Our biggest obstacle to making a success of our life is internal, not external. Or greatest enemy lies within. It's our own minds.
Originally we are pure consciousness, all of us. However, as we enter the material world to live our lifetime, we're obliged to do it through our body and mind. This physical, electro- magneto-chemical suit that we wear comes with built-in limitations and default settings.
The most powerful of these settings is the program to reproduce the species. This is obvious and yet knowing it in no way diminishes the power of this programming to drive us to do things which we cannot control.
In other words we're controlled by sex. And that programming is almost impossible to delete or override. Education is supposed to train us to regulate this impulse and control it, like our other impulses such as anger or greed.
With proper training we can, at best, squeeze our instinctive lust into a thin dressing-gown of civility, rather than flaunt it in all it's naked garishness. However, the training today is poor at best. As a result humanity is mostly dominated and dragged around by the dictates of our lusty desires.
By day or in public we suppress it, but at night or as soon as we're in private, it leaps out and we have no ability to control it.
Thus, the majority of people are suffering, either from frustrated and unfulfilled lust, or from an overdose of lust, or from addiction to gross (fornication) and subtle (fame) sex. That's the fact of life in a nutshell.
Sex is not bad. It's natural and it's a sacred practice by which children are brought into the world. That is it's sole purpose. However, addiction to, or entrapment under, insatiable lust is the tragedy and trap in which most people alive find themselves.
By attempting to fulfill our lust, we only fan the flames and fuel the fire of this lust that drives us like a donkey to seek the object of our desires, whether sex or fame. If you have a body and an ego, then you are under its influence.
Because fulfilling our lust is so pleasurable, we chase after it and enjoy the experience... for a while. But chasing that high only leads us to build a tolerance so that the more we feed it, the more it grows, instead of the opposite. Satisfaction is fleeting and ultimately always just out of reach.
We may even choose a mate but after some time they're not enough and our lust drives us to seek further objects of satisfaction. That's why divorce, affairs and prostitution are so popular. More popular than monogamy. These facts confirm the truth about our enslavement under the shackles of our own lust-driven minds and bodies.
Freedom is possible when the realization of this fact matures, either based on experience or education, to a point where one becomes tired of being controlled and enslaved to this addiction which is insatiable.
Sometimes this freedom comes with old age, for the lucky, where the sex drive simply dwindles as the hormones decrease. Sadly, many have lived a life so addicted to satisfying their lust, that they are unable to draw the mind back, even when the body no longer demands satisfaction.
These sad old men (mostly) are like addicts, broken and led like a once free-spirited horse, now unable to tread any other path because the neural highway in the brain is hardwired to follow the same habit patterns as always.
Such people die like animals, having never mastered their lust, and so the consciousness, upon leaving the body at death, is drawn back to earth in order to chase after unfulfilled lust and the tendency to enjoy the objects of the senses. This is what traps us lifetime after lifetime.
During our lifetime we are led by our prison wardens here on this slave planet, to objectify the other, to look upon people and things as objects for our pleasure. This leads a man to be unable to turn away from any passing petty woman. He is habituated to seeing the other as something to be enjoyed, rather than as a person in their own right.
And he thinks that he is the supreme enjoyer while everything is for his enjoyment. Little does he know that he is the victim being shackled, tied tighter and tighter with the chains of lust which he builds himself by fueling and feeding his desires.
It's a story as old as time. It's the original story. Nothing has changed, except that modern civilization today does little to educate and train us in these details. It rather grooms us to chase our lust and flaunt it, like a circus ringleader trains a dancing dog to perform tricks for treats.
If you're content with being a dancing dog, then each to his own. But if you're interested in mastering your life and your mind and your destiny, then step one is mastering your lust. What's bitter in the beginning, leads to nectar in the end.
Bhagavad Gita ch3:39
āvṛtaṁ jñānam etena
jñānino nitya-vairiṇā
kāma-rūpeṇa kaunteya
duṣpūreṇānalena ca
SYNONYMS
āvṛtam—covered; jñānam—pure consciousness; etena—by this; jñāninaḥ—of the knower; nitya-vairiṇā—eternal enemy; kāma-rūpeṇa—in the form of lust; kaunteya—O son of Kuntī; duṣpūreṇa—never to be satisfied; analena—by the fire; ca—also
TRANSLATION
Thus, a man's pure consciousness is covered by his eternal enemy in the form of lust, which is never satisfied and which burns like fire.
PURPORT
It is said in the Manu-smṛti that lust cannot be satisfied by any amount of sense enjoyment, just as fire is never extinguished by a constant supply of fuel. In the material world, the center of all activities is sex, and thus this material world is called maithuṇya-āgāra, or the shackles of sex life. In the ordinary prison house, criminals are kept within bars; similarly, the criminals who are disobedient to the laws of the Lord are shackled by sex life. Advancement of material civilization on the basis of sense gratification means increasing the duration of the material existence of a living entity. Therefore, this lust is the symbol of ignorance by which the living entity is kept within the material world. While one enjoys sense gratification, it may be that there is some feeling of happiness, but actually that so-called feeling of happiness is the ultimate enemy of the sense enjoyer.
Reference: Bhagavad Gita As It Is, translation and commentary by Swami A C Bhaktivedanta, original MacMillan 1972 edition, freely available at prabhupadabooks.com
Image:https://pixabay.com/illustrations/woman-dominant-the-shade-red-light-507201/
Edited and published via my mobile device onto the Hive blockchain to warn future seekers of the pitfalls on the way.
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