Marriage is a curse and a life-long imprisonment

Woman

Marriage is a curse and a life-long imprisonment. It is the greatest bondage. A bachelor, who is full of passion, imagines that he is miserable because he has no wife. The bachelor who was once free is now tied to the yoke of family and his hands and feet are chained. This is the experience of all married people. They weep after marriage. More beggars are brought forth into this world through lust. He who has understood the magnitude of human sufferings will not dare to bring forth a child.


Woman (wherever woman is represented from the view-point of man, with a view to induce Vairagya in him, the reader will do well to remember that a similar representation of man from the view-point of woman is implied therein) is the source of constant vexation and sorrow and is the greatest bondage. One cannot sacrifice a noble and sublime ideal, Self-Realization, for the sake of pleasing a bewitching woman.


Wife is only a luxury. It is not an absolute necessity. Every householder weeps after marriage. He says : "My son is ailing from typhoid. My second daughter is to be married. I have debts to clear. My wife is worrying me to purchase for her a gold necklace. My eldest son-in-law died recently." Indeed such miseries are not uncommon to all.


Wife is a sharp knife to cut the life of the husband, and vice versa. Anasuya and Savitri are very, very rare. If the gold necklace and Benares silk saries are not supplied, at the proper time, the wife frowns at the husband. The husband cannot get his food at the proper time. The wife lies down in the bed under pretext of acute abdominal colic. You can see for yourself this pitious spectacle in your own house or in the house of your friend and in daily experience. Indeed I need not tell you much. Therefore be wedded to Santi and have Vairagya, the worthy son and Viveka the magnanimous daughter. Eat the delicious fruit of Atma Jnana which can make you immortal.


When your wife is young and beautiful, you admire her curly hair, rosy cheeks, fine nose, shining skin and silvery teeth. When she loses her beauty on account of some chronic incurable malady, you have no attraction for her. You marry a second wife. Had you loved your first wife with Atma Bhav, had you a comprehensive understanding that the Self in you and in your wife is the same, your love for her would have been pure, unselfish, lasting, undecaying and unchanging. 

Just as you love old sugar candy or old rice the more, so also you would love your wife more and more, even when she becomes old, as you have Atma-Bhav through Jnana. Jnana will only intensify Prem and make it lasting.

He who is attached to his wife, children and wealth., will not derive even an iota of benefit in the spiritual path. By indiscriminate clinging to wife, children, house, wealth and objects, you have forgotten your essential divine nature. Even the old needles without eyes will not follow you, when you die. Only your actions, good and bad, will follow you. And God will judge you according to your motives and deeds.


A passionate bachelor is ever thinking "When can I live with my young wife?" A dispassionate householder in whom Viveka has dawned is ever thinking: "When can I disentangle myself from the clutches of my wife and retire into the forests for contemplation on Atma?" The mind alone is the cause of bondage and freedom. Kill this mind and rest in the Atman.


You have become the sporting lap-dog of the caprice of woman. You have become a slave of countless desires, emotions and passions. When are you going to rise up from this miserable state? In the Yoga Vasishtha you will find: "Those persons, in spite of the knowledge of the non-existence of happiness both in the past and the present in the baneful objects of the world, do yet entangle themselves in them with their thoughts clinging to them, deserve the appellation of an ass, if not a worse one."


Human love is all hollow. It is mere animal attraction. It is passion only. It is carnal love. It is selfish love. It is ever-changing. It is all hypocrisy and sheer show. The wife does not care for her husband, if he happens to be on the roll of- unemployment. The husband dislikes his wife, when she loses her beauty on account of some chronic disease. Dear man, you can find real, lasting love in God and God alone. His Love knows no change.


Remembrance or image of a woman disturbs the mind. Lust is very powerful. It carries a flowery bow equipped with five soft arrows, viz., mohana, stambhana, unmadana, soshana and tapana(fascination, stupefaction, maddening, emaciation and inflaming). Viveka, Vichara, devotion and contemplation will eradicate this dire malady. If lust is conquered, anger, greed, etc., which are all auxiliary weapons, will become ineffective. Love's principal weapon is woman. If this is destroyed, its followers or retinue can be quite easily conquered. If the commander is killed, then it becomes easy to conquer the soldiers. Conquer passion first. It will then be easy to subdue anger, who is only one of his followers.


When a tiger has once tasted human blood, it always runs after human beings. It becomes a man-eater. Even so, when the mind has once tasted the sexual pleasure, it always runs after that pleasure. It is through constant Vichara and Brahma-Bhavana that the mind has to be weaned out from lustful thoughts and tendencies. Make the mind understand by repeated auto-suggestions and hammering that sexual pleasure is false, worthless, illusory and full of pains. Place before the mind the advantages of a life in the Atman-bliss, power, and knowledge. Make it understand fully that the exalted, eternal life is in the immortal Atma, not certainly in sensual pleasures. When it hears constantly these suggestions, it will slowly leave off its old habits.


In the Bhagavad Gita you will find "Humility, unpretentiousness, harmlessness, forgiveness, rectitude, service of the teacher, purity, steadfastness, self-control, dispassion towards the objects of the senses, and also absence of egoism, insight into the pain and evil of birth, death, old age and sickness, unattachment, absence of self-identification with son, wife, or home, and constant balance of mind in wished-for and unwished-for events, unflinching devotion to Me by Yoga, without other objects, resort to sequestered places, absence of enjoyment in the company of men, constancy in the wisdom of the Self, understanding of the object of essential wisdom; that is declared to be the Wisdom; all against it is ignorance (Ch. XIII-8-12).


"Demoniacal men know neither right energy, nor right abstinence; nor purity, nor even propriety, nor truth is in them." "The whole universe is without truth, without basis," they say, "without a God; brought about by mutual union, and caused by lust and nothing else." Holding this view these ruined selves of small understanding, of fierce deeds, come forth as enemies for the destruction of the world surrendering themselves to insatiable desires, possessed with vanity, conceit and arrogance, holding evil ideas through delusion, they engage in action with impure resolves. Giving themselves over to unmeasured thought whose end is death, regarding the gratification of desires as the highest, feeling sure that this is all, held in bondage by a hundred ties of expectation, given over to lust and anger, they strive to obtain by unlawful means hoards of wealth for sensual enjoyments"(Ch. XVI-7-12).


In the Vishnupurana, it is said: "If the deluded fool loves the body, a mere collection of flesh, blood, pus, feces, urine, muscles, fat and bones, he will verily love hell itself! To him who is not disgusted with the nasty smell from his own body, what other argument need be adduced for detachment?"


Sage Vasishtha says to Sri Rama "What is there of an auspicious nature in the cage like automation of a woman-a veritable doll of flesh, joined with knots made of muscles and bones? Scrutinize her eyes closely and see, after an analysis, if there is, after all, anything charmingly beautiful about the membraneous sheaths muscles, blood and tears composing them. Why, then, are you enamoured of them in vain? Her breast, whereon the movements, hither and thither, of the pearl necklace, are comparable, in point of elegance, to the swift waters of the Ganga rolling down the summits of mount Meru, the self-same breast, of a damsel is, however, voraciously devoured, when occasion arises, by dogs, on the cremation ground situated in some out-of-the-way spots, even like a small ball of rice. 

Wearing the soot-like locks of hair and therefore best left untouched, though attractive to the eye, women, who are the veriest flame of the fire of sin, consume men like so much straw. It is women who, though appearing all juicy and green, are verily devoid of grace and who, by their attractive looks, allure men to their destruction and feed the fires of hell raging on a far off region. They are verily traps laid by the bird catcher Cupid, to catch his bevy of birds, viz., unsophisticated men. Woman is the treacherous bait, attached to the line of impure latent desires, to catch men, who are, so to say, so many fish in the pond of birth and death, wallowing in the mire of the mind. Enough with woman-the treasure chest, wherein the serene gems of the deadliest sins are kept and the endless chain of torturing misery. Made up of flesh here, blood there and bones in a third place, this female form, O Brahman! After all disintegrates in a few days. He feels the desire for intercourse, who has a woman about him. Where is the scope for such enjoyment to the womanless? Abandon her and you abandon the whole world; by abandoning the whole world, you find Supreme Bliss." *