluster of branches of trees on the mountain slopes. Soon rescue parties

arrived and the woman’s life was saved. The husband was tried in a court of law

and sentenced to capital punishment. This is what kama, desire, lust does to

man. It clouds his reason and leads him to his own destruction.

(To be continued; Author. Sri. J.P. Vaswani)

Tamaso Ma Jyotirgamaya .....

The life of self-abandon is the true life. In this, we ask for nothing, desire

nothing, claim nothing, but rejoice in what God’s Will brings to us. It is a

life of child-like trust in the All-loving Mother. She provides all the needs

of her children, not unoften, even before the need is felt.

 

 

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