-45_Life and Self Control

(A Letter)

THERE is no doubt that Europe knows very well the art of life which in our country is totally lacking. In the East it is only Japan that knows it and knows it well enough. Our country on the whole and most of the East is at present steeped in inertia.

You have asked me the exact meaning of control of the senses and what is its necessity in life. For, in India we have held up this ideal on an elaborate scale, but to what effect? Europe cares little for it, yet she rules the world.

Firstly, whether self-control is necessary or not depends on the nature of our ideal. Self-control is only a particular means to a particular end. If the meaning of life is to live the life of nature, to possess power and influence – if the aim of life is to live in accordance with its impulses, then the question of self-control can never arise. In such a case the indulgence of the senses is the motive force.

There are two approaches to life: one is to follow the lead of the senses, to enrich life as much as possible by giving them full play and acquiring means for their satisfaction; the other is to move away from their range to a region inward or upward. Those who have taken to this path are unanimous that this path leads to the realm of supreme Peace, Light and Truth and that in fact the real character of life, its true fulfilment lie in this realm. In their view the sense-world is a world of deformations, narrow and full of impurities. Its material resources, however rich and vast, are really 

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worth little. But man has also his inner senses which can help him to return to his home in the infinite Vast as a child of Immortality. This is the real sense of self-mastery: instead of swimming down the sense-current, one must swim back in the opposite direction. Instead of slipping down from the source of life one has to climb up into it.

You may ask: to what good? Suppose, one goes beyond the sphere of life to Vaikuntha, to Heaven, attains Nirvana and gets merged in the Brahman; in that case life is lost. And it is really what has happened in India. There has been no dearth of saints, seers and Avatars. But they live in their own worlds. The dwellers on our realistic plane are poor, distressed and miserable. True, there is a class of men who are not in the least perturbed at this state of things. Time was when from the mouth of a daughter of India rose the ringing voice:

"Of what use to me are the things that cannot make me immortal?"

Of course, there is no hard arid fast rule that there must be a barrier between life and beyond-life, between self-restraint and self-indulgence. A synthesis between the two may be difficult, but not impossible. Indeed, it was in India again that there developed such lines of synthetic sadhana. Rather it was Europe that gave evidence of this conflict and duality much more than India. We may remember the motto: "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, etc." By pointing to the path of self-restraint Christianity holds that it leads to the Kingdom of Christ and those who would remain chained down to their senses will remain in their low, unrefined state of nature. In Europe this conflict has led to two extremes. Self-restraint in Christianity has become self-mortification: but, on the other hand, when Europeans do not think it harmful to give a long rope to the senses, they have gone to the excess of unbridled license. In India there 

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has been an attempt at a synthesis of these two aspects of life. Worldly life was taken as a preparation for or as a stepping-stone to the world beyond. So self-restraint was given a place not only in the sphere of sadhana for liberation, but also in the field of enjoyment. Hence we see in India as much preponderance of sattwic qualities as we see in Europe preponderance of rajasic dynamism. No doubt, the sattwic state easily lapses into the inertia of tamas. As a matter of fact, such has been the case in India. But rajas also meets the same end. The one slowly slides to extinction; the other shoots up like a rocket and falls like a burnt stick. Thus both suffer the same fate.

In general, life is the play-field of the senses. If self-control implies moving away from the senses, then it is not possible for it to have a place in life. But self-control may mean keeping the senses under control, under a system of rule and discipline. This is the popular sense of self-control: it is a graded withdrawal, a first step towards detachment. This is also how it developed in India. But, as a matter of fact, this popular approach to self-control is not India's speciality alone. Europe has given it a recognised place, not only in the Christian religious life but in her worldly life too. But it will not do to forget that the untrammelled freedom of the senses and their unbridled license have been accepted as an ideal specially in modern times, and it is confined to a particular community. What they are now attempting to reject as a bourgeois trait was one day an aid in the building up of the Euorpean society. To be sure, Europe was not so inclined towards detachment as India. Europe has gone in for the cultivation of the senses, but that does not mean that she has been sticking to an excessive and disorderly play of the senses. Neither Byron nor Oscar Wilde is the ultimate ideal of Europe. When the famous novelist Balzac used to sit down to write he would do so in a lonely place in a monk's tunic in order to help his one-pointed concentration. Napoleon, Caesar and Alexander were no 

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helpless slaves of their senses. In fact, no country or race can build its greatness except on the foundation of self-control. It is not that self-control must necessarily be self-mortification. There can be a via media, and in ordinary life this is a necessity. Self-indulgence is the debit side. True, this side of Europe is much to the fore, but that leads one to think that she is living on her old capital, and it is not long before her capital runs short. The root of the capital is self-restraint, and it is the credit side, the side of accumulated power.

It may certainly be that the social, moral and other kinds of injunctions regarding control of the senses do not strictly apply any more to our modern life. Man's consciousness demands a wider and more liberal existence. Not a religion of mental conventions but a universal one founded on truth is what he wants. But that is altogether another matter. This problem and its solution will lead us into deeper waters. Hence we have to stop here. 

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