Exhausting or Violating Tapas
One may exhaust all the merit or virtuous credit one has earned through tapas if one indulges in actions contrary to the principles and discipline of tapas, such as indulging in sense pleasures, or committing a sin or a crime.
Tapas may be violated if an outside influence or the tapasvin distracts himself or herself, successfully causing a break in the spiritual concentration or impurifying the environment in which the tapas is conducted.
Read more about this topic: Tapas (Sanskrit)
Famous quotes containing the words exhausting and/or violating:
“When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.”
—Norman O. Brown (b. 1913)