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<title>The Spirit of Tapasya</title>
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		<b><font face="Times New Roman"><i>The Spirit of Tapasya</i> </font></b></p>
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<font face="Times New Roman">TAPASYA (Asceticism) is usually understood to mean the
capacity to undergo physical discomfort and suffering. We
are familiar with various types of Tapasya: sitting in summer
with blazing fire all around and the fiery noonday sun over-
head (Panchagnivrata), exposing one's bare limbs to the cold
biting blasts among the eternal snows, lying down on a bed of
sharp nails, betaking oneself to sack-cloth and ashes, fasting
even to the point of death: there is no end to the variety of
ways and means which man's ingenuity has invented to torture
himself. Somehow the feeling has grown among spiritual,
religious and even moral aspirants as well that the body is the
devil that has to be curbed and controlled with bit and bridle
and whip. Indeed the popular view measures the greatness of
a saint by the amount of his physical privations.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; One seems not to know that the devil cannot be so easily
checkmated or beguiled. For, indeed, it is easy for the body to
take punishment, to submit to all kinds of rigours, yet feel as
if it was making ample amends and atonement in that way
rather than really give up its aboriginal instincts and impulses.
Often one deceives oneself, succeeds in hiding, in secretly
preserving one's unsaintliness behind a smoke-screen of the
utmost physical tapasya.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Real Tapasya, however, is not in relation to the body and
its comforts and discomforts; it is in relation to the inner
being, the consciousness and its directives and movements.
Tapasya, austerity, consists in reacting to the downward pull
of the ordinary consciousness, turning and attuning it to the
rhythm of higher levels. To oppose the force of gravitation,
to move ceaselessly towards purer and luminous heights of
being and consciousness, that is Tapasya, Askesis, true asceticism. </font>
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Page 191<hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">Virgil, the great poet-of a diviner order in human life,
expressed the idea most beautifully and aptly in those well-
known lines, one of the characteristic passages showing his
genius at its best:</font>

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<font face="Arial Narrow">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</font><font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp; ... </font>
<i>
<font face="Times New Roman">superasque evadere ad auras,</font><font face="Arial Narrow"> </font>
</i>
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<i><font face="Arial Narrow">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</font><font face="Times New Roman"> </font></i>
<font face="Times New Roman"><i>Hoc opus, hie labor est.<sup>1</sup></i></font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; . . .to move out into the higher spaces,
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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This is work, here is labour.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Heroism consists in this untiring march upward to more 
and more rarefied heights. That means the growth of consciousness, its uplifting and expansion, freeing it from the
limitations of the ignorant egoistic movements, pressing it
forward to the domains of higher illuminations, towards
spiritual consciousness and soul-knowledge, towards communion with the Divine, the cosmic and the transcendent Reality.
That is the real work and labour. Bodily suffering is nothing:</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">it is neither a sign nor a test of the ardours of consciousness
thus seeking to uplift itself. Indeed, Tapas, the word from
which tapasya is derived, means energy of consciousness, and
Tapasya is the exercise, the utilisation of that energy for the
ascent and expansion of the consciousness. It is this inner
athleticism that is the thing needful, not its vain physical
simulacrum—not the one which is commonly worshipped.</font>

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&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<font size="2"> 1<font face="Arial">Virgil: </font>

		<font face="Times New Roman">Aeneid<i>,</i></font><i><font face="Arial"> </font>

		<font face="Times New Roman">VI.</font></i><font face="Times New Roman"> 128 </font>

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Page 192<hr>

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