Dear Srinath,
Nityananda ! Gauranga ! Hare Krishna !
Thank you for sharing with us how the mantrajas helped you from the attack of maya. It will be very nice of you if you could also tell us in how many rounds of mantrajas were you chanting and in how much time did it save you from the attack of maya ?
Nityananda ! Gauranga ! Hare Krishna !
Sincerely,
Mihir.
Hadai Nityananda Das wrote : While in the purification process itself when we climb from neophyte to advanced devotee we are pending between both; karma and being under the direct influence of the Lord. The more we surrender to the Lord the more we are under His direct influence and the more we transcend His indirect influence that causes our temporary destination. Your servant, Hadai Nityananda dasa Nityananda Gauranga Hare Krishna!
Dandavats Pranaams to Swamiji and all devotees,
Very nicely written. Shrila Prabhupada said that devotional service is like switching off a fan. When we switch of the fan it slowly decreses its speed and finally comes to a complete stop. Here the law of karma can be compared to the fan. However if we chant the mantrajas then the fan comes to a hault even faster.
Sincerely,
Mihir.
Nityananda Gauranga Hare Krishna!
Dear Guruji and devotees, please accept my humble obeisances.
In his Sarartha Darsini on SB Canto 10, Chapter 1, Text 17, Srila Visvanatha Carkravarti Thakura talks about a second Brahma within our universe. He says that when mother earth approached Brahma it was not the Brahma who resides on Satyaloka but ‘Vairaja Brahma’ living on mount Meru.
My question is: What is the difference between these Brahmas besides their different locations of residence?
Your servant,
Hadai Nityananda Dasa
Nityananda Gauranga Hare Krishna!
Nityananda Gauranga Hare Krishna!
Dear Swamiji, Jagannatha Gauranga dasa and devotees, please accept my humble obeisances.
Interesting questions. Pure devotees have gone 100% away from these planetary influences because they have surrendered themselves fully to the Lord Who in turn takes full personal care of His pure devotees. Since He is the Source of all sources everything else is overruled because of His personal involvement.
We also have to understand that the astrological charts do not refer to the soul itself since the soul is transcendental to time and place. So the astrological charts can only refer to the frame and characteristics of the temporary existence of our bodies and subtle bodies.
Yes the Lord can make your body be around longer. King Pariksit was attacked when still in the womb by a weapon that couldn�t be countered by any ordinary being however Lord Sri Krishna saved him. That same king Pariksit was cursed and bitten by a snake and died because of that. Both events were couldn�t be in the charts because they are part of the Lord�s and His pure devotee�s pastimes which are above all temporary designations.
One�s birth reading can say anything and as soon as someone takes up devotional service to the Lord one starts to function on another plain where the guidance of one�s progression is under the direct influence of Lord Gauranga Krishna, Guru and Shastra. Actually the pure chanting of the holy Name instantly destroys our karma altogether and nothing can be predicted anymore according to the laws that govern karma.
While in the purification process itself when we climb from neophyte to advanced devotee we are pending between both; karma and being under the direct influence of the Lord. The more we surrender to the Lord the more we are under His direct influence and the more we transcend His indirect influence that causes our temporary destination.
Your servant,
Hadai Nityananda dasa
Nityananda Gauranga Hare Krishna!
Respected Swamiji and all Vaisnavas,
Nityananda Gauranga Hare Krishna! Please accept my respectful obesiances!
I apologise if my last posts have been too graphic as though they've burst from a horror novel. But its really the fact. For those who have experienced spiritual bliss all this pain is not necessary. But for those who haven't, I say this approach will work because pain is something we can all experience readily.
For those who have problems with agitated and restless mind I ask you to go to this page 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCD and see if you have any of these symptoms.
In my case this problem was causing me to think of lusty thoughts again and again which would slowly fuel the lust fire to ignition. Other than that this speculation problem has troubled my life in various other ways by ruining my schedules and making things miserable. Really the thoughts are the fuel to our problems. And if we can just divert the thought to the Lord, the problem is solved before it happened.
It is not a mental diease or stigma to say that one's mind has a few problems. In my case, chanting the mantrarajas and discussing the thought process in detail helped me realise that I had this problem.
My best solution is just to go on chanting Nityananda, Gauranga and the Hare Krishna maha mantra. My case came to a happy ending after all that trouble as the mantrarajas not only made me aware of my problem and how to prevent it, but they are also speedily getting rid of those symptoms and eventually they would have cured me of it too!
So I pray that never in my life I must commit a Vaisnava aparadha even in dreams as that is the only real danger to our devotion at this stage. I now know the power of the names of the Lord. They are the best doctor. They diagnosed my problem and eventually cured it.
For one who chants Nityaananda or Gauranga just once, the mantrarajas will immeditately descend and make arrangements that will eventually bring that person on to the path of devotion. No wonder it was said, "Chant just once!" Time will eventually give proof of that statement.
Thank you very much for your mercy and patience in reading my own case. Hope this benefits the reader as well.
Daaso'smi,
Srinath
Respected Swamiji and all Vaisnavas,
Nityananda Gauranga Hare Krishna! Please accept my respectful obeisances!
This is the final and most heart stopping post regarding my problems with sex and masturbation.
By this time, things had reached a point where I had grown weary and tired of mastrubation and I was seriously planning to quit. Yet one misconception had not left and that is, "Its not wrong. Even if it is, its just minor. Not so harmful." So I was taking it lightly till then and occasionally on a few days I would masturbate simply because I was letting it continue by leftover influence of old habits without forcibly applying the brakes because of this misconception. By now the mantrarajas had got rid of the lusty urge and it was simply running like a fan would run for a while when the electricity was disconnected.
Then last week I called up Hadai dasa prabhu and told him that I was feeling stuck because I was not feeling anything strong enough like ecstasy to hit the brakes. My friends joined and then it went somewhere.....as Hadai dasa prabhu himself put it in his own words.
Hadai dasa prabhu : "What do you think of when you masturbate? Of some woman you have seen somewhere in life, real or in the movies or books right?"
me : "Well yes"
Hadai dasa prabhu : "Then what do you do? You mentally abuse that woman forcibly don't you? In real life can you just walk up to that woman and ask her to satisfy your lust?"
me : "No!!! I can't! You are right....That is what I do."
Hadai prabhu : "That means you commit the sin of actually molesting that woman! You receive those stringent reactions!"
me : "Oh my! Nitaai! I never thought....."
Hadai dasa prabhu : "Whatever you do affects those people at a subtle level because you mentally torture them like that! That is why those celebrities in the magazines and TV suffer so many problems. Your actions affect the person you are thinking of with. It actually creates a mental vibration that harms them and prevents them from normally functioning!"
me : "Then...what I have done....there is no difference between me and a real woman hunter!! That means I am a...."
Hadai dasa prabhu : "If suppose you were told that if you masturbated just once now and for that you would die immediately! When you would know that you would die right after this act, would you do it?"
me : "Never!!! Not on my life!!" (and be taken to hell, where they'll pour molten metal on me.....)
Hadai dasa prabhu : "From the spiritual point of view, every one is spirit soul. The soul is a devotee in his real nature. And the Lord is with the soul and seeing everything from within the heart! Isn't that right?"
me : "But then if that is so.."
Hadai dasa prabhu : "So you are molesting a part and parcel of God and right before the Lord when He is watching everything!! That woman is a part and parcel of God and you are doing something like that right before the Lord.
me : "A jiva aparadha.." (At this point, I was sweating and my heart was racing. My stomach was lurching and I started feeling giddy and sick as though I would faint)
Hadai prabhu : "Just see the Lord standing before you. When you know He's there, you can't do it, can you. You see him right before you....."
At this point I was just thinking of the form of Lords Gaura Nitai before me. The form of the opposite sex, the lust, all vanished. Now I was so scared and horrified I could not raise my head to even look at them. I could not imagine what the Lord's expression would be if this offense was done to His part and parcel. His anger would be indescribable. Simply that thought was making me feel as though my heart would stop. I was so shocked and when I thought of what the Lord's expression would be I thought my heart would stop. I was panting and I thought that simply seeing his feet and the shock of knowing he is there would give me cardiac arrest.
I couldn't look at His feet! All those feelings of guilt, horror, being caught in the act, the monstrosity of the sin I have done.....I stopped thinking of the Lord because I thought I would go mad or deranged if I saw those feet anymore. Like how the murder feels when everyone stares at him dead in the eye when he is exposed. He cannot tolerate a piercing gaze like that. He will scream, "Stop it! Don't look at me like that! No! Stop! Don't stare!!! STOP!!! AAARRGHH!!!!!!! and he covers his eyes in horror.
Jiva aparadha....and an offence like THAT, I had done it! All before the Lord!! He saw everything! Still, I was spared!! I was not burnt to ashes immediately! So many times I committed such a heinious crime!! Oh Nitaai! I told myself it was not wrong!!! I abused your part and parcles and said it was not wrong!!! How could I have even thought of such a crime?? All these years, that was my 'pleasure'. What kind of a person was I if I was committing offenses to other souls? I am the most fallen, so many bad qualities. All are better and fit to sit on my head! And I was desiring to do something so sinful to them!!!
A disciples sins can affect his my spiritual master too!! He was giving me so much love and mercy and I was repaying him by giving him the sin of abusing another soul! Another devotee!! SHAME ON ME! WHAT HAVE I DONE!! CURSE ME!...................
I do not think any words will be enough to properly convey the storm of emotions and the horrible feeling throughout every atom in my body. My friends were so shocked! Venkat took an oath right there never to masturbate again, EVER! Vignesh was so disgusted that he could not speak!! I on the other hand had to come to grips with the reality. Who knows what they felt. Only they will be able to describe it properly. It just goes to show the whole world what this masturbation and illicit sex really is. Not the pleasure, but really the horror.
At that point Hadai dasa prabhu consoled us and said, "You are all forgiven before it was ever even done. The Lord has forgiven. Now you know. When you think of the Lord knowing that He is there you cannot do it. You simply cannot masturbate because you know very well that the Lord's pleasure potency is so much greater. So when you meditate on him and chant NItyananda and Gauranga, the lust vanishes and you will no longer masturbate. When you dive into the ocean of pleasure while chanting, all this will just vanish"
I could not eat that day. I have seen so many scenes of grief both in the fictitious stories and in real life. I have seen how it is when someone you love so much dies away so suddenly. But that could not compare to this. I was paralysed for a whole night. The next day I remembered everything I had done, everything that I have mentioned in my earlier posts and I cried bitterly banging my fists on the desk and my head on the wall. I have never wept and cried like that for a very long time. That was the first time I repented. Finally I got up and told myself to let the past go and look to the future and atleast not repay the Lord like that for all his mercy from now on.
I got up, feeling like a different person. A new fire had awoken inside me and I was feeling incredible. This time I had more than enough to stamp the brakes forever. The last misconception had fallen by the force of Hadai dasa prabhu's words. I now felt a fire of determination that I should reach the Lord and his devotees at any cost. It was like making a very brave decision like walking into a battlefield with the confidence that I will survive all that is thrown at me. The feeling lasted for a few seconds, and then it went. At last I felt as though a crushing weight of a million tonnes had been lifted of me. I was peaceful. The mantrarajas Nityananda and Gauranga had done it! Just as they promised, whoever chants once will eventually be delivered! I understood their power and could only fall before the Naama prabhu's feet.
The Lord insipired Hadai dasa prabhu and told him what to say. And he told us. So it was the Lord who spoke to me, to the three of us. The Lord actually spoke to us through his devotee. Hadai dasa prabhu himself had never used such strong language with us ever. It was Lord Nityananda and Gauranga and I can see them behind this whole orchestration. To think that the Lord spoke those words to us sends a shiver down my spine. Really I don't know what to say.
When I think of how merciful the devotees of the Lord like Swamiji and Hadai dasa prabhu must be in order to forgive us for sins like this even before it was done, I am overwhelmed and I understand their greatness. How small and insignificant we are compared to those great devotees! It was very humbling and I felt very fortunate to have been able to meet such devotees despite my sinful and condemned position.
Then the next day I spoke to Hadai dasa prabhu again and before him I took a vow, that I will NEVER indulge in this vile act of masturbation again, even at the cost of my life, even if it maintaining that vow becomes the very last thing I do!! I know that it is very daring to make such a strong decision, but I have faith in the mercy of the Lord, His names and his devotees and that gives me the confidence to try to keep up such a vow. I have no qualification, but if I can just grab their feet firmly without letting go I know I am safe.
So with this I come to the end of narrating my experiences with illicit sex in the form of masturbation and how the names of the Lord and his devotees saved me and gave me one more chance to come out of it. For all the drama and trauma involved, the story had a happy ending and I pray to all of you that it stays that way.Our acaryas never compromised with illicit sex. For them it was 0 and only ZERO! They set the standard and we cannot aim for any lower standard than that.
The Lord and his devotees have done so much, so much for us. They saved my life from heading straight to hell and gave me the Nityananda and Gauranga mantrarajas and the Hare Krishna mahamantra. They opened my eyes to the truth and gave me a new life. They showed so much mercy to a useless soul like me which cannot be repaid in an infinity of births. My real position is to be their servant, servant of the devotees. They did so much for all of us....and I will not let them down anymore!
Thanking you for your patience and your mercy,
Aspiring to become a humble servant of the Vaisnavas and the Lord,
Srinath
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
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
Respected Swamiji and all Vaisnavas,
Nityananda Gauranga Hare Krishna!
Jai Visnupada Srila Prabhupada!
Jai Swami Gaurangapada!
All glories to our Guru Parampara!
Please accept my respectful obeisances!
In the following series of threads I will post up all my experiences related with illicit sex and the problem of masturbation faced by the younger generation and its disastrous effects on spiritual progress, how I was finally made aware of the huge magnitude of sin I had committed and how I have vowed to stop these things. I request your grace on this most sinfull and mad soul so that he becomes elegible for proper devotional service.
Being a person born and living in a country like India, I will first start by saying that talking about one's problems with sex, particularly with adolescents, is something that is still almost like taboo and most people are highly reluctant to talk about it. It is a generally perceived notion that such talks concerning these 'delicate' matters will destroy one's decency and sattvic spirit and make one very vulgar and corrode all morality. Like in my case, my parents simply gave me hints like, "You know such attractive feelings can come at your age....", but basically that's just a lead and the rest is, "Figure it out by yourself." As a matter of fact hearing a word related to these things faced by teenagers is enough to make a person lose their appetite. It seems to have a highly disturbing effect. For this reason, it is expected that people get to know these things from their peers or just by experience.
What is not realised though is that in the present generation, atleast within my experience, things have gone so bad that I was severely mocked for having told a classmate that I wanted to quit masturbation. But people are not willing to talk openly about this, and so these problems never come out into the open. They lurk in the shadows and grow subtly, eventually what we have is an entire genereation of people obsessed by lustful passions (which have now become accepted as one's birthright). When I first entered high school, lust related problems were something only in colleges. But before I left high school, I saw my juniors falling victim to lust and illicit sex in various forms.
What is responsible? TV, movies, the media, and a lot of exposure. These days the world is increasingly advocating that seeking pleasure through sex is one's birthright. For this reason, youngsters have begun to revolt agains the idea of abstinence and celibacy. Let me point out that a woman has the right to divorce her husband if he does not satisfy her desire for lust or vice versa -- that is one of the clauses in the divorce laws.
Even children are exposed to these things in a wrong manner and this influences their growth when they step into adolescence. In the beginning it starts out by experiencing attraction to the opposite sex by sight. Any form of association with the opposite sex in the wrong way creates lustful agitation and excitement. This in turn starts the agitation. Finally when the lusty feelings become very strong, they start showing up in dreams. These wet dreams lead to nocturnal emissions. Eventually the teenager starts accepting these things as normal. As the lust increases, soon teenagers start thinking that it is now a necessity to satisfy the agitation as soon as it arises. Therefore they resort to artificially agitating them and passing out the vital seminal fluid which is so important for the body. This is what is called masturbation and this is how it develops. It starts accidentally and then becomes voluntary, then habitual.
Lust is something that is never satisfied. Every single act of lust, whether it be thinking or passing semen, causes it to grow tremendously and soon the sexual urges lead teenageers to watch pornography or when there is association with the opposite sex, it can lead to pre-martial sexual affairs and the like. In very bad cases, things go so far as to become incest. Otherwise, these days homosexuality has become very common with people campaigining for it to be legalised. If sex pleasure is accepted as right, why should there be any restriction on how to satisfy the sex desire is what people ask these days.
When things reach their ultimate climax, one may even become agitated by animals or even worse, even dead bodies! It is known as necrophilia and I have heard of one particular teenager who was put in the mental hospital for this type of tendency.
Therefore when we talk about giving advice to the youth and the students, we see that we are faced to deal with issues like these which an earlier generation could not have even imagined. I am a college student and I am daily exposed to such things in and out. Everyone is obsessed with sex and looking at this, I think the youth need much more help for their own spiritual benefit than what anyone could have estimated.
So in my next post, I will describe my own horrible experiences in this matter. I hope you devotees will not view me as being vulgar as I have absolutely no intent to patronise illicit sex in any form by the use of blunt language. Rather I intend to put a stop to this. Things are so serious that these problems have to be faced head on and smashed to the ground. Treating them delicately by hiding them in the shadows and just giving hints alone will not be enough to solve the problem. The problem has to be exposed for a correct diagnosis. And when it is exposed, the issues turn out to be far more serious than what one thinks.
Thank you very much for being so kind and patient as to read this article,
In the service of the devotees in destroying our mundane lust,
Srinath
