Pure
air. Clouds in the sky, or better, a cloudless sky. That was my symbol chosen for
chastity, aka, purity, in Sanskrit saucam.
Chastity or Purity
is of two kinds: external and internal. External purity is done by means of
earth and water – clean body, clean clothes and clean home, making life more
pleasant. Internal purity is done through the mind, heart and intellect freed from
deception, lust, anger, greed, pride, jealousy, hypocrisy, likes and dislikes. As we
work and play, the body, our clothes and our offices and homes get dirty,
cluttered, untidy and need to be set back in order. So we wash, change clothes,
tidy up and get things organised, which occupies our attention to detail and
promotes awareness of our surroundings, and hopefully self-awareness as well.
During
the use of our mind in this process or in all others, we also get it dirty,
cluttered, untidy and it needs to be put back into order. This is the practise
of internal “Chastity” or “Saucam”. Uncleanliness happens for various reasons, which I give 3 provocative names to here:
1) SELF-ABUSE.
Our own minds have been “untrained” for years so as not to see Reality – we see
the world and ourselves through our own filter, our own conditioning, through
our perception of self, our nationality, race, creed, belief system, even
childhood traumas, some allege! We look through tinted glasses with tainted
thoughts and feelings that have never been examined on the basis of anything
Real or at least some set of standards acquired consciously and not just forced upon from
outside. We’ve been told what to think, what to do, which sphincter to compress
at which particular time… So obviously, daily mental activities will accumulate
more conditioning: the more we mentate, the more we remain the same, or get
worse… This is violence against ourselves, or self-abuse.
2) RAPE.
People around us – due of course to their conditioning and non-self-aware state
– will tend to impinge on our mental activities and tell us what to do, suggest
how we should behave, communicate negative thoughts, reactions and feelings to
us, try to convince us of their opinions, broadcast their perceptions of the
world onto us, infect us with wrong thinking, complaints, anger, jealousy, envy
and other useless human behaviour patterns. They will want to force their opinions onto us. This is violence against others, or rape.
3) WAR. The
Zeitgeist in general and the media in particular will impinge on our
mental processes and try to influence us, convince us, promote impulse
shopping, get us to vote for someone, give us some scriptwriter's picture of a crazy universe, with aliens from outer space
who want to kill us, or fantasy worlds to trap us, or stressful social situations that may
happen to us, or comical idiocies that force us to laugh... whatever. Our poor, unexamined, untrained minds, our sense of self which is just the result of
outside forces, gets taken over by an outside power and manipulated at
will, unless of course we have a strong ego that defends itself and tries to
conquer all others. Slaves and masters, masters and slaves, it doesn’t matter
that much. It’s society against you. It’s total warfare, violence of all against one.
So for
the “Striver after Reality”, or the Practitioner of Virtues, the mind must be
cleaned periodically, and everything put into its place, ordered and organised,
placed under the critical intellectual faculty, accepted or rejected on the
basis of a certain discerning faculty in the mind that we (unwillingly) have to
give a name to, so let’s call it the forerunner of the Higher Self, or the
Intellect.
What
does the reasonable mind, then, do to clean itself? This was dealt with a little
by the Stevie Wonder article on Mind Cleaning. And we will have to look at it
again soon.
But
let’s make a note of the Western use of “chastity” here. This kind of simple chastity
has been converted into almost a religion, meaning abstaining from sexual
intercourse of any kind, or negating the sexual function of human beings, which
is a great pity. Because it’s not WHAT you do or don’t do that’s important for
a practitioner of the Virtues, but HOW you do it or don’t do it. The “how” is
the tough part. So chastity means a lot more than just curbing
the sexual appetites… The right term is more "being pure in mind" than just
"being chaste in body", as dealt with in Mt. 5:27: “Ye have heard that it
was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto
you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed
adultery with her already in his heart...” Meaning that the new dispensation was
not about acting, or WHAT, but about being and mind, ie, HOW.
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