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<p class="paracenter">III
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<p class="paracenter">SADHANA
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<p class="paracenter">ASCETICISM
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<p class="para"> You have seen Sannyasins lying 
upon nails. Why do they do that? Perhaps to prove their saintliness. But when 
they do so in public, well, the suspicion is legitimate that it is something 
like a pose. There are some perhaps who do the thing sincerely and seriously, 
that is to say, they do not do merely to make a show. In their case we might ask 
why they do so. They say it is to prove to themselves their detachment from the 
body. There are others: they go a little further and say that one must make the 
body suffer in order to free the soul. But I tell you that the vital has a taste 
for suffering and imposes suffering on the body because of this perverse taste 
for suffering. I have seen children who, when they got hurt, would press the 
part hurt in order to get more pain and it was a pleasure to them. I have seen 
bigger persons also doing the same thing—morally I mean. It is a very well-known 
fact. I always tell people 'If you are unhappy, it is because you want to be 
unhappy. If you suffer, it is because you like suffering, otherwise you would 
not have the thing.' I call it an unhealthy state; for it is contrary to harmony 
and beauty; it is a land of unhealthy need for strong sensations. Do you know, 
China is a country where they have invented the
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<br><p class="pageno">Page-73</p>
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<p class="para">most atrocious kinds of torture, unthinkable ways? When I was in 
Japan I asked a Japanese who liked the Chinese very much, why it was so. He told 
me: 'It is because the people of the Far East, including the Japanese, possess 
very dull sensibility. They feel very little; unless the suffering is very 
strong they feel nothing.&quot; They were obliged to use their intelligence for the 
discovery of extremely strong sufferings. Well, all people who are inconscient 
or tamasic, the more inconsicnet they are the greater the tamas,have their 
sensibility blunted; they need strong sensations if they have to feel them. This 
is what usually makes them cruel, because cruelty gives very strong sensations. 
The nerve tension produced in you when you impose suffering on some one, well, 
it does bring a sensation: they need that in order to feel, otherwise they would 
not feel. It is for that reason that whole races are particularly cruel. They 
are inconscient, inconscient vitally. They may not be unconscious mentally or 
otherwise. But they are unconscious vitally and physically, physically above 
all.
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<i>If one has a sense of beauty can he be cruel ?</i>
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<p class="para"> It is a psychological problem. It 
depends upon the region where there is the sense of beauty. There may be a 
physical sense of beauty, a vital sense of beauty and a mental sense of beauty. 
If you have the moral sense of beauty, that is to say, a sense of decency and 
nobility, you can never be cruel. You will be always generous;
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<br><p class="pageno">Page-74</p>
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<p class="para">your movements will consist of fine gestures. But, as I say 
often, man is composed of many different bits pieced together. For example, I 
frequented very much the artists. I knew all the great artists of the end of the 
last century and the beginning of the present. I lived among them. They had 
really a great sense of beauty. But morally some were very cruel. It is because 
when you see an artist in his study at work you find him living in an atmosphere 
of great beauty, but when you see the gentleman at home, he is a different 
person, having very little contact with the artist he was. Here he becomes 
vulgar and commonplace. Many of them are indeed like that. But there are always 
exceptions. Some have a unified personality, that is to say, they live their art 
and are truly generous, fine.
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<br><p class="pageno">Page-75</p>
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