05.22 – The heaven that turns out to be hell
People today think of heaven not just as an enjoyable place to be attained after death, but also as any enjoyable place or activity. Our culture incessantly glamorizes sex as supremely delightful, as heavenly. However, the actual experience of sex just doesn’t live up to the hype. After all, the body’s capacity to enjoy is permanently limited. Not recognizing this reality and being goaded by the culture, many people perversely imagine that sexual indulgences which are forbidden as immoral will be the real heaven.
Little do they know that the heaven will soon turn out to be a hell psychologically, physically and familially:
- Psychologically: Millions of people become sex addicts, especially porn addicts who find themselves wasting their mental energy on porn, even against their will. Among all types of addiction, porn addiction can be the most entangling. Why? Because whereas one needs to spend time, effort and money to get to cigarettes, liquor or drugs, in today’s hypersexual culture, one often needs to spend time, effort and money to get away from sexually provocative material.
- Physically: Wanton sexual indulgence throws people into the path of a marauding army of sexually transmitted diseases, AIDs being just one of them. Several of these diseases are mortifying, agonizing and debilitating.
- Familially: Due to extra-marital affairs, thousands of families get disrupted, even divorced. This rupture plunges the entire family into misery and especially inflicts traumatic emotional wounds on the children.
And these three hellish consequences don’t include the eventual karmic consequences of immoral sexual indulgence, especially of the cold-blooded murders that are legalized today in the name of abortion.
Thankfully, we can protect ourselves from all this misery if we just accept the foresight provided by the Bhagavad-gita (05.22) in its warning that sensual enjoyment breeds misery.