Obscenity is objectionable not because… Gita 05.22

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna. Obscenity is objectionable not because it shows too much of a person, but because it shows too little and obsesses people with the too little. Nowadays, there is increasing obscenity in the media, in the culture, where sexually explicit images are easily available.
And often, they’re defended anybody, they say it’s one’s right to see whatever they want. And those who object to it are called as moral police, old fashioned, religious moralizers. But the point is that we have to look at the effect of things.
Some people say that it’s our body, we can expose it. If somebody wants to freely expose their body, what’s wrong with it? The problem is that it’s not an obscenity. The problem with obscenity is not that too much is being shown.
Let’s say in traditional cultures, people dressed modestly, wherein they covered their bodies properly and didn’t show too much flesh. And now in obscenity, too much flesh is being shown. But the problem is not that too much is being shown, but too little is being shown.
What does that mean? That when we consider a person, a person is not just their body, and not just their skin and the color and shape and contours of their body. The person is a whole being, body, mind and soul. The essence of the person is spiritual.
And when there are obscene depictions, too little of the person is being shown. That is just their body and not even their body, it is just the skin. Because all that we see is the outer cover and that is only a very small part of that person.
That part will be there only for a few decades in that person’s life. All those looks are not going to be there when they are very small and when they grow very old. So obscenity, obscene depictions show too little of a person, show only their physical shell and only their physical level also for a very short period.
But it obsesses us with that. Obsesses us with that means that when because that is present in such a seductive way that the mind gets consumed with it and can’t think of anything else. We reduce people to their appearances and thus we neglect their substance.
And the result, even if we don’t consider from a moral perspective, from a spiritual perspective, from a karmic perspective, even from in this world itself, the result is that people’s relationships become very superficial. When they are driven only by other superficial appearance, then the relationships get reduced to just scratching each other’s itches. And when that stops, when the ability, when the itch is no longer felt to be scratched, then their bodies may come in contact with many other bodies, but their hearts remain lonely and thus they experience misery.
The Bhagavad Gita says in 5.22 that the wise people do not delight in such sensual pleasures, sensuality, in such sensual depictions, because they know that these will deprive us of them, of their spirituality. So, we want to see the full person, body, mind and soul. And for that, we need not sensual depictions, but spiritual depictions.
We want the knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita, which helps us appreciate the person as a complete being, body, mind and soul, and relate with them holistically. It is only such relationships that are deeply fulfilling.