Ravi Gupta
WE WERE DEPRESSED, and they gave us Prozac. We began losing our hair, and they gave us Rogaine. Now we lose our vigor, and they give us Viagra. Life is a great chemical pill.
Viagra's all over the place newspaper headlines, the evening news, doctors' offices, medicine cabinets.
A quote from a story in the Idaho Statesman proclaimed, "Doctors nationally have written 120,000 prescriptions for Viagra the first week of its release, [and it] is being touted as the most revolutionary medicine to hit the market since the birth control pill."
Revolutionary for what? Now every man can take the pill to renew his virility. Fifty-, sixty-, seventy-, eighty-year-old men become young once again.
But the Vedic scriptures give us a different perspective. Life is not meant just for revitalizing the body. There is a time for everything, and the Vedas lay this out very clearly.
Srimad-Bhagavatam, the ripened fruit of the Vedic scriptures, divides life into four stages brahmacarya, grhastha, vanaprastha, and sannyasa each twenty-five years long.
The first quarter is spent as a student, studying under the guru, or spiritual master. This is a time of celibacy, character building, and intense spiritual training.
After graduating from gurukula "the house of the guru" the student may go on to married life, taking the spiritual values he has learned to maintain a God-centered family.
At the age of fifty, the Vedas say, the husband and wife should retire from active family life, leaving their grown children to care for themselves. The couple should focus their lives again on the true purposes of human life and slowly reduce the tie of affection.
In this way, at the age of seventy-five they should completely dedicate themselves to worshiping the Lord and prepare for the final test.
According to the Vedas, the point of life is not to push one's sense gratification to the furthest limits, to find newer and newer means of beautifying, strengthening, and pampering the body until it finally collapses. Such a life ethic is described in the Bhagavad-gita as demoniac:
"They believe that to gratify the senses is the prime necessity of human civilization. Thus until the end of life their anxiety is immeasurable. They are bound by a network of hundreds of thousands of desires and absorbed in lust and anger."
Srila Prabhupada explains: "The materialists, who have no concept of God, think that they are advancing. They try to enjoy this material world to the utmost limit and therefore always engage in inventing something for sense gratification."
The Gita describes this world as changing and temporary. After all, how long can we keep our hairline intact? How long will the boost of Viagra last?
The real search in life, the Gita says, should be to answer the questions that are truly vital to human life: Who am I? What am I doing here? Why am I suffering? How do I achieve supreme happiness?
Without asking these questions, we are no better than a royal edition of animals.
After all, wouldn't a chimpanzee love to have Viagra?