The Root of Evil !

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intellects. No thought of God. No talk of God. It is all fashion, restaurants,

hotels, dinners, dances, races and cinema. Their life ends in eating, drinking

and procreating. That is all. Passion has introduced new fashions not only in

London, Paris and Lahore, but even in Madras amongst the Brahmin girls of

orthodox families who apply Cherry Blossom Powder and Hazeline Snow to their

faces, instead of the sacred turmeric powder, and dress their hair like the

French girls. This sort of vile imitation has crept into the mind of our boys

and girls in India. The sacred percepts and teachings of our ancient sages and

Rishis have been totally ignored. What a lamentable state! They will accept

anything as true only if a Johnson or a Russel brings something by way of the

theory of evolution, motion, atom, relativity or transcendentalism. Shameful

indeed! Their brains are all clogged with

foreign particles. They do not have the brain to absorb anything good in others.

There is a miserable degeneration in the present young men and women in India.

This is the age when they cannot walk even a short distance without a Rickshaw,

a car, a tram, a bicycle or a carriage. What an awful artificial life! Bobbing

of the hair amongst the ladies in India has become a severe epidemic and has

invaded the whole of India. This is all due to the mischief of passion and

greed. Young men of the present day indiscriminately imitate the West and

this results in their own ruin. Men are swayed by lust. They lose their sense

of righteousness, and of time and place. They never discriminate between right

and wrong. They lose all sense of shame. Read the history of the

crimes—robbery, rapes, kidnapping, assaults, murders—that come up for trial

before the Sessions Courts.

Lust is at the root of all this. It may be lust for money or lust for carnal

pleasure. Lust ruins life, lustre, strength, vitality, memory, wealth, fame,

holiness, peace, wisdom and devotion. Man, with his boasted intellect, has to

learn lessons from birds and animals. Even animals have more self-control than

men. It is only the so-called man who has degraded himself much by indulgence.

At the heat of sexual excitement, he repeats the same ignoble act again and

again. He has not a bit of self-control. He is an absolute slave to passion. He

is a puppet in the hands of passion. Like rabbits he procreates and brings forth

countless children to swell up the numbers of beggars in the world. Lions,

elephants, bulls and other powerful animals have better self-control than men.

Lions cohabit only once in

a year. After conception, the female animals will never allow the male animals

to approach them till the young ones are weaned and they themselves become

healthy and strong. Man only violates the laws of nature and consequently

suffers from innumerable diseases. He has degenerated to a level far lower than

that of animals in this respect. As a king is no king without a treasury,

subjects and an army, as a flower is no flower without fragrance, as a river is

no river without water, so also, a man is no man without Brahmacharya. Ahara,

Nidra, Bhaya and Maithuna—food, sleep, fear and copulation—are common to both

animals and men. That which differentiates a man from an animal is Dharma,

Viveka and Vichara Sakti. Jnana and Vichara can

be secured only by the preservation of Veerya. If a man has not got these

qualifications, he should really be reckoned as a veritable animal only. If

lust, which is the source of all enjoyments in this world, ceases, then all

worldly bondage, which has its substratum in the mind, will cease. Even the

most virulent poison is no poison when compared to lust. The former defiles one

body only, whereas the latter adulterates many bodies in successive births. You

are a slave of passions and desires, emotions and attractions. When are you

going to rise up from this miserable state? Those persons, who, in spite of the

knowledge of the non-existence of happiness, both in the past and in the

present, in the baneful objects of the world, do yet entangle themselves in

them with their thoughts clinging to them, deserve the

appellation of an ass, if not a worse one. If you do not possess Viveka, if you

do not try your best for salvation, if you spend your lifetime in eating,

drinking and sleeping, you are a horizontal being only, having to learn some

lessons from those animals, which possess far more self-restraint. The sexual

degradation that has overtaken mankind today is due directly to the fact that

people have assumed that there is a natural "sexual instinct" in human beings.

It is not so. The natural instinct is the procreative one. If men and women

restrict sexual indulgence to mere procreation, then that itself is observance

of Brahmacharya. As this is found to be impossible in the vast majority of

cases, total abstinence is enjoined on those who seek the higher values of

life. As far as the Sadhaka of burning Mumukshutva is concerned, celibacy is a

sine qua non, as he cannot afford to waste his vital energy at all. The

gratification of every worldly desire is sinful; the flesh should be the abject

slave of the spirit intent upon divine things. Man was created for a life of

spiritual communion with God, but he yielded to the seduction of evil demons

who availed themselves of the sensuous side of his nature to draw him away from

the contemplation of the divine and lead him to the earthly life. Moral

goodness, therefore, consists in renouncing all sensuous pleasures, in

separating from the world through discrimination and dispassion, in living

solely after the spirit, in imitating the perfection and purity of God.

Sensuality is inconsistent with wisdom and holiness. The great business of life

is to avoid impurity.

windowtext"> ----Sri Swami Sivananda

Sivaya

Namah

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