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DISCOURSE 71
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out endeavouring to control the sense of taste. Listen to the following principles and bear them in mind if you want to control your sense of taste.
(1) Those who are slaves to their sense of taste will experience a fall. They may also be ruined spiritually.
(2) Those who are tempted by the sense of taste eat meat and drink liquor and become addicts to such habits and ruin their present lives.
(3) Those who are slaves to their sense of taste go to hotels and restaurants and waste money. Their physical health gets upset and they have to spend thousands of rupees on medicines.
(4) When those people who are slaves to the sense of taste do not get in their house, the food they like, they become angry and begin quarrelling with the result that the atmosphere in the house becomes agitated. On account of this, domestic happiness is destroyed.
(5) Those who are slaves to the sense of taste cannot concentrate their minds on spiritual austerities. Their minds keep wandering towards sweet dishes and succulant delicacies. They cannot count the garland of beads even once reciting the Navakar mantra.
If you are slaves to the sense of taste, you will suffer much loss. Having known this, cannot you exercise even a little restraint on your sense of taste? Sometimes you also carry out such austerities as fasting and Ayambil. Sometimes you also carry out Ekasan. So, it will be easy for you to give up food that does not agree with your constitution.
I know that you have one serious weakness. You associate with people who are interested in only earning money and fulfilling their sensual desires but who are not interested in Dharma or the soul. As is your association; so is your behaviour. Those people do not have any principles or prohibitions in respect of their food habits. You either imitate them blindly
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