Q: What is the difference between sense contact and sense control at various levels of one’s personality—material, physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual?
A: Sense contact (or indulgence) is driven by the mind and is generally negative, whereas self-control is driven by the intellect and is a positive quality.
Material Level
Sense contact: An uncontrollable urge to constantly acquire, amass, aggrandise, and accumulate material things. One is never contented or satiated. One becomes a taker. There is no limit or end to one’s acquisition.
Sense control: Lives a life of standardisation. Keeps a check on one’s wants and, as a result, becomes contented and a giver.
Physical Level
Sense contact: At the physical level, sense contact is the cause of many diseases. The physical body is sustained by food (annamaya kosha), and this principle applies to all the sense organs. The more one indulges the senses, the more it can lead to disease.
When there is indiscriminate or reckless sense contact, the law of diminishing returns creeps in. It neutralises the joy one derives from indulgence, and a sense of boredom sets in.
The Bhagavad Gita says that sense contacts are the wombs of sorrow. False happiness is rajasic and tamasic: “It is nectar in the beginning and poison at the end.”
Sense control: Self-control can cure disease. Abstinence or fasting rejuvenates the body. It creates an appetite for enjoyment, allowing you to truly enjoy what you have acquired. True happiness is sattvic: “It is poison in the beginning, but nectar at the end.”
Emotional Level
Sense contact: The mind constantly runs behind sense objects, dissipating mental energy. The mind is always either craving, indulging, or lingering. This strengthens existing desires and also creates new ones.
Sense control: It conserves energy because you are not constantly thinking of objects and beings in the world.
When you operate through the intellect, you develop the quality of ending perception with perception. You become objective toward experience: you enjoy it and move on to the next. The mind does not return to past experiences to linger on them. You learn the art of being in the present.
This reduces the strength of existing desires and does not create fresh ones. Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2, Verse 64 defines self-control: “Do not act on likes and dislikes, and do not create fresh likes and dislikes.”
Intellectual Level
Sense contact: It is indiscriminate and reckless contact. As and when the mind craves, you give in to it without any pause or discrimination.
Sense control: It is a discriminative and punctuated contact. You consciously inject abstinence into sense contact. The intellect decides when and how much to engage.
Spiritual Level
Sense contact: It makes one extroverted. The mind runs behind the world and becomes unavailable for higher reflection.
Sense control: It makes one introverted. It creates a conducive climate in which you can entertain thoughts of the higher, the Absolute Reality.
Sense control is not sense denial. It is not determined by quantity or quality; it is a contact established by the intellect. A person who has no attachment to things yet still engages with them is spiritual. For example, King Janaka—a royal who lived in the world, yet whose thoughts were fixed on the Higher. He had no attachment to name, fame, or wealth.
If any sense contact becomes an impediment to one’s sadhana, one must abstain and withdraw like a tortoise. A person of self-control may move among sense objects, but he is not a materialist. Similarly, just because a person lives in an ashram does not automatically make him a spiritualist. It is one’s thoughts that determine whether a person is a materialist or a spiritual seeker.
If you look at material and sensual pleasures as potential harbingers of sorrow, then you are oriented toward the spiritual.
A person who wishes to establish himself in higher wisdom lives a life of self-control, practising abstinence as much as possible. Once established in the Higher sense, contact does not dislodge him from the Self.
