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DASA-DHARMA
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love for free life. It cannot be denied that Indian culture has always emphasised that self-restraint is essential to prevent inroads into the peaceful life of other people. If tendency towards free life is not restrained in time, one is likely to drift towards a life of ease and sensual pleasures. Cultivation of self-restraint then becomes an impossibility.
To give up oneself to such life is to lose the dignity of human personality and greatness. The mind becomes overwhelmed with with passionate thouhgts and loses all its strength. It then becomes impossible to regain balance of thought and purity of conduct. An individual who becomes a victim of such situation will never be able to subdue his mind and subdue the evil Karmas which entangle him into a life of misery and continued transmigration. In that event, one cannot regain the chance of human birth which is the only opportunity for destruction of bad and good Karmas. The pleasures of worldly life are undoubtedly fleeting but no one can predict to what stage of degradation a man might sink before he can awake to his senses. Like an insect which is attracted by a light and embraces it only to fall down dead, a person who is attracted to a life of sensual enjoyment emerges physically and morally bankrupt.
Renunciation in a lesser or greater degree is the beginning of self-restraint. The world is full of objects of glamour to the different senses and it is only a person who is constantly conscious of the dangers of licentious life that can control himself from a fall. It is constant awareness to the pitfalls of life that can ever keep an individual vigilant on the path of righteousness. Without self-restraint, an individual will be blindly sacrificing his good fortune of having been born a human being and lose an invaluable gem of life for a piece of glowing glass. Without self-restraint, the intellect and the body will not work to achieve the spiritual advancement even in the slowest possible manner.
It is axiomatic that without full control of thought and mind, one cannot achieve real renunciation. Austerities, fasts and. penances are futile without the internal purity. Introspection and
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