Value Education and Spirituality 23 – Ramayana 5 – Shurapanakha – Don’t let the selfish exploit our sexual vulnerabiity

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna. Hare Krishna. Welcome back to the Value Education and Spirituality series.
We are discussing about the Ramayana and we will discuss now about Shurpanakha and how the selfish exploit the weaknesses of others for their own purposes. Now, when Ram along with Lakshman and Sita were living in the forest, at that time, the Rakshasas were living nearby and among them there was Shurpanakha, who was the sister of the emperor of the Rakshasas, Ravana. And this Shurpanakha, she was searching around and for some food.
The Rakshasas were cannibals. They would eat humans also. So, she suddenly smelled some human flesh.
She immediately came there and when she saw, initially she was thinking, oh, I’ll have some delicious food to eat. But when she saw, oh, there was this handsome man. She saw Ram over there and her desire changed from a desire of the belly to a desire of the flesh.
And she desired an amorous relationship with Ram. And she very brazenly went and propositioned him. She actually changed her form so that she looked very attractive.
And she propositioned him. Now, Ram very politely first said no to her. And then he said that, you know, I’m already married.
And he said Sita is there. And then he said, you can be with my brother. Now Lakshmana understood and caught on the joke.
And he said, you know, you will have to become, I’m a servant of Ram. You’ll have to become a servant of a servant. You’ll have to become Sita’s servant.
You’ll have to become Ram’s servant if you become my wife. Why do you want to do that? Went back to Ram and Ram. And when she saw that neither of the brothers was accepting.
Now, here you see that the point is there was no, there was just pure carnal desire, sexual desire. There was no romance also in it. If there was some relationship, some actual attraction was there, she would not have just given Ram and gone to Lakshmana.
She just had the desire of the flesh and she just wanted some male to satisfy that desire. It was like that basically. So now when she saw that neither of them accepted and immediately when there is that selfish desire, then one just gets angry when the desire is not fulfilled.
The Bhagavata says that krodha comes when the calm is not satisfied. When desire, lust is not satisfied, one becomes angry. And now whom should she become angry against? She wanted both Ram and Lakshmana to satisfy her.
Why are they not satisfying me? Because of Sita. And what happened? She immediately pounds on Sita and started strangling her. She says, I’ll kill you.
Then they will become available for me. Can you see the extent of maliciousness? One woman wanted to kill another woman so that she could fulfill the desire of her flesh. So actually, lust is a terrible enemy.
It can make people so vicious. So anyway, when she expressed such terrible intentions, now they did not actually, she was trying to kill Sita like that. It’s a normal protective male instinct.
Ram could have killed her at that time. To kill one’s wife and somebody wanting to kill his wife in front of his eyes, it’s outrageous crime. But he did not kill her.
No, Lakshmana checked her and the scuffle that followed, Lakshmana carefully avoided hitting any fatal blows. He just, to punish her, he disfigured her. Cut off her nose and cut off her ears.
It’s just to remind her that don’t be so arrogant, thinking that you’re so powerful that you can get away with anything. And she’s screeching. She just ran away from there.
She went to her brothers, Kharan, Dushan, and they came and attacked Ram. But Ram single-handedly defeated all of them. And thousands of Rakshasas alone were defeated by Ram.
And he gallantly protected Sita over there. After this, Shurpanakha realized that this was disastrous. How can this man alone defeat everyone? This is revenge has to be taken.
She went straight to Ravana. And when she went straight to Ravana, now, actually, there was not much love lost between Ravana and Shurpanakha. Shurpanakha had been married to a Rakshasa, Dushtabuddhi.
Now, when, in the previous generation, among the Rakshasas, there had been many Rakshasa chieftains. And when Ravana got power, he had many challengers. But he used his power, he used his cunning, he used his expertise at deceiving others.
And he grabbed the Rakshasa throne. So another of the contenders for the throne was Dushtabuddhi. So, he made an alliance with Dushtabuddhi by getting Dushtabuddhi married to his sister.
But still afterwards, some problems came up between Dushtabuddhi and Ravana. And Ravana had Dushtabuddhi killed. So, Shurpanakha basically became a widow.
Shurpanakha later realized that Ravana has done this. And so, she was also looking for a way to take revenge against Ravana. And when she saw the power of Ram, how he single-handedly killed all the Rakshasas, she realized that this person may well kill Ravana.
And even if this person doesn’t kill Ravana, if Ravana kills him, if this person kills him, if this Ram kills Ravana, then I’ll get my revenge through him. And if Ravana kills Ram, that’s good at least. I have been humiliated, that will be avenged.
So, now she wanted Ravana to take action on her behalf and attack Ram. But she realized that Ravana may not act when Ravana hears about how powerful Ram is. And another survivor from the Rakshasa army accompanied, already gone, and informed Ravana about what had happened.
And he had cautioned that Ram is very powerful, we will have to confront him very carefully. So, then when Shurpanakha came, she came straight into the palace, into the court, when Ravana was sitting on the high throne with all his generals and courtiers there. And she went and fell at his feet, crying piteously.
And then when she raised her face, Ravana was shocked, why is my sister crying like this? He raised her face, he saw her disfigured, had her nose cut off. He said, who is there to do this? She said, who is going to enter into the valley of death for this audacity of doing this atrocity to you? He said, tell me and I will kill him. And Shurpanakha knew what buttons to press to make Ravana dance like a puppet.
He said, what kind of king are you? That your citizens are suffering and you are sitting enjoying on the throne. You are an incompetent king given to sense pleasures. He felt so angered to be insulted by his own sister in a public assembly.
He said, I am not an ordinary citizen, I am your sister and still you are letting this happen. Shame on you. Tell me Shurpanakha, who has done this? And I will kill him.
And then she said that Ram and Lakshman, those two brothers did this. Ravana’s anger immediately soared down, he started thinking. Now Shurpanakha realized that actually Ravana may not act.
Then she completely changed the whole story. She said, you know what caused the battle? She said, Ram had a very beautiful wife. And she started going into detail, describing the beauty of Ram, of Sita in a way to incite Ravana’s lust.
And she is a woman, she knows womanly charms. So she started speaking in a way and she could see Ravana’s whole disposition changing. He got aroused, his eyes became wide and he started salivating.
And he said, you know brother, when I saw Sita, I thought she would be just the right woman for a king like you to have, to add to your queens. And I had gone there to get Sita as a queen for you. And just see what they did to me when I was trying to serve you, my brother.
So just see. Now she had no thought of brother when she had gone to Ram and Lakshman. She had no intention of taking Sita to Ravana.
She had gone there because only of her own desire. But she completely spun her own story to further her aims. This is how, you know, people who are selfish, they misinterpret everything and report everything so that they show themselves as the good people and they make sure that others do what they want to do.
So now that same Ravana, who had become circumspect, cautious on hearing that it was Ram with whom he had to contend, suddenly lost his intelligence when he heard about the beauty of Sita. And by hearing about the beauty of Sita, he just threw caution to the winds and embarked on a course, which eventually led not only to his death, not only the death of thousands of Rakshasa warriors, but to one of the bloodiest wars, all because he could not control his lust. And his lust was triggered by Shurpanakha.
So actually, Shurpanakha is a person who exploited Ravana’s lust for her own purposes. But along with that, Shurpanakha also represents a principle. And the principle is the principle exploiting lust, people’s vulnerability to lust for one’s own purposes.
And this is what is done today by the advertising industry, by the entertainment industry, and especially by the pornography industry. The advertising industry has its own product to sell, but it doesn’t just show the products. Before Sigmund Freud, he was a psychotherapist, considered to be father of psychotherapy.
Before him, whatever advertisements would be there, that means in the previous century, the early part of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century, the advertisements focused on the virtues of the product. Oh, this car is so convenient, or this machine is so good, or whatever, the virtues of the product. But psychologists like Freud and others said that people act not based on just their rational thoughts.
They act based on their feelings. So, if you want to, the conclusion was that if you want to make people do something, then you have to get them to feel the way you want them to feel. And from that time onwards, the advertisements started focusing on triggering people’s feelings.
And by triggering people’s feelings, they make people do what they want them to do. So now, for example, any product is to be sold, a car is to be sold, along with the car. On the car, the advertisers will show a scantily clad woman reclining in an alluring pose.
And people think that if I purchase this car, this girl will also come along with it. Stupid, but that’s what people believe. And so, the advertisers who want to sell a car, they add, it’s a dehumanization of women, basically.
Now, women are commodified and dehumanized for selling some products. So, the advertising industry has its own products to sell, but it exploits people’s weakness towards lust and uses female forms to just fill the pockets of wealthy people more and more. So, apart from the advertising industry, there’s the entertainment industry.
So, Bollywood, Hollywood, they expose the bodies, especially they describe and depict and retell it so that what will happen? The whole point of triggering people’s lust is so that people will come and watch the movies. And the film stars, the actors and all those will become wealthier and wealthier and wealthier. So, again, this is again, standardizing industry, the entertainment industry, they are all manifesting the Shurpanakha mentality.
And this is worst manifested in the pornography industry. At least in entertainment, there is some story, there is some acting, there is some music, there is some special effects. And sex is also one commodity that is sold over there.
But in pornography, it’s lust, simply lust. So, what is being done over there is that people’s basest instincts are being exploited. And sexual acts are depicted in vulgar and often violent ways so that people will be triggered, people will be triggered.
And then what happens by this? When people are sexually influencing, Ravana lost intelligence and did horrible things after that. When people are triggered by such sexually explicit imagery and description and depiction, they lose their intelligence and then they do terrible things after that. So, actually, when these sort of depictions come, we may think that, Oh, these are all, this is all being done for my pleasure.
I’m enjoying and these people are giving me enjoyment. But when Srivapanakha was describing the beauty of Sita, she did not desire the enjoyment of Ravana. She actually wanted to fulfill her own selfish purposes.
And she knew that Ravana might go towards destruction also by this. So, similarly, when all these people who are depicting sexuality explicitly, they are not concerned with giving us pleasure. Their concern is simply selfish to make money.
The pornographic industry actually is the fastest growing and one of the biggest industries. Cricket brings big money in India. In America, it’s baseball and basketball, those sort of games.
Baseball, basketball that bring huge amounts of money. But whatever is the money of all the franchises of baseball and basketball combined together in America, that and much more is the money that comes from the pornographic industry. So, what is happening is, people are being exploited.
And then so many people, by watching porn, what happens? Ravana did destructive things externally, but people get addicted to porn. People spend hours and hours and hours. It’s wasting time.
Their mind is filled with sick fantasies. And some people may even try to enact those fantasies by doing violent activities against others. What we see, that we will do eventually.
That’s how the whole advertising industry works. What people show in advertisements for 10 seconds, 20 seconds, they show that people purchase products. So, now if people see pornography for sometimes hours and hours, days and days, weeks and weeks, months and months, years and years, people are addicted.
What effect will it have on people? So, we should know that when this sort of sexual description, exclusive sexual description is coming, it is not to give us pleasure. This is the Shurpanakha industry manifesting to exploit us. And we have to protect ourselves.
By staying away from such things, we will not lose our intelligence and we will not do irrational things that will be self-destructive and that will be destructive for others. So, exploitative people, when they seem to be offering us some pleasure, we should know that actually they have their own agenda. And their agenda is to exploit us, not to give us some pleasure.
And by knowing their agenda and by knowing the dangers of what they are depicting, we can protect ourselves. Thank you.