Dear Guru Maharaja,
Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to you and Srila Prabhupada.
Thank you for emailing me. I have been struggling to follow the fourth principle of no illicit sex. I am trying, but it is very hard for me to curb my lust. I am still chanting everyday, but I know that I need to chant more.
I will check in to your new website. Thank you for registering me.
I wanted to ask you if you have ever been physically sick for a long time? I ask this because I have been sick for three years. And I wanted to know if you have endured physical illness before? And how did you get through it? The scriptures tell me that I am not my body so that helps me some times. Thank you.
Your servant
Bhakta ***
Dear Bhakta ***,
Receive my blessings. All glories to Srila Prabhupada.
You should spend a lot of time in our website, www.isvara.org. It contains many many articles and even books and tens of thousands more will gradually be inserted on the following months. You can also research and publish yourself Krishna conscious documents. This is the devotional service for your spiritual master you have been looking for since a long time.
The symbol of ill fortune is bondage to lust. As was stated at the beginning, all conditioned souls are impelled to action, but how they will act is their fragmental independence. Now we see that the soul can either surrender to Krsna or to lust, for in verse thirty-six Arjuna complains that he feels sometimes impelled to sin even against his will, and Krsna says,
“It is lust only, Arjuna, which is born of contact with the material modes of passion and later transformed into wrath, and which is the all-devouring, sinful enemy of this world.”
Actually this lust is a reflection of our dormant love for Krsna, but because the individual soul has chosen not to cultivate that love for Krsna, that same propensity is pervertedly exhibiting itself as lust. And that lust means sex enjoyment.
Sex enjoyment is the bondage to the material world, for no man can do without it, and the more he gets the more tightly he becomes bound by material nature. The Manu-smrti tells us that lust cannot be satisfied by any amount of sense enjoyment, anymore than a fire can be put out by a constant supply of gasoline. In the state penitentiary criminals are kept in check by iron bars, and similarly, those who misuse their fragmental independence are tightly shackled by sex desire, which is forever binding them to material existence.
Once having exerted his independence against the Lord, the conditioned soul has no further independence. So here Arjuna speaks of being impelled unwillingly, and elsewhere Krsna says that all living beings are working helplessly under the spell of His maya.
So by keeping chanting Krishna’s names one day you’ll be able to conquer this deadly enemy of spiritual realization.
Accepting a material body and spending years inside it is like living in a deseased condition. Whether they enjoy or suffer due to past karma, everyone is actually suffering.
I overcame this sickness I have been in since 60 years by taking shelter of my spiritual master’s instruction, which I tried to follow for the whole of my life.
Keep chanting Hare Krishna.
Your well-wisher
Manonatha Dasa (ACBSP)
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