talking to girls

Hello Andrian,

Hope you are doing good. Coming to the answers,

While the act of talking to a member of the opposite sex by itself is in no way wrong the beginner Brahmachari should remember that his past tendencies generated by past karma position him in a state where even innocent and honorable contact carried out with a well meaning intention often ends in lust. Lust and desire are tricksters of the highest order. Lust has the uncanny ability of showing its head from the most innocent of contact. It is in the nature of lust to creep into situations where one might think there is little chance for lust to flower.

Again it is not lust itself which is the cause behind its appearance but the ignorance around the Jivâtma (embodied soul) that makes the lower self susceptible to lust. The individual embodied soul having fallen from its lofty state of matchless purity and bliss tends to run after anything and everything that appears to promise some degree of pleasure. Not having realized that desire and lust always end in pain, the embodied soul tries to carve out sexual situations from perfectly normal and honorable situations. For this reason, a Brahmachari wishing to evolve through Brahmacharya and become all powerful would do well in maintaining brief and limited contact with members of the opposite sex, restricting it to necessity and nothing more.

Relationships such as 'friendship' with members of the opposite gender turn into nothing more than disguised relationships with sexual intentions. This is so because at the innate level, the very first intention behind approaching the woman was fueled with lust and nothing else. If a man or woman were to have perfect and ideal love for another as the 'soul' and nothing more there would have been no danger from sexuality. But how many people can relate to another person at the 'soul level'? How many people can view the other as not the body, mind, intellect or consciousness but only as a soul? It is a task totally beyond the ability of society in general. Most attempts at 'friendship' are intentions of sexuality disguised behind the term 'friendship'.

Can the man who claims he is looking just at 'friendship' be interested in befriending a woman who is disfigured? An invalid woman without hands or legs? A woman deep in the grip of a cancerous disease with pus oozing out of her body, teeth rotting, hair gone and flesh dried to the bone?...

Similarly, would a woman claiming genuine love & friendship unto death with a man she knows be interested in continuing the friendship if the man lost all his money, his job, his strength, his good looks, his high-powered sports car and became wheelchair ridden being a victim of third degree burns with his face and body burnt to extreme ugliness in an unfortunate accident? The lady who had claimed of undying love, the lady who had written love letters terming each other as 'soul mates', the same lady who had said "I will love you and be there for you even if death do us apart" would be busy changing her cellphone number so the unfortunate man doesn't ever get in touch with her again!

This is always the result of looking at another person with a selfish, dishonorable and covetous intention. Most of the 'relationships' that exist fall into this category. People disguise their real & selfish intentions behind the words -- 'love', 'friendship','relationship' etc.. All these relationships are nothing more but informal contracts for the benefits of wealth, sex, power, name or position. Such acts of falsity are a disgrace to the real meaning behind the term friendship or relationship. Why indulge in such frivolous contact? A sensible man would do well in staying clear of these falsities of the external world and instead spend his time and efforts at achieving something more concrete and of substance.

If the man could look at a lady at the 'soul level' he would feel the same love for the most beautiful woman and for the above mentioned diseased woman emitting unbearable stench...
If the lady could look at a man at the 'soul level' she would feel no difference in her love for the man, both before the accident and later...

The self-realized man or woman of absolute perfection perceives each and every other person as the 'soul' -- The manifestation of the Almighty. He sees himself in all others and all others in his own self. To him, doing good to another is doing good to himself. Doing the slightest harm to another is causing that much harm to his own self; for the underlying principle is that all souls are nothing but the Almighty. This is called as being established in the 'soul state'. Such a man would be unaffected by the condition of the bodies of both the beautiful and the diseased woman for he never looked at them as 'bodies' in the first place. His perspective was something higher and of immense substance right from the very beginning. This qualifies as the truest form of love or friendship, for the basis of love is beyond that of petty and temporary things such as the promise of a beautiful body which will decay with time or wealth which will eventually desert man only to leave him in pain. It thus follows that only the self-realized man becomes capable of infinite and boundless love in the universal sense.

Scriptures cutting across religions viz. The Bhagavad-Gita, The Bible, The Quraan and many more point out that such a man, further to having reached the 'self-realized state', as a reward for his efforts attains to incomparable and infinite bliss forever, a million times more pleasurable than the most intense sexual orgasm. This state of infinite bliss and pleasure is in reality the default state of the soul. It is the state which we have all forgotten through degeneration into matter (The Body). It is the state that has been lost due to the soul getting embodied in the physical and mental bodies due to karma. If one has to reclaim this original state, one has to undo all the negative and positive karma that lead him to the degenerated state and not do any new karma that would bind him to this state.

The enlightened Brahmachari after attaining self-realization see's no difference between an insect, a dog a cow and a beautiful woman. To him, all are manifestations of the Almighty Lord and hence as dear to him as he himself. The external dress worn by the soul in the form of the body of an insect, the body of a dog, the body of a cow or the body of a beautiful lady are of no value to him. He is established in reality through realization of the fact that all these bodies will one day age, die, decompose and vanish. Only the soul remains, for the soul is nothing but the Almighty Lord and it is the only thing of substance. Hence he sees all living creatures and non-living things as an essential part of he himself in terms of the absolute reality of the soul.

This is the ultimate state that Brahmacharya finally leads to -- Self-realization. This is the correct reason why one must follow a life of Brahmacharya with God-meditation. This is the exact reason why self-realization is the highest and most superior of achievements of this human birth. There is nothing more that man needs to do after having reached this state. For the self-realized man the very purpose of the human existence is over and done with. He is freed forever from the cycles of births and deaths on earth and merges into union with the Almighty, residing forever in incomparable bliss.

Till such a state is reached, man cannot view another as the 'soul' in the true sense. There will always be some amount of bodily identification even in the very advanced Yogi who has not yet attained to self-realization. There will always be a chance that he views another as the body with a selfish motive and hence a chance for fall from his state of Brahmacharya. For this reason, a Brahmachari must maintain as little contact as possible with people in general and members of the opposite sex in particular.

The answer to the question posed has been extended and elaborated in detail with a view of enlightening readers about life, self-realization and the significance of Brahmacharya.

              ॐ तत् सत्
(That Supreme being is the absolute truth)