Re: Advice for the Youth and Students

Respected Swamiji and all Vaisnavas,

       Nityananda Gauranga Hare Krishna! Please accept my respectful obeisances!

       I am continuing from where I stopped earlier. Forgive me for having prolonged the matter so far. But I want to address the real problem that the youth is facing now. It is very involved and each person's case has its own way of treating it. Nevertheless I have described many things common to all of us and I now get straight to the point of how this problem finally found a solution.

       After meeting all of you, I started chanting the mantrarajas. There was a phenomenal difference. Atleast my sanity was still there when I was attacked by lust, so I could stop it. I was a crooked person though, and still I couldn't stop myself just yet. Whenever I was attacked by lust, I suffered from a parallel attack of Compulsion and I would repeat the thoughts over and over and I would agitate myself. At that point all my sanity and knowledge and understanding and all that advice would be forgotten and I would fall down again. But this time I could get up with somewhat stronger resolve.

       Within a very few days, I started noticing masturbation as more of an agitation and violence rather than a pleasure seeking method. After that I could no longer find that agitation any pleasing. I was getting disgusted and thought that it was ruining my peace of mind, which it was. To be frank, I was feeling very bored and fed up while masturbating and I wanted some real happiness. My compulsive problem was making it a lot harder to quit than normal cases. This is the problem when it becomes a habit. The emotional attachement is strong. It required something really big, like a gut wrenching heart attack of a shock. Something that broke the emotional attachment to women. Something extreme which would be so strong that it could override the sexual impulse.

       When I first mentioned the problem to Hadai Nityananda dasa prabhu, I found he was far more open and willing to address it with love and care, more open than I ever was. He would tell me that its all forgiven now that I chanted. He would tell me to read the naam realisations and how the incredible bliss that comes from chanting would make all that lust worth spitting on. I read and listened with astonishment as he was a practical example of what I had seen so far only in paper. I couldn't believe my good fortune, but I was actually seeing the power of devotion right before me and I was convinced.

         I started looking at what I had done? What was I after? Nothing! I was just wasting my time.  Basically this is related to weak decision making. You know, when I was a kid, I had a habit of continuously sucking my thumb whenever I was alone. Some psychologists would say that is because of some kind of subconscious feeling of insecurity. I used to do it till I was around 8. I wanted to let go because it was really a stupid thing to keep up, but I couldn't because I never actually made the decision to quit for a while. Then one day I just told myself, "I'll stop this." And I just stopped and went to sleep. Didn't give it a second thought. So I got rid of that habit permanently.

     In the case of many disgusting unclean habits like masturbation, I see that whenever a lust attack comes, we just accept it saying, "It's ok...." which is tantamount to surrender to it instead of tolerating. The senses are always agitated by various things at a materialistically contaminated stage. But I see that there is really no reason for a mere feeling to get complete control over my senses when I think about it logically when sane. The reason I surrender to lust is because I want to and I think it is ok, it will not affect chanting, etc.... As they say, one who doesn't want to take any initiative has all the excuses, so there are many excuses. But to what use do these things come to?

    When I look at it calmly, I don't even see whether there is any pleasure in this at all. In the beginning when the senses are agitated, I get a very nervous feeling of excitement with that stomach wrenching thrill, (which is not actually happiness, only nervousness) as though some great happiness of unimaginable quality and quantity is on its way and I am being held in suspense for that great pleasure. At that time if I accept this feeling, believing it foolishly, thus causing all kinds of lusty thoughts to come in my mind. All imagination. Even this is not at all happy, its only a strange feeling of tension and suspense. Finally when this thing reaches the end, what happens? I don't even feel slightly happy. As a matter of fact my emotions go from extreme suspense, to fear, to a shocking feeling of being jolted back to reality (like a nervous attack, not at all pleasant), then to boredom after that 'high' feeling subsides, to tiredness, then a feeling of staleness and laziness. After that comes the most disgusting feeling of all.

   Some people say that there is a feeling of great happiness when discharging semen, but in my experience it is just because they are too tense and they only mistake their suspense feeling for happiness happy. Actually looking with a cool head, that feeling is not at all different from that feeling one gets while going to the toilet and passing urine and stool -- that disgusting feeling of uncleaness, perhaps worse because we are not in a bathroom, but passing urine and stool in bed like people do at the time of death. What's worse is that it feels as if I have passed urine in bed and now I'm swimming and lying in it! Yaaaaaaaargh..! Echk!!! This is happiness? There is nothing more disgusting than this!!

   The feeling of unclean is so much that I feel as though I have completely spent all my energy and I am feeling as though my brain has stopped working. I feel like taking a bath and even after that I don't feel ok. It feels like being in a dead body. Chanting falls exponentially, however much we deny it to be -- zero quality. My brain doesn't seem to work. I don't get sleep till late night and so waking up early is difficult. Not only that, materially all our will power, concentration and strength is gone and its as if our nerves have become weak. System crash.

   I am saying this because for a few days I have tolerated the agitation and I can tell the difference between then and now. I have struggled with this habit for more than 4 years and I can tell that I have really made myself into a material and spiritual wreck because of it.

You see, I bought the Brahmacharya in Krishna Consciousness book of Shrila Prabhupada's teachings about Brahmacharya and I wake up only after reading it properly. It sort of woke my brain up to what I had always felt I was doing wrong, but could not make that feeling concrete and real. The mantrarajas mercy is not an excuse for committing offense. Swamiji said in his Bhagavatam that if I think like that do that, I'll soon stop chanting and only be committing only offenses!! That feeling makes it so addictive to only commit offenses -- finished.

   So I tried to stop. It worked for a while, but then a new problem came. Sometimes when the agitation was strong, I would relent by telling myself, "Ok! I'll satisfy the urge for a while....but if they are becoming so agitated that I am in high danger of spilling out semen, I'll stop." Call this withdrawal symptoms or anything else, I call it with my own term, half-lust. This half lust is even more dangerous as we want to stop half-way through, but the moment we give even 1% or 0.5% way for lust, then there is no chance of stopping at 50%. Sometimes I saw that I could wake up in time and stop the agitation, but what would happen is that when I was sleeping, this agitation would start again from where it left off and complete its full course when my rational mind was essentially 'switched off'.

   So half lust, quarter lust, 1% lust, or 0.0001% lust -- lust is lust. Making it habitual is like opening the door to it. But even if we give one atom of space, it will make way soon and force us to occupy the door. Like the camel which sneaked into its owners tent. At first he gave only enough room for its head, but it used that room to barge in with so much force that the owner had to give more and more room. Eventually he had to give so much room that he eventually left the tent and had to stand in the hot sun! So in the lust matter its either zero or 100%, nothing in between. Knowing very well that one can end up in hellish planets where we have to get molten iron poured into our throat while being beaten with whips and being made to embrace molten metal, I'd do well to chose zero. The pain approach.

    I had improved, but still the problem of me not considering masturbation as a sin remained, which caused further setbacks. That was promptly elimated in a very shocking stomach wrenching conversation with Hadai dasa prabhu and my friends.

     (To be continued....)

Srinath

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