See love in the expression of emotions – and in the concealing of emotions too

Relationships frequently become dry or even break down because people don’t express the affection they have for each other. As finite beings, we can’t read others’ minds. So only when our loved ones express their feelings for us do we feel reassured that our feelings are reciprocated.

But expressing emotions is not the only way to show love. Sometimes, love may be shown best by concealing emotions. If a child is going to a distant land for higher studies, the mother may feel overwhelmed by anxiety. Yet she may conceal her tears so that her child has a happy last memory of a proud parent offering good wishes and blessings.

The essence of love is not emotions, but purpose: the purpose of doing the best for our loved ones. Such a purpose-centered understanding of love illumines the Bhagavad-gita’s exhortation (12.17) to stay equipoised amidst happiness and distress, which may seem like a call for unemotionality. Paradoxically, this same verse states that such equipoise among devotees endears them to Krishna.

Why does unemotionality please Krishna? Because it helps us focus on him. Presently, because we are materially attached, most of our emotions are about temporary material things, and when we let such emotions carry us away, we lose sight of our long-term spiritual good.

In bhakti-yoga, we demonstrate our love for Krishna by both expressing appropriate spiritual emotions whenever we feel them and subordinating those emotions that obstruct our spiritual purpose. For example, on a holy fasting day, we may not like to fast. But instead of spending the whole day with a sullen face, we strive, as an austerity, to absorb ourselves in serving Krishna as cheerfully as possible.

When we cultivate such absorption by concealing inappropriate emotions, we become purified and gradually relish constant spiritual emotions.

Devotion makes the mind’s power our power

Our mind is phenomenally powerful. Within a fraction of a moment, it can take our thoughts from one end of the world to another.

Unfortunately, this phenomenal power is often directed against us, especially against our long-term interests. Being attached to quick pleasures, the mind often impels us to act self-destructively in pursuing such pleasures.

Moreover, when we seek anything worthwhile, especially anything spiritually worthwhile, that requires long-term commitment, we find ourselves pitted against our mind. By sheer determination we may fight the mind for some time, but it can in one moment of delusion overpower us. The Bhagavad-gita (06.06) cautions that the uncontrolled mind is our enemy.

Significantly, the same verse also reassures that, when controlled, the mind can become our friend. The best way to control the mind is to connect with a power greater than the mind’s – the supreme power of Krishna. And the best way to connect with Krishna is by practicing bhakti-yoga. This time-honored process redirects our love from this world to him, thus enabling us to relish higher satisfaction in his remembrance.

Initially the mind resists vehemently our attempts to focus on Krishna because it fears losing opportunities for worldly pleasures. But if we persevere in our bhakti practice, it gradually recognizes that Krishna offers far better happiness than any of the worldly things it craves for.

Even in our present conditioned stage, we can find some things in bhakti that attract us. This intersection zone between devotional activity and mental congeniality can become our beachhead in tapping the mind’s power for our devotional purpose.

Once the mind accepts that Krishna offers the highest happiness, then far from distracting us from him, it starts reminding us of him when the world distracts us. Thus, when we access Krishna’s sweetness through devotion, the mind’s power becomes our power.

The obligation to endure gives us the right to know

Death is the most covered-up reality in our contemporary world. Of course, what is covered up is not the fact of death per se, but the implication of that fact on where we should invest our life-energies.

If a bank were collapsing, we would expect our financial advisors to caution us about investing in it. But if none of them sounded such a cautionary note, their silence would be scandalous.

Similarly, given the body’s inescapable mortality, it’s scandalous that most of today’s opinion leaders don’t caution us about investing our life-energies in the body. It reeks of a colossal cover-up that hardly anyone advises us against making temporary worldly things the definers of success.

Spiritual guides who blow the whistle on this cover-up are often silenced with the reproach: “Don’t be a pessimist; for your own good, don’t think too much about this.” But that’s like a bank telling us to “for your own good, don’t read about the bank’s financial prognosis.” The obligation to endure the consequences gives us the right to know those consequences – and the right to explore alternative choices.

In this spirit of honoring our right to know, the Bhagavad-gita (13.09) states that contemplating the misery of death – and before it, old age and disease – comprises one of the twenty items of knowledge. That list (13.08-12) concludes with the primacy of eternal spiritual knowledge and the necessity of the metaphysical search for the truth.

When we contemplate the ramifications of our mortality, we become more open to learning from spiritual wisdom-literature such as the Gita that inform us about our immortal essence: the soul. And when, guided by the Gita, we learn to love Krishna by practicing bhakti-yoga, our investment of our life-energies yields auspicious returns, both in this mortal world and in Krishna’s immortal world.

Let God be the center and the circumference of your life

To live a life of bhakti is often conceived in terms of living a life centered on God. That is certainly true.

The Bhagavad-gita (12.19) indicates that for exalted devotees, Krishna is the home for their consciousness – he is the center of their inner world, the point to which they return and the point around which they orbit. Just as, say, one celestial object orbits around another – making that object the center of its orbit, so too do we need to make God the center of our life.

Everything we do, we connect with Krishna and we strive to come closer to Krishna.

Additionally, we need to make Krishna the circumference of our life too, That means that we don’t let our life cross the boundaries that Krishna sets. Of course, just as different circles can have different circumferences, so too can different people have different levels of capacities to connect with Krishna.

In the Gita’s twelfth chapter, over a set of five verses (12.08-12), Krishna outlines various circles at which we can practice bhakti, staying connected with him at different levels.

If we claim that our life is centered on Krishna, but if we don’t have him as our circumference, then that centering will largely remain a matter of illusion.

Love always brings with it bonds and boundaries. When we love someone, we choose to do the things that please our beloved and we avoid the things that displease our beloved.

The same principle applies to our aspiration to love Krishna too. If our claim to love him is genuine, then we need to work at regulating our life according to his guidelines.

The more our life is centered on Krishna, the more we will be able to expand the circumference for taking Krishna’s message to others. But before we can consider extending Krishna’s grace to others, we need to first ensure that we ourselves are well connected with Krishna. That requires learning to live within the circumference of Krishna’s guidelines.

Give the world your attention, but don’t give it monopoly over your attention

“Don’t miss the forest for the trees” is a saying that conveys how we may get so caught in the details of things that we forget their purpose, that we may let small things consume us so much that we forget far bigger things.

When we understand our spiritual identity – when we understand that we are at our core, souls, who are parts of Krishna – then our vision rises beyond this world to Krishna. He becomes the object of our love, the purpose of our life, the objective we wish to achieve through whatever we do.

The Bhagavad-gita (18.46) urges us to spiritualize our work by doing it in the mood of worship for him who is the source of the world and who pervades the world.

Paradoxically, when we give too much attention to the world, we are often unable to to give proper attention to it. That is, when we let ourselves be consumed by the world’s inevitable ups and downs, we make it impossible for ourselves to deal with those issues properly. If we are emotionally consumed by those ups and downs, then our destabilized emotions often prevent us from responding intelligently.

When we think about Krishna and how best we can serve him, when our vision is thus fixed on the one who is the Lord of the world, we become emotionally sheltered in him and then when our emotions are engaged in this world, we can be engaged without becoming encaged

By cultivating a spiritual cyclic routine of engagement and withdrawal, we candy our best serve in the world while also staying fixed in our ultimate goal beyond this world.

Perhaps the fastest way to harm the world is to not see beyond the world – the world in and of itself being filled with temporary things can never satisfy fully our longing for happiness. And letting it monopolize our attention and aspiration means to ensure that we sentence ourselves to dissatisfaction and destructive competition with others who imagine that their pleasure too depends on similar this-worldly gratification.

Don’t care so much for desire that it doesn’t care for the desirer

The great irony, tragedy and atrocity of desire is that it no longer pays heed to the desirer. Just as a person who rides on a horse and then the horse goes wild, when we ride on the horse of desire, desire grows wild and doesn’t care for what we desire thereafter.

Thus, for example, surveys show that many people who crave for sex throughout the day often are bored when they actually have sex. Or people who are compulsively eaters often don’t even really like the things that they eat. Just as any horse-rider knows that the horse can be a source of pleasure as well as a source of disaster, even death, so too do we need to remind ourselves that desire is not always a source of pleasure – it can a source of utter disaster too.

Unfortunately, we live in a culture that glamorizes desire and blinds us to the dangers of desire that spirals out of control.

Of course, our desire is not something external to us like a horse is. Yet our desire is external to us in that it is present in our mind which is external to us as souls.

The Bhagavad-gita (16.10) warns that desire that is insatiable binds us to unclean actions – in fact, we get bound by our own vows, our own crazy resolutions to indulge in ways that are often self-destructive.

When we start practicing bhakti-yoga, we realize that we can find higher happiness in the devotional remembrance of Krishna. Such remembrance is akin to a regulation and redirection of the horse – away from danger and toward a safe home, wherein our desire takes us towards spiritual growth and ultimately liberation. Thus, the Gita focuses on purification of desire – with the need for such purification coming from the recognition of the dangerousness of addictive desire

Bhakti is not just a choice of the head – it is also the calling of the heart

Suppose we are driving to some destination and come to a fork. If we are unsure about which way to go, we will move slowly or not move at all. But even if we are sure, that conviction alone will not take us ahead – we need to drive ahead.

A similar dynamic applies to our spiritual practice. Spiritual growth is essentially a journey of the heart from worldly objects to Krishna. Such a journey requires philosophical conviction. When we have to choose between some worldly object and Krishna, we may feel indecisive. The Bhagavad-gita is like a map, a guidebook to happiness. By studying it, we understand that Krishna is the source of everything (10.08) – thus, he is the source of the attractiveness of all worldly objects, including the one that is presently attracting us (10.41). So, by becoming devoted to him, we won’t lose the pleasure coming from that object; we will access the source of that pleasure and relish joy in its fullness.

When we thus understand Krishna’s all-attractiveness, we feel convinced to choose him. But that conviction alone doesn’t take us to him – it aids us in redirecting our heart towards him and cultivating attraction for him. By practicing bhakti-yoga and investing whatever devotional emotion we have in Krishna, we gradually sense his reciprocation in the form of satisfaction and purification. This inspires us to further invest our emotion in him, thereby relishing his greater reciprocation.

The resulting redirection of heart culminates in life’s ultimate perfection: the ecstasy of endless love. Progress towards this perfection is facilitated by the choice of the head, but is executed by the calling of the heart, the calling that unites the human heart with the divine heart in a bond of eternal love.

To be awake is to be aware of our wake

Suppose a person is sleepwalking. They flail their arms and hit a loved one – something they would never do when they were awake. Being asleep, they are not aware of their wake.

When a ship moves through a sea, the trail of disturbed water it leaves behind is called its wake. During our life-journey, we too leave behind a wake – the consequence of our existence and actions. Sometimes, we get so caught in rushing to our destination as to be oblivious to the wake of distress and devastation that we leave behind.

Such obliviousness characterizes

much of modern society with its pursuit of financial growth through the exploitation of natural resources. While environmental exploitation can have many specific causes, it has a universal underlying cause: our spiritual somnolence.

The Bhagavad-gita explains that we are spiritual beings who are presently in a slumber. This dormancy is induced primarily by our infatuation with matter and material pleasure. The Gita (13.22) indicates that our craving to enjoy matter leads to good and bad in life. Our material existence is like a dream.

When we start practicing yoga, especially bhakti-yoga, we start waking up spiritually. One consequence of our spiritual awakening is that we become aware of our wake – we understand the kind of actions we are doing, the kind of ramifications those actions have on others and on the environment, and the kind of karmic consequences we will get for those actions.

Just as an awakened person doesn’t go about hitting people needlessly, similarly, when spiritually awakened, we don’t go about unwittingly hurting other living beings, the environment and our own spiritual essence. Instead, we act constructively, thereby contributing to the solution.

Thus, by striving for spiritual awakening, we attain not just ultimate liberation, but also a more harmonious life in this world.

Count your blessings – and your toes too

When multiple problems threaten us, we may feel overwhelmed by negative emotions such as self-pity, pessimism and paranoia. Our mind frets about everything that’s gone wrong and everything that may go wrong – and overlooks the many things right in our life.

To correct our imbalanced vision, we need to count our blessings. When we focus on enumerating and elaborating the things right in our life, we start feeling more secure and positive.

At the same time, counting our blessings isn’t meant to be an exercise in utopian fantasizing, where we overlook real dangers and neglect real solutions. If we walk starry-eyed on a crowded road and don’t notice that a heavy person is about to tread on us, our toes will be the casualties. While counting our blessings, we shouldn’t forget to count our toes.

Counting our blessings doesn’t mean closing our eyes to problems – it means opening our eyes to realities bigger than the problems. When guided by spiritual wisdom, counting our blessings raises our vision to the highest reality, Krishna, our greatest well-wisher and ever-present indwelling guide. Meditating on him helps us realize our spiritual connectedness with the omnipotent Supreme. This realization animates us with feelings of security and positivity. We can channel the resulting surge of energy for practical problem solving.

The Gita (08.07) urges Arjuna to constantly think of Krishna. If we cultivate similar disciplined contemplation, we are reminded regularly of our greatest blessing: Krishna’s eternal love for us. Significantly, the same verse also asks Arjuna to fight, thus practically countering the miscreants threatening dharma. According to our vocation and position, we too can tangibly tackle problems.

When we thus learn to count our blessings and our toes, we can become internally and externally resourceful in focusing on the best in life and bringing out our best into life.

Some of us may lament that we are not fluent in speaking.

By training and practice, we all can improve our speaking ability. Even if it’s true that everyone can’t become an eloquent speaker, there’s one aspect of speaking well that we all can develop: learning when not to speak. And this is no small ability – even the fluent sometimes lack it. People whose words flow easily may well be especially vulnerable to the temptation of speaking too much, thereby spilling confidences or courting controversies. The media regularly reports motormouths whose loose speaking earns them censure, even condemnation.

Pertinently, the Bhagavad-gita (17.15) outlines austerity of speech: it declares that we should speak in a way that is non-agitating, pleasing, truthful and beneficial. This implies that we shouldn’t speak in agitating, hurting, untruthful and harmful ways. Life periodically presents us with temptations to speak in these negative ways by, say, backbiting, taunting or gossiping. Amidst such situations, the ability to zip our lips can keep us out of trouble. Moreover, when people see that we keep others’ confidences and avoid slurring their reputation, they will infer that we will do the same for them too. Restraint in speech may not earn applauses, as might fluent speech. But it can earn something much more precious and elusive: trust.

And hearteningly, we all can develop such restraint. The same Gita verse urges us to recite scripture regularly. By such recitation, we come in contact with the all-pure, all-potent supreme, Krishna. And by that divine contact, we get the purity and potency to restrain ourselves.

Rather than lamenting about the fluency we don’t have, we can instead strive to gain the restraint we can have. By such positive proactive purposefulness, we all can learn to tap the power of our speech more effectively.

Build roads, not roadblocks

Suppose someone had to go to a place that wasn’t accessible by road. We would expect them to clear a path to get there. If they started making roadblocks instead, we would consider that odd, if not crazy.

Unfortunately, that’s what we do in our mental world when faced with any challenge, say, leading a principle-centered life by resisting temptations. Our mind springs into action, imagining the many problems that may come up and painting them in their scariest dimensions. Disheartened by the fear of unmanageable problems, we feel like giving up even before we start. Thus, we end up building roadblocks.

What makes us sabotage ourselves like this? Our mind. The Bhagavad-gita (06.05) explains that our mind can be both our enemy and our friend – so, we need to carefully use it for raising ourselves, not carelessly let it degrade ourselves. To raise ourselves means, metaphorically speaking, to build roads. We need to envision pathways to rise from where we are to where we aspire to be.

Certainly, we need to consider probable problems and prepare to deal with them. But such preparation is best done with the thoughtfulness of the intelligence, not the restlessness and fearfulness of the mind. The mind doesn’t just magnify probable problems – it also imagines improbable problems. When the mind dominates us, we can’t foresee and prepare; we simply fret and mope.

Spiritual practices such as scriptural study and meditation alert us to the mind’s shenanigans. By such alertness, we can catch the mind when it starts acting up and stop it from building roadblocks.

Further, spiritual practices sharpen our intelligence. With a perceptive intelligence, we can build roads, that is, make tangible plans for tackling realistic problems.

By thus subordinating the mind to the intelligence, we can increasingly bring out the best within us, thereby fulfilling our God-given potential.

Fire-sacrifice is literal, metaphorical and transformational

The Gita talks repeatedly about yajna, sacrifices wherein oblations are offered to the sacred fire. We may wonder, “Does it recommend this activity literally or metaphorically?”

Actually, it does both. The principle of offering is universal, being woven into the very fabric of existence. It is manifest not just in spiritual life but also in secular life. Parents offer necessities and comforts to their children; soldiers offer salutes to their commander; citizens offer taxes to their government.

The Gita reveals the universe to be a universal government, wherein the ritual of fire-sacrifice taps into the interconnectedness of the various levels of the cosmos. The sacred fire, invoked through special chants during fire-sacrifices, acts as a conduit for transporting our offerings to the gods who reside at higher cosmic levels. Thus, fire-sacrifice is a literal activity.

But today’s humans can’t perform competently all the minutiae associated with sacrifice, especially the precise intonation of mantras. So, literal fire-sacrifices aren’t recommended today as the primary mode of offering.

Nonetheless, the metaphorical principle underlying sacrifice – of offering something dear to someone dear – still holds true. The Gita (04.25-29) itself underscores this broadened vision of sacrifice when it deems as forms of sacrifice a wide variety of activities such as breathing exercises, charity, scriptural study and fasting. The Gita (04.30) concludes its expansive explanation by stressing the transformational potency of sacrifice: its performers become purified and progress towards destination eternity.

Today, the best way to perform sacrifice is through mantra meditation, which the Gita (10.25) deems a prominent manifestation of sacrifice. Therein, we offer our most innate energy, our consciousness, to the Absolute Truth, Krishna, who manifests in his eminently accessible form as transcendental sound vibration. By becoming purified and transformed through the sacrifice of chanting, we can connect with the highest reality and relish life’s supreme fulfillment.

Bhakti has to be a choice before it can become a calling

Some people say, “I will become devoted to God when I feel his call from within.”

The problem with such thinking is that we are unlikely to feel God’s call in a sustainable or transformational way. At present, we all are attached to material things. So, though we may feel a sweet devotional pull towards God, that feeling doesn’t usually last for long because our attachments soon resurface and drag our consciousness towards worldly objects.

Even if we somehow feel a stronger call in future, still our deep-rooted attachments won’t let that call stay – they will pull us forcefully, thereby weakening the pull of the divine call. So, we will still have to determinedly choose Krishna instead of worldly objects, even when we don’t feel called towards him. If we have to choose him then, why not choose him now?

True, great saints have often felt Krishna’s overwhelming call. But frequently they have practiced devotion earlier, in that life or a previous life. While outlining the various stages at which bhakti can be practiced (12.08-12), the Bhagavad-gita (12.08) states that feeling called towards Krishna, with mind and intelligence gravitating towards him, is the highest stage. If we are not at that state, the Gita doesn’t advocate waiting passively for some unpredictable call. Instead, it (12.09) recommends that we strive to practice bhakti at a lower level: choosing to conscientiously fix our mind on Krishna, even when we don’t feel naturally attracted to him. By thus diligently choosing Krishna instead of worldly objects, we will become purified and find absorption in him increasingly relishable. As our attraction to him increases, he will eventually become our spiritual calling, and we will become absorbed in him.

To fight for what is right is right

The world today is haunted by the specter of terrorism, which rationalizes itself based on a religious book. Coming from this context, we may feel uneasy on finding that another religious book, the Bhagavad-gita, has a battlefield setting. Further, when we find that, in the Gita (02.03), Krishna disapproves of Arjuna’s pacifism and asks him to fight, our unease may exacerbate to alarm.

To properly understand Krishna’s call, we need to see it in its own context. The Mahabharata, the epic of which the Gita is a part, describes elaborately the outrageous atrocities that the vicious Kauravas had inflicted on the virtuous and peace-seeking Pandavas. Exhibiting remarkable forbearance, the Pandavas had offered the Kauravas peace on the most accommodating of terms. But the arrogant Kauravas had derisively rejected their offer, thereby leaving them no option except to fight. The Pandavas fought not just for their own right to serve as the martial guardians of society but also for their citizens’ right to have a virtuous socio-political environment conducive for all-round growth.

The Gita doesn’t endorse becoming a peacenik, wherein passivity distorts noble pacifism into ignoble impotency. When dealing with incorrigible offenders, it doesn’t naively rule out assertive action, including violence. Aptly therefore, Krishna chides Arjuna by declaring his reluctance to fight to be not ennobling, but degrading; not born of compassion, but born of confusion; not progressive for society and spirituality, but regressive for both. Indeed, the only right course of action for Arjuna was to fight.

The Pandavas’ thoughtful assertiveness against malevolent power-grabbers differs entirely from terrorist attacks on the defenseless and blameless. In fact, the mature consideration of one’s options that the Gita demonstrates comprises a model for unsentimental spiritual cogitation. Such cogitation is vital today for countering both the ignorance that breeds terrorism and the impotence that feeds it.

We don’t breathe twice in the same body

We frequently misidentify with our body. However, Gita wisdom explains that not only are we not our body, but the thing we call our body is not a steady thing across time.

The Bhagavad-gita (08.04) asserts that the whole material manifestation, of which our body is a part, is characterized by change. Indeed, the only thing constant in this world is change. This change may be subtle, but it is inexorable. So inexorable, in fact, is the body’s change that we don’t breathe twice in the same body – it changes in the infinitesimal period from one breath to the next.

Science too confirms that our body is in constant flux. Old cells are dying, new cells are being born, and the remaining cells are moving through various stages in the journey from creation to destruction. So, from every moment to the next moment, our body is changing.

As our body is our essential vehicle for functioning in this world, processing the reality that it is so unstable can be disorienting. When we eventually digest how changeable and changing our body is, we get the cerebral jolt necessary to decrease our infatuation with it and the pleasures it promises. The resulting detachment can make us more open to exploring life’s spiritual frontier.

The Gita, a time-honored guide for spiritual explorers, reorients us by introducing us to a higher reality: No matter how many things change, one thing never changes – Krishna always loves us. He is always waiting for us in our own hearts. And we can experience his presence by practicing bhakti-yoga. This time-honored process redirects our heart from matter to Krishna, thereby delivering tangible, transformational experiences of spiritual love.

When we use our ephemeral body to access Krishna’s eternal love, we can relish security and serenity even in this ever-changing world.