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he ignores the inhibition and indulges in the wrong act, that act leaves a mark of defilement on his conscience. Thereby his inhibition is reduced and the next time he undertakes the same activity, he can do it relatively easily. His conscience thus goes on losing its force and it gets entirely obscured, if he continues to repeat that type of activity. He is then habituated to indulge in that activity. The initial wrong action is thus the commencement of forming a wrong habit. Such habits leave the indelible mark on his conscience and it stops resisting. He can thus indulge in that activity without any inhibition. Such uninhibited habits assume the form of strong traits and addictions. Such traits stay with the soul and are not left behind even at the time of its migrating to other embodiment.
Those traits set the behavioral pattern in the new life. As long as conscience remains obscured, one tends to behave impulsively according to the set pattern. In spiritual language, that is termed as Ajnän. It denotes the ignorance of soul about itself. Thereby one fails to perceive rightly and he instinctively remains tuned to the pursuit of sensuous pleasure and of physical comforts. In order to come out of that, he needs to break up the set pattern. For that purpose one has to strive very hard. First of all, he has to become aware of his Self and of the traits that are unbecoming to him. Then he tries to loosen the grip of such traits by repentance etc. That is the beginning of internal Tap. In order to get rid of the traits, he has to remain increasingly vigilant of defilement that may occur from time to time. Eventually one reaches the stage of constant vigilance as a result of meditation and concentration, which are the two ultimate categories of internal Tap.
While undertaking to remove the wrong traits, one has to sacrifice his sensuous pleasures and the material comforts. In his endeavor he may also face different types of hardships. For instance, the environments may not be conducive; he may get no food or get insufficient food and whatever he gets may not be to his taste; he may be exposed to various types of pain and physical discomforts. He must be willing to bear all these and any other type of hardship as well. In fact willingness to bear hardships is the prerequisite for refining oneself. That constitutes the external Tap. The more patiently one bears the hardships, the more intense would be his Tap. In this way, with the help of external and internal Tap, the aspirant ultimately succeeds in getting rid of all defiling traits. This process of removing the defiling traits is Nirjarä. Therefore it is said that Nirjarä can be achieved by Tap.
