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.