Words From The Master - 22 March 2008

When love turns to violence

WHAT is lust? The truth is that we don’t know. Humans know only how to reproduce. We do not know what lust is.

When animals mate they experience pure lust. They enjoy themselves. But humans are different. Our lust is born from imagination. It’s built on fantasies from movies and books. It is borrowed from others ideas. It is not natural for us.

Our struggles with lust begin from early childhood. From a young age onwards we begin to form ideas about how our ‘would be’ partner ‘should be’. This idea about ideal partner contaminates every relationship we have.

We begin to compare and contrast a real partner sitting next to us with the person who lives in our imagination. When we do this, the real partner becomes a poor substitute for the person in our mind. The partner, who lives in our cerebral layer, leaves us with a feeling of being cheated in the present.

Men feel they are being deprived. Women feel exploited, used, disrespected. Men operate from their Muladhara, root chakra, contaminated with lust and greed. Women receive the energy through their Swadishthana, spleen chakra with fear and insecurity.

Our lust and sex are contaminated with the dirt of our imagination. We can only mentally relate to another. Even when our partners are sitting next to us, we take the permission of the mental picture to live.

The Hindu scripture Shiva Sutra has a profound way of illustrating this. A verse says: If you are a couple in bed, there are four of you in bed together. Each of you is accompanied by the other’s fantasy of yourself; the man sees the woman and his fantasy about her; the woman sees her mate and her fantasy about him.

Fantasy, imagination, mental picture, these are the words we use to describe lust. The lust isn’t pure. It is tainted by our imagination; it is built on our fantasies and thrives on the hope of finding that person to match the one in mind.

Likewise, our love is tainted by this imagination. We love someone as long as that person does what we say and obeys us. A mother says: I loved my daughter deeply until she married someone, who was not my choice.

We don’t know love. Our love is a desire to possess. What we think as love is actually violence. Only when you let go the need to control and possess can you really love.