Lust doesn’t just bind us – it also makes us fight to hold on to its bonds

If someone were being bound by ropes, that person would naturally fight to untie the bonds. But suppose that person fights instead to hold on to the bonds. We would rightly consider such behavior crazy.

Yet this is how people behave when bound by lust.

Lust addicts become blind to dignity, morality and civility as they feverishly seek sexual gratification, sinking sometimes even to brutality and bestiality.

How does lust bind?

By making a biological function degenerate into a psychological compulsion. The resulting obsession makes lust addicts blind to dignity, morality and civility as they feverishly seek sexual gratification, sinking sometimes even to brutality and bestiality. Lust also drags people into behaviors that invite mortifying and debilitating diseases. Moreover, it keeps them deprived of the unlimited devotional happiness available at the spiritual level of consciousness. And it drags them deeper into the miserable cycle of birth and death.

And how does lust make its prisoners fight to hold on to their bonds?

By making them mistake regulation of lust to be deprivation of freedom. Those thus deluded consider pandering to lust’s dictatorial demands to be expressions of freedom. They reject spiritual mentors who explain lust’s actual nature by labeling them as old-fashioned killjoys and self-appointed moral police. Being thus misled by lust, its prisoners end up fighting to hold on to its bonds.

No wonder the Bhagavad-gita (03.39) cautions us against lust, declaring it to be our eternal enemy (nitya-vairi) that covers our knowledge (avritam jnanam). By its delusions, lust makes us use our own energy against us – instead of fighting against lust, we fight against the moral and spiritual regulations meant to protect us.

How can we break free from lust’s bondage?

By equipping ourselves with Gita wisdom, we can see through lust’s diabolical delusions. And by cultivating remembrance of Krishna, we can relish higher devotional happiness that progressively makes lower sensual pleasures unnecessary and unappealing.

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