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	<p class="paracenter">
	VII</p>
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	THE SPIRIT OF TAPASYA</p>
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	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 noondaysun overhead (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.</p>
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	Page-91</p>
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	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 is 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 smokescreen of the 
	utmost physical tapasya. </p>
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	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. 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:</p>
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	Page-92</p>
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	... <i>Superasque evadere ad 
	auras</p>
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	Hoc opus, hic labor est-</p>
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	To move out into the higher spaces-this is work, here is 
	labour. 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 movement, 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: 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.</p>
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	Page-93</td>
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