How To Deal With Temptations...

Human beings face lots of temptations from their surroundings, social media as well as what others do or say. It's, indeed, quite common nowadays to be lead into one temptation into another as we can see throughout our experiences.
Children do it all the time, unconsciously, but so are adults! We may not be conscious of it, but temptations are rather funny little sneaky obstacles of life! 

The act of tempting or the state of being tempted especially to evil is quite common, always have been! 

For instance, let's come back to our teenage years! 
Back in school, your friends were are getting into the gym to play basketball, when one of them decides to sneak into the other girls' restrooms. They push you towards the restroom, convincing you that the girls were changing into their P.E. clothes. The temptation of going in there to see girls changing was indeed, tempting, so you go in and give in the temptation. 

Another example...
Let's bring it back to even earlier years!
You are at home with your cousins who are about the same age as you. The three of you are about six years old, sneaky and all of you love candies. You are in your house, and you know where your mother hides the jar full of candies. You tell your cousins about it, and you all plan a sneak attack on the jar.  You convinced your cousins to get the candies as well! The temptation is real when it comes to sweets! Evil enough you all three did not ask to get some, you just went and take yourselves. 

The last scenario happens much later on in life... 

You are a political person running for senator, and your people are going into amazing length to get some voters on your side. It wasn't your idea to go run for senator but your close family members. Dinner time, gathered around a wonderful meal, your family talks about your political views and the power you would be getting if you became a senator... You thought of it all night long in your bed, and you came to the conclusion of having some power and more money is rather tempting, so you start running a campaign. The temptation was clear and you became a senator, more power, more money... 

These examples are extreme, childish and common... 
Children are tempted by sweets as common sayings, "Don't talk to strangers" and " Don't trust a stranger even if he gives you candies".  Easy to give in the temptations when you don't fully understand the consequences of giving into temptations. 
Teenagers are an easier catch! Drugs and alcohol are now commonly used in their worlds! One kid offering, other give in temptations of feeling high or drunk... And when they are underage, the danger of getting caught is just pure adrenaline. 
Adults comprehend the danger of giving in temptations, yet, they still give in like children give into temptations! As we grow up, we are interested in different things, more dangerous! 

Temptations aren't simple, aren't healthy or safe! You could be tempted when it comes to food, but your health is beyond horrific so your doctor advised you to have a diet, strict diet.... But the smell of fast food come from your office when you work every day. The smell makes you want to eat, but you can't, yet, it's too much, too difficult to hold back so you go and buy some food. Next thing you know, you collapse, then wake up at the hospital! The temptation caused you to collapse on the floor of your office, and you almost died from a very bad health! 
I could go on like this, giving examples, showing you how dangerous temptations can be, but it would take hours, months, years, many, many, many books! 

Why do we give in? Because we are humans, and somehow temptations are obstacles, clever ones which are able to look amazing and yet dangerous! You never know what the consequence may be. Hospital bed, sick stomach, or even a coffin! Giving in temptations may lead to your death, then again, who knows...

Be careful with temptations, you never know what may come!

"Temptations are as thick as the leaves of the forest, and no one can be out of the reach of temptation unless he is dead." - Robert G. Ingersoll

~Bella

The Book of Symbols 7...

Scarab

Through "scarab" applies to a whole family of stout-bodied beetles, it is the scarabeus sacer, the bung beetle of the Western Desert that has so captured the mythopoetic imagination. This "sacred scarab" embodied the Egyptian god Khepri who propels the sun out of the darkness of the underworld and across the sky in its diurnal journey (Quirke, 35-6). Here, in an illustration from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Khepri encompasses the sun rising out of the night sea. Shu, the god of air, supports the solar barque, while Nut, the goddess of the sky, receives the brilliant orb to which she gives birth each day.

The dung beetle has the remarkable instinct of rolling balls of animal dung along the ground to its underground cache where the dung will be stored for food. Unlike the images of the scarab, however, it is not its front legs but its feathery-looking hind legs with which the beetle rolls the balls of dung. The ball is sometimes so large that the beetle is forced into an almost vertical position; yet, persistent and resolute, the scarab manages to negotiate obstacles in the way. 

Changing "heads" as the day progresses, the solar

deity is Khepri in the morning, while the noonday sun

at the zenith manifests as the falcon-headed Ra and the

sun of the evening as the ram-headed Khnum. Wall

painting form the tomb of Nefertari, 19th dynasty (ca. 

1270 B.C.E.), Valley of the Queens, Egypt. 

African cultures featured the dung beetle in myths of the beginning, as the creature able to bring up a piece of primordial earth from the watery abyss. But the scarab's pushing of its dung ball resonated especially in the imagination of the ancient Egyptians. Khepri, associated in particular with the sun of the morning, was depicted in lifelike forma as the black dung beetle, sometimes with its wings spread, or as the figure of a man with a scarab beetle head. Kheper, from which Khepri gets his name means "to take shape" or "to come into being," evoking the sun and solar consciousness taking visible shape with day. But Khepri's blackness also suggests that it is an invisible force that upholds solar energies, and unconscious that propels consciousness into its awakenings and discriminated forms, creativity and perpetual motion. 

The scarab's relation to the rising of the sun made it an emblem of rebirth. This symbolism was reinforced by the fact that besides the bung ball it rolls for food, the scarab fashions from sheep dung a pear-shaped ball in which to lay its eggs and feed its larvae. Pupae resembling tiny mummies, their wings and legs encased, rise out of the earth in which the dung ball containing the beetle's eggs was embedded, giving all the appearance of spontaneous self-creation. 

Transcending the boundaries of darkness and

underworld, the scarab god Khepri emerges with the 

rising sun. Illustration from The Book of the Dead of 

Anhai, 20th dynasty (ca. 1100 B.C.E.), Egypt.

So much did the scarab evoke the qualities of immortality, sublimation and transcendence that its dwelling, a subterranean, vertical shaft leading to a horizontal passage, may have been imitated in the architecture of Egyptian tombs (Andrews, 51). Hundreds of thousands of scarab amulets were crafted in Egypt out of precious and semiprecious stone, metal and glass. Their flat undersides were inscribed with images of animals, gods, kings and other designs, and they drew power to the living in the form of seals or jewelry (Andrews, 50), or were placed with the dead in the tomb as symbols of new life (Lurker, 105). Funerary texts illuminate the notion that at death the heart, seen as the center of life, feeling, action and memory, would be weighed against a feather of Maat, the goddess of order and proportion. If the heart failed to balance, it would be devoured by a monster, prohibiting entry into the afterworld. Heart scarabs were a magical means of preventing such an outcome, even, presumably, if the life lacked virtue (Andrews, 56). Attached or sewn to the mummy bindings over the chest, their purpose was "to bind the heart to silence during the weighing" (ibid.). Many were inscribed with pleas to the heart not to betray its owner: "Do not contradict me with the judges... do not make my name stink to the gods" (Wilkinson, 77). Here, the image of the scarab may be said to signify, on the one hand, a well-concealed defense against authenticity; and on the other, the balance and essence required for a "coming into being" as a linking of finite and infinite dimensions of self.

The Book of Symbols 5...

Kiss

Over the doorjamb of the womb-chamber of the Konārak temple in Southern India, and among the images in niches on its facade, are small, erotic sculptures of ardent couples, or mithuni. Their flowing bodies melt together in a passionate embrace, evoking the sexual play of both gods and mortals, and, paradoxically, the release from it in the union of the self and Supreme Self within a single being. Rapturously, the figures kiss. And here, under the arched brows and interlocked noses of two who are one, the lips merge in a state of bliss that knows nothing of a within or without, and in which there is no longer separation, desire or grief (Brhadaranyaka Upanishad IV:3:21; ARAS, 7Ao.044). 

A kiss of passionate longing may be shunned on the 

chaste movie screens of contemporary India, but it is

openly depicted in the sacred temple sculpture of the 

13th century. Sandstone, Surya Temple, Konārak, 

Orissa, India. 

Behind sealed lips, we protect one of the most personal spaces of the body; we part our lips to draw in the breath of inspiration or to speak intimate feelings into the beloved's ear, finally surrendering the private self in the loving convergence of one's own lips with the lips of the other. Even when not romantic, the kiss implies affection, blessing, recognition and reconciliation. Thus the psalmist intones, "Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other" (Psalm 85:10). The comparable climax of the Muslim hajj to the Grand Mosque in Mecca is the pilgrim's kiss upon the Black Stone of the Kaaba, an act of reverence first performed by Muhammad. In these religious traditions, kissing is a ceremonial act, a sign of the bond between kin, or respect to holy relics, prayer shawls or altars or homage to one's ruler (kissing his feet) or to one's conqueror (licking the dust beneath his feet). With the bridal kiss, Western culture bridged the sacred and the romantic, although such European fairy tales as "Sleeping Beauty" or "Snow White" mark the approach of true love by a kiss that awakens the soul, rather than kindles sexual libido. 

Through the identity and meaning of many of the 

characters in Bronzino's mannerist allegory are still

debated, this detail is unequivocally of Venus and her 

adolescent son Cupid engaged in an amorous, 

incestuous kiss. Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time, detail, 

oil on panel, 1544-5, Italy.

However, the sensuous, unseemly kiss between Bronzino's Cupid and Venus, his mother-  slipping the tip of the tongue into her son's lips- portrays a sly, incestuous carnality. To some cultures, the public display of kissing is considered scandalous, for its signals the opening act of coitus, and casual, devouring tongue-kissing has even suggested cannibalism. Jung, in fact, disagreeing with Freud that all libido was sexual, noted the pleasure infants take in sucking and observed that "kissing derives much more from nutrition than from sexuality" (CW 5:652). The empty "air-kisses" of celebrities or the shallow "spit-swapping" of teenagers can seem to cancel out any encounter between two halves of a single soul that we can still feel in the secular sculpture of Rodin's The Kiss. The songbirds whose crossed wings surrounded Aengus, the Celtic god of love, deteriorated into the banal "x's" that close sentimental love letters. Modern Valentines- whose puckering smooches even use kisses to veil hostility- anticipate the chilling intentions of such phrases as "kiss off" (to dismiss a stale lover), "kiss up" (to display shameless obsequiousness) and "kiss and tell" (to betray matters shared in confidence). More stunning is the submissive "kiss of shame" upon the devil's anus (or that of his masked proxy). Here, the disciple kisses the "nether-lips" at the opposite end of the body than the mouth, a practice of medieval Satanists at their black Sabbaths, which often inverted conventional ritual. Similarly, the "kiss of death," such as Judas kissing Jesus, reverses, in the perfidious intimacy of betrayal, all that is signified by the kiss of love. The kiss can also convey a different kind of reversal. Francis of Assisi placed squarely on the lips of a fearsome leper the "kiss of peace," communicating a spiritual love that drew the most reviled being of the age into the saint's most personal interior. 

~Bella