Once we slip down a slope we can’t control how far we slip down Gita 03.36

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
The valley is at the bottom of the slippery slope from the top of the mountain Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita talks about how Mahavishnu Mahapadma all devouring, the great devourer, the great devourer and the great Mahapadma very simple in this world today in today’s world we see that there is revulsion to molestation of women violation of women in the form of rape there is a widespread awakening of the of the horror of violence against women and here what is sometimes not understood is that such reprehensible behaviour is not a manifestation of some animal nature which is something which a few perverts have and from which most people are free we need to recognise that everybody in this world is ultimately trapped by material nature everybody in this world is in a source of illusion everybody in this world is susceptible to the temptations that come from sensuality now having understood this the implication has to be carefully seen so there are certain forms of sensuality that people think are ok say for example pre-marital or extramarital sex is frowned upon but you know specifically some soap operas or some other movies, this is often glamorised as if it is something enjoyable it is some forbidden pleasure but it is enjoyable now beyond that there is pornography, there is prostitution, there is voyeurism there is exhibitionism voyeurism is that people want to see somebody else you know doing sexual activities and that is voyeurism and exhibitionism is people want to parade themselves without clothes exhibiting their sensual organs so now all these stem from a strong desire for sensual pleasure strong craving which is essentially non-different from lust so we need to recognise that it is the same force which makes us do these things and that same force that gives further momentum it takes us towards forms of indulgence that are considered unacceptable if somebody is on the slope of a mountain and we tell them you can slide but you have to slide up to this point don’t slide beyond this point actually once somebody starts sliding down a mountain slope it is very difficult for them to stop sometimes they will be able to stop and sometimes the momentum, the gravity will be so strong that they will find it impossible to stop so similarly if you consider sensual indulgence to be like a slippery slope then when Krishna says Mahasana Mahasana means it is the great devourer so here devouring refers to that that Kama, sensual desire if you devour our intelligence, you can devour our conscience, it can devour our humanity it can devour our basic sense of morality and people once they get caught under the grip of Kama desires they end up doing things which they would normally shudder to even think of so the tendency in contemporary society to demonize the perpetrators of sexual violence is actually a tendency towards denying the universality of the problem that means whenever some people commit sexual violence there are demands by some righteous or self-righteous people these should be punished they should be killed, they should be hanged or they should be castrated or some kind of punishment like that is demanded and beyond the righteous range that permeates such demands if you see the assumption is that these people are some kind of perverse creatures they are some kind of demons somehow they are in human bodies so demonizing the other is a way of denying what is hidden what is in here there is the same force although not to that same demonic extent that is there inside us which is there outside us in some people who commit extreme crimes so usually if you understand the anarthas are the same we all have certain limits towards what we can go now for example say people become angry now if they had parents who had physically attacked them, physically beaten them then these people grow up and often they think that when the problem is to be solved and it is not solved means physical beating up is acceptable now when they go forward physical beating is acceptable but they will not take say whip and flog someone or they will not take a stick and beat someone so physical beating itself may be dangerous is often counterproductive because it perpetuates the mentality that that is the way to solve a problem otherwise it can’t be solved so the point which I am making is that we all have our limits about what we can do and what we will not do but these limits are not set in stone for most people so when say people’s imagination is fuelled by say watching some television where they see someone in a fit of anger they just smash a TV in this person they do the same thing in a fit of anger so when anger comes to what extent one will go to indulge in it that is determined by the limits that our culture our morality, our upbringing our social situation has set for us but when we expose ourselves to stimuli where unrestricted expression of the same impulse is exhibited where anger is exhibited in a disproportionate way then under fits of rage people do things which they would normally never have done so sometimes people just in a fit of anger they catch somebody whom they are angry with and bang that person’s head against a wall they are horrified when their blood splatters all over what did I do? I never would have done such a thing but when we are exposed to things which we see then subconsciously those things move from the realm of the unacceptable to the entertainable we may not do it ourselves but this is just unacceptable it’s entertainable so the same principle applies when sensuality is explicitly depicted in the media and not just in the media which we say the movies may depict romantic or erotic scenes but there is outright pornography and violent pornography that is also depicted that is easily accessible for people today in fact for many people going to get food from a fridge requires more effort than seeing a pornographic image because at least for the second one has to walk and go somewhere for the first one can just click a button or two so when the such images one sees repeatedly then what is acceptable and what is unacceptable what is what is consider what can what will be considered what just cannot be considered that boundary gets shifted more and more and the shifting of this boundary is not something which we consciously notice that means that it happens at a subconscious level so our moral limits are being extended and then when this happens when suddenly say the desire attacks us that which we would earlier have considered utterly unacceptable because of repeated exposure to seeing it now that starts becoming acceptable and then not only acceptable that also ends up becoming doable so rather than demonizing people who engage in perverse violence which is a which is extreme expression of anger or in perverse sexual violence which is an extreme member of extreme expression of lust and anger combined lust primarily rather than demonizing such people and thinking that such people are some some kind of perverse beings who are utterly different from us we need to see that they are they are manifesting an extreme injury the malaise that affects all of us unless we counter the sensuality that the that unless we curb our own exposure to sensual images unless we decrease the sensual temperature of the culture without that these extreme problems will no longer be that extreme the what is unacceptable will become more and more unacceptable and it will become something which our righteous rage alone will not be enough to stop and so the Bhagavad Gita recognizes that our longing for happiness when it gets perverted then it becomes directed towards worldly things so rather than letting it get distorted like this the ultimate solution is to redirect our consciousness towards Krishna and become absorbed in him while such redirection is happening we also need to have based on our own vulnerabilities certain restrictions which will protect us from engaging in from engaging in activities which are anti-devotional so even if something has the limit of acceptability has shifted outwards within our conscience so if there is some amount of conservativeness in society then that the conscience may not stop us but the culture will stop us but if the culture is permissive and the conscience is also permissive then it becomes very difficult to have protection of oneself or protection of others in such a society and by when the society is not culturally conservative it is important for us to ourselves be individually conservative in knowing what our triggers are and in ensuring that we take steps to protect ourselves from being triggered by those triggers