Lust is ubiquitous in today’s society with billboards depicting prurient images and movies enacting explicit scenes. Displays that would have appalled people even a few decades ago and indeed throughout most of history are commonplace nowadays.

It’s almost as if the culture has given itself a license to lust – lust publically and graphically. And people have taken up that license with gusto, somewhat akin to people drinking in a place where prohibition had been lifted.

Just as licensing alcohol brings no waiver from its consequences, so with lust. And the consequences of unrestricted indulgence in lust are becoming increasingly evident in today’s society. They range from dreadful sexually transmitted diseases physically and traumatic disasters socially ranging from divorces over infidelity to sexual abuses.

While sexual libertarians may argue that nature has given us lust, they conveniently forget that lust is not all that nature has given us.

That’s why wise people don’t mistake the culture’s license to lust as an opportunity – they see it as a blunder that sentences a whole civilization of people to suffering.

While sexual libertarians may argue that nature has given us lust, they conveniently forget that lust is not all that nature has given us. We human beings also have been given a higher intelligence – an intelligence by which we can understand the purpose of existence, including the purpose of sexual pleasure.

With our intelligence we can realize that indulgence in lust can never satisfy our longing for happiness because we long for constant happiness, whereas lust can at best provide intermittent momentary pleasure. And even that intermittent pleasure becomes with age infrequent and inaccessible.

The Bhagavad-gita (07.11) indicates that kama (sensual pleasure) has its place in life, but what brings purpose to life is dharma: an understanding of our higher spiritual nature and a redirection of our emotions and energies towards attaining unending spiritual happiness by learning to love Krishna, the supreme all-attractive being.