Chaitanya Charan Das Based on Bhagavad Gita Chapter 15

Many people want God to give them a special signal for commencing their spiritual life: “When God calls me, I will begin.”

However, such an attitude is based on a fundamental misconception about the nature of our relationship with God. We are not meant to wait for him – we are meant to wait on him. Significantly, waiting on him is not degrading; it is fulfilling. It is the culmination of our innate longing to love. Just as we care for a loved one, we learn to care for Krishna. When we are intensely in love with someone, we eagerly and actively seek an opportunity to do something for that person – we don’t wait passively and apathetically till that person has to tell us what needs to be done.

The Bhagavad-gita (15.07) states that we are Krishna’s parts, implying that we can be truly happy only when we live in loving harmony with him. The same verse states that souls in material existence struggle with the six senses that include the mind. The point of the verse is that those who don’t wait on Krishna have to wait on their senses. When we don’t lovingly connect with him, we have no access to any higher spiritual happiness. So our innate need for happiness makes us look for it at the material level, where our senses allure us with promises of pleasure. Being beguiled by those promises, we end up waiting on our senses, running around at their beck and call, trying to gratify their demands, which are often untimely, unreasonable and unending.

If we reflect calmly using scriptural wisdom on our present plight of slavish submission to our senses, we will realize that the scriptural expose of our plight is a more than an adequate divine signal for turning towards Krishna immediately.

Many people want God to give them a special signal for commencing their spiritual life: “When God calls me, I will begin.”

However, such an attitude is based on a fundamental misconception about the nature of our relationship with God. We are not meant to wait for him – we are meant to wait on him. Significantly, waiting on him is not degrading; it is fulfilling. It is the culmination of our innate longing to love. Just as we care for a loved one, we learn to care for Krishna. When we are intensely in love with someone, we eagerly and actively seek an opportunity to do something for that person – we don’t wait passively and apathetically till that person has to tell us what needs to be done.

The Bhagavad-gita (15.07) states that we are Krishna’s parts, implying that we can be truly happy only when we live in loving harmony with him. The same verse states that souls in material existence struggle with the six senses that include the mind. The point of the verse is that those who don’t wait on Krishna have to wait on their senses. When we don’t lovingly connect with him, we have no access to any higher spiritual happiness. So our innate need for happiness makes us look for it at the material level, where our senses allure us with promises of pleasure. Being beguiled by those promises, we end up waiting on our senses, running around at their beck and call, trying to gratify their demands, which are often untimely, unreasonable and unending.

If we reflect calmly using scriptural wisdom on our present plight of slavish submission to our senses, we will realize that the scriptural expose of our plight is a more than an adequate divine signal for turning towards Krishna immediately.