Websites from the ISKCON Universe
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[Talk to IIT Mumbai students]
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“Ultimately it’s the desire, not the desired, that we love.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
This statement seems counter-intuitive: alcoholics desire a drink, not the desire to drink.
Yet if a drink was all that they desired, taking it would satisfy them. But whatever satisfaction they feel is short-lived. Soon, the desire re-appears and goads them into drinking again and again and yet again.
We all have our specific forms of attachment, be they alcoholism or shopaholism or something else. In every such attachment, a track is formed in our consciousness between us and the desire for that object. And our thoughts and feelings move rapidly and frequently along that track, impelling us towards indulgence. Each such movement in our consciousness broadens and deepens the track till just being on it feels familiar and comfortable. Thereafter, whenever we feel burdened and seek relief, our thoughts immediately go down this track because it feels like home. Thus, we end up with the desire for the desire.
Indeed, alcoholics often tell their therapists that they don’t drink to get high – that was their initial purpose; now, they drink just to feel normal. Because desiring the desire feels normal, giving up addiction seems so difficult. Even if addicts somehow give up their addiction, they soon fall for something else because they need some avenue for relief – they need some track in their consciousness that feels like home.
So, Nietzsche was right in saying that we desire the desire. But he was wrong in using the word ultimately for describing our desire for desire. That’s our ultimate fate only as long as we are operating within a materialistic framework, as was Nietzsche. What is ultimate in the material realm is not ultimate in the spiritual realm.
Gita wisdom explains that we are at our core spiritual beings who are naturally pleasure-seeking. We are meant to find the highest pleasure at the spiritual level of reality. But when we are unaware of life’s spiritual side, our longing for pleasure gets misdirected towards various worldly things, eventually leading to attachments and addictions.
Ultimately, the human heart longs for God. He is revealed in the bhakti tradition to be the all-attractive supreme person, Krishna. Bhakti-yoga fulfills this longing efficaciously by giving us time-tested practices for connecting with him. These practices create tracks in our consciousness that lead to him. When we discipline ourselves to do these practices regularly, they provide us the comfort of the ultimate home – they invoke Krishna’s purifying, sublimating, fulfilling presence in our heart.
Interestingly, the theme of desiring desire is mentioned thousands of years before Nietzsche in the Bhagavad-gita (02.70). It uses the compound word kama-kami, the desirer of desire, to underscore our capacity to choose how we respond to what happens within our consciousness. When a desire comes into our consciousness, be it from our circumstances or our conditionings, we have the choice whether to desire that desire or to resist and reject it. If we refuse to become a desirer of desire, we take away its power to agitate […]
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On the sacred day of Christmas, when Jesus Christ descended to raise human consciousness, I am humbled to see this significant landmark scaled by our small effort to share the wisdom of the Gita, which too is meant for raising human consciousness.
I thank all those who have joined in the journey of delving into the wisdom of the Gita daily. And I thank especially those who have pioneered this phenomenal social media outreach: Eshant and Sapna Garg.
I seek the blessings of Jesus on this day so that I can continue to serve lifelong his and my Lord – indeed the Lord of all of us.
And drawing strength from the Lord’s promise in the Gita (10.11-12), I pray fervently that he mercifully continue to illumine the life-journey of all of us with the light of the Gita.
As a Christmas meditation, here are three similar verses from the Gita and the Bible
Bhagavad-gita: “Those who worship me with devotion, they are in me and I in them.” (Ch. VI. 29)
Bible: “I in them, thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.” (John 28.23)
Bhagavad Gita: I am the beginning, the middle and the end of all beings. (10.20)
Bible: I am Alpha, Omega, the beginning and the ending. (Rev. I. 8)
Bhagavad-gita: For one who sees Me everywhere and sees everything in Me, I am never lost, nor is he ever lost to Me. (6.30)
Bible: Remain in me, as I also remain in you. (John 15.4)
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At the age of five was my first memorable introduction to the Bhagavad-gita. I participated in a Gita verse recitation competition in Chandrapur, Maharashtra. I remember feeling both happy and nervous: happy to have memorized several verses, and nervous about recite them on stage in front of many people. However, that encounter with the Gita had no lasting impact on me, at least not visibly. I forgot the Gita and went on with my life, pursuing the great Indian student dream of academic excellence.
From achievement to fulfillment
Though I had left the Gita, the Gita hadn’t left me. I retained a subconscious attraction to Gita verse recitation, an attraction that was unusual because I had no interest or talent for singing or music. Little did I know that Gita recitation would draw me back to the Gita fifteen years later.
I was in the third year of my engineering in Electronics & Telecommunications at the Government College of Engineering, Pune. I had just fulfilled my lifelong dream of becoming a topper: I had scored 2350 out of 2400 and stood first in Maharashtra. I expected to be elated and I was, but for a heartbreakingly brief period. There was no happiness in just looking at my mark-sheet. Only when someone congratulated me for my marks did I feel joy. And if anyone didn’t congratulate me, I felt miserable. I realized that my life’s most desired achievement had not made me happy; it had made me more dependent on others for my happiness. By working hard, I could top in another exam, but what would I get? At best, a repetition of the same brief elation. Wasn’t life meant for something better?
When our heart is ready for wisdom, wisdom finds its way there. While I was pondering such questions, a friend gave me a copy of the Bhagavad-gita. I read the Gita (06.22) description of spiritual absorption: a state that takes us beyond dissatisfaction and disturbance. Having just tasted the shallowness of worldly achievements, I felt inspired to pursue this as my life’s ultimate achievement.
As I studied the Gita, recited its verses and applied its teachings, I found my anger decreasing, my mind becoming calmer and my life becoming more purposeful. I started sharing the Gita’s message with friends and several of them became transformed, some to a greater degree than me. They broke free from bad habits and became more positive and productive.
So sublime and transformational was the wisdom I found in the Gita that I decided to dedicate my life to studying and sharing it.
Spiritual science
The Gita transformed me not just experientially but also intellectually. It infused my life with holistic meaning. Since my school days, I was fascinated by science, especially by how it uncovered law-like order in nature. And yet I felt disappointed, disturbed even, that science provided me islands of meaning while sentencing me to drown in an ocean of meaninglessness. Science, or more precisely scientism, told that my life was ultimately pointless; that I was […]
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Answer Podcast
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“All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
This quote strikes us as paradoxical: If the thought is ours, how could it have been stolen by the ancients who existed before us and our thoughts? Yet Emerson’s point resonates with thoughtful people. We sometimes get a striking thought and feel elated at having come up with something so brilliant, so incisive, so original. But then we discover, to our consternation, that the thought has already been phrased by some ancient thinker. So, we feel as if that ancient has stolen our thought. “Stolen” not in the sense that they plagiarized our idea, but in the sense that the originality we had thought as ours was actually theirs.
This quote also resonates with a principle integral to spiritual growth. While studying spiritual texts and molding our lives accordingly, we sometimes find that the ancients have worded something that echoes our experience. Or rather, our experience shows their words to be profoundly true. Gita wisdom refers such resonance as realization. A contemporary word with a similar sense is epiphany, a moment of sudden and sublime insight. While any insight can be called an epiphany, spiritual realization refers to the insight that is a re-sight – we see demonstrated in life the truth that we have seen taught in wisdom-texts. That which is a reality, when we understand it to be a reality, we get realization.
For helping us gain realizations about the spiritual realm, which is not accessible through our senses, the Gita offers the process of yoga. Yoga practice streamlines and sublimates our consciousness, thereby tuning us to perceive higher truths. The Gita (09.02) indicates that those who practice its teachings realize those teachings.
When we get a yogic realization, rather than we getting an insight and then finding that the ancients had already got it, we read their insight and then experience it to be true. Chronologically, these two are different. But essentially they both reflect a similar principle: truth is timeless; and in the discovery of truth, ancients and moderns, and indeed all people, are in harmony.
Ultimately, the deepest, highest insights that we are capable of – insights about our essential identity and ultimate purpose – are neither stolen by the ancients from us, nor borrowed by us from them. Those truths are timeless and transcendental. They exist at the innermost core of our being and rise to our awareness as we evolve spiritually. The opportunity for such spiritual evolution is open for all people at all times.
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Bhaktisiddhanta Disappearance Day class at Radha Gopinath Mandir, Mumbai
Podcast
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