The formidable enemy of any spiritualist in general and particularly of a brahmachari (celibate) is the phenomenon of Lust. Lust is characterized by an insatiable desire for sex and while sex is healthy and permissible for a householder, when regulated, for a brahmachari however it is absolutely forbidden.
The sex desire is universal; for anyone possessing a material body made of flesh and bones, sex is natural. However the purpose of human life is to transform this force to pure love, and experience the divine joy of loving God without any selfish desires.
A brahmachari is also aware that simply putting on the saffron robes of renunciation doesn’t guarantee one immunity from the arrows of Cupid. The fifth canto of Srimad Bhagavatam compares our life in this material world to that of a man who enters a forest to get honey from the bee hives. He accepts much risk from jackals, snakes and wild animals to get the honey. Finally he also gets stung by the bees. Similarly in this forest of material world, to experience sex pleasure, one undergoes repeated suffering and pain from various sources.
In the Mahabharata (Udyoga parva), Vidura describes to Dhritarashtra, the plight of a king chased by a tigress. In fear he runs and falls into a well. However he gets stuck on the branch of a tree within the well and a huge crocodile below, with its jaws wide open, stares upon the king, waiting for him to fall to death. Meanwhile, a deadly snake hanging on the well slithers closer to the king, while two rats are slowly but surely eating away the branch. In desperation the king hopes to get out of the well only to find the tigress outside waiting with her three cubs. He looks down and sees sure death staring at him from all sides. Just then a swarm of bees sting him repeatedly, for his fall had disturbed a bee hive. However once in a while, a drop of the honey from the broken beehive falls on his outstretched tongue and that is his source of greatest pleasure. He eagerly waits for the next drop to fall on his parched throat, and prefers to forget the painful misery that is plaguing him, and the inevitable disaster that is awaiting him.
The story is narrated to graphically drive home the plight of a conditioned soul in this world. We are chased by the tigress of lust accompanied by her three cubs of anger, greed and illusion. The well is compared to the dark, suffering material world while the deadly crocodile represents death. The serpent is Time and the two rats are the day and night that are eating away our life. As the bee sting like various miseries harass us daily, a little of the sex pleasure keeps a person going in the material world. This insignificant pleasure makes him oblivious to the painful sufferings and death. For the little honey of sex pleasure, one is willing to pay a huge price of uninterrupted miseries. A foolish person thinks it’s after all a good deal; the pleasure of sex is worth all the agony and sufferings of this material world. This is called illusion and therefore the material world is considered to be a very special prison which has no walls, yet all of its inmates are imprisoned within it. The unseen chains of this prison of material world that are holding us are our insatiable lusty desires.
The taste of sex pleasure is very strong; it is after all a perverted reflection of the highest spiritual pleasure, called the adi rasa. Only when we experience pleasure in Krishna consciousness can we give up the pursuit of the mundane pleasures of sense gratification. For this we need the causeless mercy of Krishna; only by His grace we can be released from the clutches of sex and enter into the bhakti rasa, the pleasure of devotional service.
