The War Within - Between Good and Evil, Bheemeswara Challa [books for 7th graders txt] 📗

in sex”62 Many young people are eschewing not only marriage but
sex altogether. One study found, “Japan is in danger of heading for extinction
after researchers found that more and more of the country’s young people are
shunning the idea of marriage and having children. One in four unmarried men
and women in their 30s say they have never had sex, and the majority of young
women prefer the single life”.63 In 2007, Russia declared 12th September as
the National Day of Conception, hoping that a day off to do a ‘patriotic duty’
will reverse the trend. Scandinavian countries, long known as some of the most
liberal, tolerant, and progressive societies, and as responsible members of the
global community, have left one’s sexual preferences and purposes to individual
inclination, based on the idea that a sexually ‘satisfied’ population is a hipper and
more productive society, and, in so doing, implicitly underplayed sex as a means
of procreation. But things have changed. Alarmed that the birth rate is below 2.1
children per female, the number required to replace the current population—the
Danish birth rate is 1.7—many are openly egging couples to have more sex, and
offering financial and other incentives for more babies. From a global perspective,
and a more egalitarian alternative—and a more cost-effective way—would have
been to welcome and encourage more migration and immigration from ‘poorer’
countries. That they did not choose this way is a reminder that the ideal of
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common humanity and global citizenship are as far away from realization as
ever before, despite globalization and communication technologies. Technology
has also revolutionized human attitude to sex. One can have secret trysts with
strangers through the web, or buy sex toys in the anonymity of online shopping.
Condoms, contraceptives, and pills… we now can have sex freed from both fear
and responsibility. Recreation has won over procreation. Wherever there is a
new technology, the sex industry is quick to adopt it. It does seem that modern
man is content with the ecstatic pleasure that sex provides, which has so far
stood the test of time; here too gadgets, toys, dolls, and tools have made inroads
and threaten over time, like robots in the workplace, to replace the human in
the bedroom, and to indulge our kinks. It is said that ‘the previously taboo,
everything from hook ups to queer sex and kink, have become more accessible’.
A time may come when people find it less of a hassle and less taxing and more
effortless to ‘buy’ a ‘mate’ of latex than go through the grind to get a human
partner. It is being predicted that future sex is going to feature lots of sex with
robots, and that ‘it is going to be perfectly normal that people will be friends
with robots, and that people will have sex with robots’. And no one will need
to actually physically touch each other ever again. Technology could eventually
eliminate the need to be in the same room with your sexual partner ever again.
No ones knows whether all this innovation in the bedroom will make us sexually
enlightened or lead to a dystopian future where humans give up on biological
sex. Some experts have commented: “If a robot can give you more pleasure than
a human, maybe the human should be trying harder”. Try harder—to do what,
to be who? The defining question of the next 10 years, we are told, is likely to be
whether technology is used more to maintain intimacy with partners over great
distances and enhance relationships, or create insular worlds where we can please
ourselves—and to dispense with human intimacy for sexual satisfaction.
In one sense, our ‘obsession’ with copulating is perhaps symbolic of our
desire to undo our accidental or intentional or enforced separation from each
other in being born alone. In truth, we began as One, became multiple and in the
end go back to the One. The first ‘life’ burst out in the tiniest little cell. The single
cell organisms started combining and working together to form multicellular
organisms, not through aggregation or aggression but through a magical complex
of interrelationships maintaining a perfect cooperative co-ordination of disparate
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functions. The enduring tension between separateness and singularity, unity and
multiplicity is perhaps symbolic of this ‘original’ separation and the yearning
to become ‘one’ once again. The physical ‘separateness’ between man and man
cannot be eliminated; two ‘bodies’ cannot fuse into one; what truly separates one
from another is mental and psychological, which manifests as selfishness, selfcenteredness
and self-righteousness, slander and malice. In short, on pursuing
the spiritual goal of ‘oneness’ of all forms of life with the awareness that we are
all waves of the same ocean, the sparks of the same flame, we must realize that
a giant step towards that ‘goal’ would be to eliminate, at least greatly diminish,
the ‘psychological space’ between one man and another. For that, we should
devise mechanisms to deepen and strengthen our emotions like consideration,
compassion, kindness, and altruism so that physically we might remain different
and distinct but functionally and emotionally we banish the various forms of
divisiveness in the human world.
Our present times are considered, particularly in Western countries,
sexually most liberated and promiscuous and permissive, and teenagers feel that
sex is not only normal, but expected in any relationship, almost immediately. It is
said that today’s young people are the first generation ‘raised’ on pornography—
there are an estimated 4.2 million porn sites in the world and the number is ever
increasing—and many teens are less inhibited than they were 20 years ago. Sex
has become pervasive and embedded in every walk of human life, be it social,
political, for entertainment or marketing or media. And yet, one survey says that
only 44% are ‘sexually satisfied’. Sex is increasingly interwoven with violence and
crime; it seems to draw out our darker side. We read news reports of children
as young as two or five being ‘raped’ and murdered. Many working women,
including in the armed forces, are complaining of sexual harassment by superiors
and colleagues. Human sexuality increasingly appears out of control, and more
and more people seem unable to resist their darkest desires. Although all statistics
are questionable, many share the view that sexual violence is on the rise and that
it is taking different forms including ethnic rapes and religious rapes. Another
emerging trend is blurring the boundary between the sexes, leading to what is
called ‘asexuality’ or ‘neutralization of mankind’. There are few truly masculine
men and feminine females. Men are showing feminine qualities and women
male traits, thus acting against nature, which intended that the sexes, by being
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constituted wholly different in body, brain and bent, do not normally come into
rivalry and antagonism in the fulfillment of their respective life-roles. We are, in
effect, trying to refute a fundamental basis of creation: everything exists as a ‘pair
of opposites’, the most fundamental of which is male and female. It is on ‘duality
in unity’ that the cosmic order operates. It is hard to imagine what would be the
evolutionary consequences of this phenomenon of gender-neutrality?
Sex, and its attendant rituals, have always been a very important part
of all ancient cultures, and some customs are bizarre, but the most noteworthy
feature is that it is the female who is given more options and choices. Whether or
not what we generally consider as sexual ‘fidelity’, or ‘exclusivity’ are hard-wired
or not is arguable. Some researchers, based on surveys and on anthropological
records, as well as their study of the behavior of our closest primate cousins,
chimpanzees and bonobos, make the case that humans actually evolved to
be promiscuous. They attribute our modern sexual malaise to the mismatch
between our Paleolithic libidos and the monogamous straitjacket into which
we have forced ourselves. Technologies of all kinds like the internet have been
central to the ways in which sex is understood and experienced in contemporary
societies. And we can now connect with one another with unprecedented ease.
Prowlers can see more potential mates in an hour on Tinder than any of our
ancestors encountered in their lifetimes. Although one feels greatly distressed at
such terrible happenings in today’s world, it is no comfort to be told that much
of this was foretold in ancient Hindu texts like the Ramayana, Mahabharata,
Srimad Bhagavatam, Linga Purana, etc. These were written in the context of
descriptions about moral decay in the current ‘age’ of Kali Yuga, described as an
extended period of increasing sin. Some of the following predictions seem to fit
into the contemporary scene with uncanny accuracy.
The desire for sex in this age of Kali Yuga will be one of the most
captivating of all preoccupations of the human race. It will distract most
of society from the real spiritual purpose of life. People will want to
satisfy themselves in this way and then use up so much energy, physical
and otherwise, to meet their sensual desires. It will sap them of their time
in life when they could be using this existence in much more important
ways. Even pre-teenage girls will get pregnant. The primary cause
will be the social acceptance of sexual intercourse as being the central
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requirement of life. Men will have lustful thoughts, and so will women.
Lust will be viewed as being socially acceptable. Prostitution or frivolous
sexual activity will take away one’s sense of bodily and mental cleanliness.
It will increase addiction to trivial bodily pleasures, which will accelerate
degradation and disease in society. For quick profits, debauched men and
even women will capture and force many young girls, and boys as well,
into a life of prostitution, which will often leave them hurt, wounded,
diseased or ruined for life. Such exploitative culprits, who engage in
human trafficking and force others into such an existence of engaging
in the sex trade, will multiply like a virus in this age. And like any virus,
if they are not destroyed completely, they will only reappear later in a
different place. Womanliness and manliness will be judged according to
one’s sexual expertise. Marriage will cease to exist as a holy union. Men
and women will simply live together on the basis of bodily attraction and
verbal agreements, and only for sexual pleasure. Women will wander from
one man to another. Young women will freely abandon their virginity.
Some men will violate the wives of others and some, in the indiscriminate
rage of lust, will go (wherever she may be) with any woman.
We can engage every single word in the above expose to describe the
prevailing scenario and situation in the world today. It makes us wonder how
anyone can so vividly sketch what is going to happen several thousands of years
in the future. So, what does this, and other dire forebodings, mean? Having
been born in these times, are we simply fated to be immoral and evil, that we are
being driven by forces of implacable fate in everything we do? Does it, therefore,
absolve us of feelings of shame and guilt? The question that needs to be thought
through is this: how will our libidinous behavior impact human future and
evolution? Will carefree copulation become the ‘chosen’ instrument of ultimate
self-destruction? Will humans ever be liberated from the basic biological needs,
especially sex, that drive our evolutionary past, and how will it affect human
behavior? Will human sexuality, unbridled and on the rampage, further corrupt,
enfeeble and defile human passion and personality and accelerate decay and
destruction? Or will we find a way to direct that awesome energy towards human
redemption and renewal? And, as many now are saying ‘humans are still evolving
today’, how will the current dedication of so much of our mental and psychic
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time and energy for sex influence that evolution and our desire to be better than
we were yesterday? For, our desires and passions know no reason nor respect any
bounds or boundaries. For long, they were driven by the struggle to survive.
Now that it is not so compelling, how will they reflect and react? How will the
imminent ‘sexual revolution’ play out? Will mechanization of sex relieve us of the
tension of human sexual pursuit, and release psychic and spiritual space? Or, will
it, coupled with intra-gender sex, make us more mad in our mindset as it is not
the kind of human sexuality that nature has intended, and further strengthen our
destructive impulses?
The bottom line is that our sexual behavior is but a part of our overall
behavior, and our ‘behavior’, as we have been stressing, is but a reflection and
extension of the state of the ‘war within’. Sex being a primal passion is more
susceptible to its influence and impact than other aspects of human life. Every
human attribute and emotion gets magnified manifold