Re: Advice for the Youth and Students

Respected Swamiji and all Vaisnavas.

       Nityananda Gauranga Hare Krishna! Please accept my respectful obeisances!

       In this post I would like to describe to you how I suffered from the problem of masturbation and how I struggled with trying to quit the habit.

       I have to really dredge my memory for this, but I am going back a very long way into my past. My problem with lust is very deep rooted and I have detected it existing since my childhood. The lust was lurking, though it was inactive at that time. I was the only child and both my parents were working. In their absence only the TV or the PC or the books. Naturally I came across so many cartoons, so many movies and many things which slowly agitated my senses over a period of years without anyone noticing anything. Although whatever I watched appeared to be very benign and harmless and not related to sex, still it conditioned my mind and made my will extremely weak. Its true effect was only known by the time I stepped into adolescence.

       By the time I was a teenager, I slowly began to feel the pangs of lust as I described earlier. At around this time many of my peers began to explore the realm of lust. Although I was very cautious to be decent in all ways, I was also being slowly influenced by these things. At this time I read many novels which spoke of mundane love and which slowly approached openly sexual content. This was true with the movies as well. Eventually I started becoming very agitated and started having bad dreams. And following the sequence of events, very soon I had started masturbating. Eventually it became a bad habit that persisted with me like some sort of curse.

        At the time I was not aware of what I was doing. I had no religious interest then. I come from a traditional orthodox and religious brahmin family and so out of fear of being severely chastised I never spoke to anyone about this. That was my undoing. In all my life it is one of the biggest mistakes I made, not telling someone that this was a problem. I let that problem grow to huge proportions. It would appear as though that agitation was going to give me great happiness and I was excitedly waiting for the happiness to come. But it would never come and I would be left physically tired and mentally unclean, having made my problem worse with every attempt.

        Lust is a weird thing. It hangs a lure before you as if its unlimited happiness, but when we try for it, we seem to be advancing towards that, which makes us more agitated. Then suddenly its all gone and we see that happiness is now out of grasp and far away. Yet it seemed as if we missed it only by a whisker, so we try again to get it, thinking, "This time I will get it." Again maya pulls the lure before we can get it and again we notice its gone farther away. The whole cycle repeats.

         Within my conscience I knew that what I was doing was very wrong, yet I would convince myself, "Everyone does it. So what's wrong?" I will share one thing with you that the problem became so bad that I started having intrusive thoughts. Any person of opposite sex I saw seemed to bring lusty thoughts in my head. At this point I had actually started suffering from symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), but I didn't know it. But by now I was really scared that this was going to head for something. I was now living in fear. That led to anxiety. My conscience told me to stop. But I couldn't. It didn't seem to serious. I was now scared I may become addicted to pornography and other things.

         By this point I had already been reading Shrila Prabhupada's books for more than a year and so I was aware of what I was doing. What woke me up was a line. "Wasting semen is also illicit sex." So after seeing how dangerous lust was, I got the tiniest bit of desire to quit. I would try to control myself for a few days, but then I would succumb to the urge simply because I didn't think it was wrong. Basically my problem was that if any thought came to my head it would go into an endless loop. If it was a dialogue, I would repeat it even 25 times in my head trying to make it perfect. Those were OCD symptoms. You may go to wikipedia's article and find out more about this.

          If the thought happened to be a sexual thought, the endless loop would  first slowly then midly, then strongly agitate me and force me to masturbate again. If the thought had just come and gone, it would not have done anything. But I let it repeat and make things worse. All of you who have problems with controlling the mind might have experienced compulsive symptoms like this. 

          At this point I started chanting the Hare Krishna maha-mantra. All went well for a while and I was really making a bit of headway and just when I felt I was going to be peaceful, I became too lax. By becoming too lax, I considered masturbation to be harmless and therefore not wrong. And so I fell down. Again and again I would try, but again and again I would fall. As long as one thinks that there is no wrong in committing sin, one won't feel like giving it up. However, the acaryas instructions were ringing in my head and now I was caught in between, unable to fully say No to lust and being unable to say a full yes to bhakti and chanting.  Offenses in the maha-mantra kept its results far away and it was not working well.

          Then I came to IIT, where the solitary life in the hostel was maya's open ground for all types of wayward behaviour. At home I could restrain myself out of fear of others. But now I ran a huge risk that I could become uncontrollable and go mad. I didn't fall down that far, but I was internally full of anxiety. But there came the saving grace of the Lord in the form of Hadai Nityananda dasa prabhu, to whom I owe my life and all. The help he gave me cannot be described with millions of words.

           The help he gave combined with all the knowledge I had read in the books woke me up to what sex really is. There's no pleasure and so no use in seeking it. However, this didn't prove to be strong enough. But what happened next was really incredible. I will describe that in the next post.

       (To be continued......)

Hoping to conquer lust,

Srinath

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