If Krishna is not our goal, we hit self-goals

All of us want to achieve success and happiness. But just the desire or even the ability to succeed is not enough – we need to have the knowledge to transform that desire and ability into success.

Suppose a football player has strong skillful feet to hit goals. But if that player shoots the football into one’s own goal, then all the ability ends up not helping but hurting the player and the team too. We might consider it absurd that a player may not have the basic knowledge to know which goal to target and would consider a self-goal to be an accident.

Unfortunately, we all end up scoring such self-goals when we don’t have a spiritual conception of life and don’t make the supreme spiritual reality Krishna our goal. How? By letting our desires and abilities be captivated by worldly things – a captivation that only increases our illusion, bondage and misery. The Bhagavad-gita (06.05) cautions us that presently our mind is our enemy. From within us, it prompts us to act against our best interests by making us infatuated with the temporary instead of the eternal, with the material instead of the spiritual, with the world instead of the source and Lord of the world, Krishna.That is, it makes us score self-goals.

To stop scoring such self-goals, we need to make Krishna our goal. How do we do that? By firstly striving to increase our devotion to him by practicing diligently the rules of sadhana-bhakti and by secondly doing all our activities in the mood of an offering of love to him.

When our consciousness is connected with him through intention and action, we get a higher satisfaction that increases our immunity to the mind’s self-sabotaging suggestions, thereby protecting us from scoring self-goals.