Deeper insights into tapas
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Tapas is Intelligent Effort
When you add intelligence to your effort, your effort will become effortless.
Many times, people undergo tapas just to prove something to themselves or to society. In such cases, there is a big danger of tapas itself becoming an act that comes from the ego.
In the same way, many seekers fall into the trap of trying to make some extraordinary spiritual effort, just to prove that they can do it. They torture themselves to prove something to the world.
There are two types of people in society:
1. The so-called worldly people: These are the people who are caught in the attractions and sufferings of this world. These people are tortured by the desires and fears of their body and mind. Their life is completely controlled by the desires and fears of the body and mind. But at least these people know that they are caught.
2. The so-called speakers or spiritual people: These are the people who continuously torture their body and mind in the name of tapas. I have myself seen in India, people sitting or standing on nails for five years! I have also seen people standing on one leg, rolling on the ground or walking on hot coals, all in the name of tapas.
There is no need to do all this and
torture your body. Actually, you torture
your body because you think that it is
torturing you! Sometimes, when life is
gracious to you, it gives you an intense
'crash course' in tapas, where you do
not sink into depression or explode into
violence, which is the period when an identity to which you have been clinging too hard is being removed from you.
But tapas does not always have to be a painful process. In fact, real tapas happens naturally, out of your intense longing for the Truth. Anything done by force is not going to help you or society. When your seeking for the Truth is intense, each false identity that is removed from you can only bring joy, not pain.
A person who knows how to enjoy the body and mind is totally at ease with himself. He feels relaxed with his body and mind. He enjoys intensely all the pleasures and the comforts, but he never abuses the body or mind.
One should know the difference between enjoying the body and abusing the body. At one extreme, you have people torturing their bodies in pursuit of sensual pleasures, and at the other extreme, you have people torturing their bodies in the name of penance or suppression. Both do not know how to handle the body and the mind.
