The Creation of Pleasure and Pain : 7.

The senses mostly are regarded as our untrustworthy friends who create a lot of misery for us, so in our attempt at self-control we subdue the senses so harshly that their backs may break. But the instigator of the senses is really to be regarded as a more dangerous cause than these instruments, or servants, the senses by themselves.


As we say, students are very bad these days. They are rebellious gundas. But we know, and it is well known everywhere, that there are instigating policies and fireworks behind the students, and these young juvenile enthusiastic minds can be bent in any direction, like a young bamboo stalk. When it is very old, it cannot be bent. But when it is very tender, we can bend the bamboo and direct it in any way that we like. These senses are like these rebellious students of modern days. They are not bad by themselves, but they are led along wrong paths by forces which are selfish, personal and injudicious. We have to find out the causes behind these incentives driving the senses along erroneous channels. We should not complete our process of sifting evidence merely by coming to the borderland of sense activity, because we find that we can be unhappy even when the senses are not functioning.


In the waking state we can be highly disturbed even when we are not actually seeing anything, hearing anything, eating anything or touching anything. Have you not had occasions of this kind in your life? You are seeing nothing, almost. You are sitting with a blank look, but are highly disturbed in the mind. It is not that the senses are active at that time; they do nothing almost, but you are highly irritated, agitated, upset, and disturbed by some factor not clearly known. So one can be unhappy even if the senses do not function actively.



What about the dream state? How wretched we become sometimes in dream when all the senses are inactive totally. None of the senses function in dream, but yet we can have all sorts of funny experiences in dream. We can also have experiences in waking condition such as reveries and occasional moods of depression, melancholy and dispiritedness of various types.

Swami Krishnananda

To be continued  ....