So can you elaborate on the spiritual mental effects of modesty and guarding the eye? Today many men and many younger men watch porn, spill seed in vain, have premarital sex, consume immodesty on their smart phone, are surrounded by sexually empowered sex positive immodest women, etc. Etc.

This is a crisis to a certain degree here in the USA TBH. A majority of all online dating, porn and immodesties concerning "immodesties" or "perversions" of the internet is consumed in the USA by a large margin.

How does this effect man and what is one to do today?

I am aware. You are asking quite a lot here. I'll try to deal with each issue 1 by 1.

About the spiritual mental effects: Masculinity is a person whose job, design and mission is to give. Femininity is a person whose job, design and mission is to receive what her man gives. This is a whole topic and I recommend watching this series to get the basics: youtube.com/…

The above sins you mention severely impair a man's ability to be a giver, and instead he becomes - not even a receiver - a needy taker. I recommend this shiur to elaborate further on this specific point, and you can try to find others he does to fill in gaps: youtube.com/…

About the numbing, it works a bit like this. As children, we start off very in touch with life. Everything is more exciting, more interesting, more hopeful, more wonderful, and indeed children in this respect are created as human beings are meant to be. Sin, especially this sin, ruins that fast. The way that works is as follows:

The sin does what all sin does and offers an immediate payoff, and then it doesn't provide that payoff as well as it used to, and instead dangles the just-out-of-reach perfect experience in front of a person to keep him pursuing that initial payoff. Over time, so slow he barely realises it, he actually loses 99% of the mental world of intimacy and sex. What I mean by that:

Firstly, he loses much of the pleasure. Secondly think about this. Before he pursued these sins, he did think about girls right? He thought about them in a much more innocent, proper way - remember children are created as the ideal in this area. When he was a child, whether conscious or less well formed (and each to their own), he was excited about the noble and holy aspects of intimacy, which we can discuss separately, but either way it was a certain, correct, and actually really beautiful...

...excitement. It was a hope and yearning for true love, true bonding, and true unreserved closeness with a beautiful precious girl, and a life spent with her doing every great thing under God's great light. As the person who performs this sin goes on, the gradually forget this image and ideal, this pleasure, the feeling of this yearning and hope.

A human being who is no longer in touch with his true self, his masculinity, and his yearning to give himself to his soul mate, and has even lost the pleasure allotted for this holy home, holy marriage, holy mitzva, is going to get cynical fast. Without knowing what's good about life, one way or another a person is going to start to grow disinterested with higher things like mission, purpose, goodness, the delights of holy, innocent life.

This person will also become afraid to get close to people, as they will no longer feel comfortable doing so. This is a bit harder to explain, but it's partly to do with shame, but it's also very much to do with trust. When one does things that are untrustworthy, it develops an equal measure of distrust in themselves of others. It can be subtle or overt, conscious or unconscious. It's like a brick wall around the heart, that denies it connection to others.

Kabbalistically all emotions are created for connection with others. Therefore their real and proper purpose, and thus their expression and feeling, is never present when we are doing something simply to satisfy ourself. With brick walls around our heart, we find it very hard to ever feel a real emotion.

Not feeling real emotions contributes to the cynicism and nothing is worse than cynicism. It's the worst enemy of goodness, truth and growth. It's an even worse enemy to having a real relationship. Combined with shame and distrust, this person will not be able to get close to anyone, will abhor it, and will therefore be forever feeling completely alone in the world. Marriage can't work under those circumstances. Intimacy can't work under those circumstances.

I think I have spelled out most of the damage and you can connect the dots for the rest.

There is also the aspect of how inappropriate, upsetting and shameful it is to do this in front of Hashem.

What to do about it depends on many things, but the main thing to do is to strive to start keeping the halachot of this as best one can. It can be VERY hard, so immediate progress is not realistic. But it IS possible for any person in the world to master this and never look at anything inappropriate deliberately and never let oneself indulge in fantasy or worse ever again. Learning Torah is the best cure.

Learn the halachot, and learn as much as you can about Hashem. He really absolutely needs you to not do it. It's not optional for Him. Your soul mate absolutely needs you to not do it too. Everyone should know this and be told this from a young age imo. How can good lovely young men like this generation ignore a need like that?

Also learning about Teshuva is very important. Doing Teshuva on this is vital and will help the process, and will also deepen as time goes on and success is made.

As for practical issues of how to date etc, that's a personal question that you should ask a Rabbi who knows you. Not something we can do on Mi Yodeya either way. Note: There's no need to ruin and upend your entire life based on anything I've said! Use your own brain, get guidance and see if you can figure out a solution to being as holy as you can in the world you are in, and only retract from areas of it that are safe and healthy to do so. Again, with guidance!

Trust in Hashem, ask Him for help, He will gladly do so.

I phrased this as addressed to anyone reading it. It wasn't specific to you and am not implying at all that you are asking about yourself, btw.

Thank you! Very well written and intuitive to my question. You have interesting knowledge I would associate with intuition. You should try to use chatGPT-4 in your endeavors for it can assist you in many ways. If I have any questions and if you're willing to answer I will ask you. Thank you for the sufficient response!

@naarter glad to hear. Could you elaborate on the chatGPT-4 usage point?