VIRTUE - Guide and Protect Your Awareness

VIRTUE - Guide and Protect Your Awareness


How should you regard members of the opposite sex? Do not look at members of the opposite sex with any idea of sex or lust in mind. Do not indulge in admiring those of the opposite sex, or seeing one as more beautiful than another. Boys must foster the inner attitude that all young women are their sisters and all older women are their mother. Girls must foster the inner attitude that all young men are their brothers and all older men are their father. Do not attend movies that depict the base instincts of humans, nor read books or magazines of this nature. To be successful in brahmachariya, one naturally wants to avoid arousing the sex instincts.


Purity is but freedom from desire and that is achieved by desiring to know Truth."

HOLY KURAL, VERSE 364


GOOD COMPANY, EXERCISE AND WORSHIP


Be very careful to mix with good company--those who think and speak properly--so that the mind or emotions are not led astray and vital energies needed for study used up. Get plenty of physical exercise. This is very important because exercise sublimates your own instinctive drives and directs excess energy and the flow of blood into all parts of the body.


Morning, noon and evening we will chant with joyful hearts the blessed name of Siva. We will sever in our minds the root of all desire and lust and, sweetly as we please, we will abide where night is not nor day. If you always offer worship to the Almighty's holy feet, then you will have peace. That will make you rule the mind, which treads the senses' path.

SIVA YOGASWAMI


In the Tirumantiram, the 10th book of the Tirumurai, Saint Tirumular speaks of the values of brahmachariya. He insists that it is very important that the brahmachari and brahmacharini strive to keep awareness in the refined areas of the mind so that beneficial, constructive thoughts can be created. Then the energies are properly employed so that spiritual unfoldment can be experienced in this and future lives.


REVIEW


1. Do not view others through the veil of lust.


2. Keep good company, get plenty of exercise and worship God.