When we strive to live according to some elevated
principles, there results an inevitable tension between our precepts and our
practices. The level that we live at rarely rises to the level we espouse and
expound. The tension between the two can spur us to raise ourselves up, to
start striving strenuously to practice what we preach. Even if we are unable to
do so, just the sincere aspiration will keep us on the path to
self-improvement. Unfortunately, we may succumb to the mind’s trap of
compartmentalization. That is, the mind may compartmentalize our public
comportment and our personal conduct into two water-proof compartments, where one
has no bearing on the other. The mind makes us believe that as long as we can
maintain the facade of being priniciple-centered , it doesn’t matter if we in
our private life are actually pleasure-centered, not principle-centered. The
Bhagavad-gita (03.06) cautions about such a disjoint when it reproaches those
who put on the garb of renunciates but internally contemplate on sense objects.
Interestingly, the Gita refers to such people as not just hypocrites, but also
as self-deceivers. They may or may not fool others, but they are fooling
themselves. By imagining that they can get away with just the facade, they are
depriving themselves of the substance of spirituality – the sublime
satisfaction that comes by being able to steadily absorb oneself in the remembrance
of Krishna, who is the source of all happiness. In today’s cultural ethos, such
compartmentalization has become accepted as a routine fact of life. If the
President keeps the economy on the growth track, what scandalous affairs he has
in his person life is his own business – so goes the mind’s deceptive mantra, a
mantra that the mainstream media has adopted as its own. Amidst such a cultural
setting, we need to know that the process of bhakti is choked by the mind’s
compartmentalization approach. Krishna needs to permeate and conquer our entire
being – external and internal, in fact, the internal is more important than the
external. By seeing the mind’s compartmentalization mechanism as
self-deception, we can reject it and progress towards self-realization and
devotional culmination the supreme satisfaction of pure love.
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