17. When Love Turns Violent

What is lust?

The truth is, we do not know. Humans know only how to reproduce. We do not know lust.

When animals mate, they experience pure lust. They enjoy themselves. But humans are different. Our lust is born from imagination. It is built on fantasies from books and media and borrowed from other's ideas. We rarely interact with reality. Pure lust, therefore, is not natural for us.

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

We compare and contrast a real partner sitting right 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 while women feel exploited, used, and disrespected. Men operate from their root chakra, contaminated by lust and greed, Women, on the other hand, operate from their spleen chakra, contaminated by fear and insecurity.

Our lust and sex is 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 Siva Sutra has a simple, yet profound way of illustrating this. One of the verses says, 'If you are a couple in bed, then, 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 is not pure and therefore does not provide enjoyment. It is tainted by our imagination. It is built on our fantasies and thrives on the hope of finding the person to match the one in our mind.

Likewise, our love is tainted by fantasy and imagination. A mother says, 'I loved my daughter deeply until she married someone not of my choice.'

We do not know love. What we think of as love is actually violence: deep-rooted violence. Our socalled love wants to own and conquer another person even if they resist.

It is war. Try to understand this and drop all imagination and fantasy.