05.21: We don’t have to labor under unquestioned and questionable assumptions
“I want to go closer to Krishna, but how can I give up happiness?” This fear often checks many of us who are seekers on the devotional path.
Gita wisdom implodes this fear by informing us that what we have to give up is not happiness, but our assumptions about what is happiness. We often assume that happiness means material happiness. However, Gita wisdom points out that this assumption is unquestioned and questionable. Let’s see how:
Unquestioned: Almost everyone around us both in real life and especially in the media glamorizes and pursues material enjoyment. This propaganda is so overwhelmingly convincing that we rarely, if ever, question it.
Questionable: The materialist propaganda never depicts that our bodily capacity to enjoy is limited inescapably. Material enjoyment being fleeting can never satisfy our longing for unending happiness, just as a drop of water can’t satisfy a thirst-parched person in a dreary desert.
Gita wisdom empowers us to question our questionable assumption in two ways:
- By enabling us to recognize that we as souls have a original and natural right to spiritual happiness, which is far superior to material enjoyment
- By facilitating us to experience spiritual happiness through cultivating loving remembrance of Krishna.
No wonder then that the Bhagavad-gita (5.21) assures us that if we turn our heart away from external material enjoyment to internal spiritual fulfillment, we will get unlimited happiness. When we let ourselves get a taste of that happiness, then we realize that the door to freedom from laboring under unquestioned and questionable assumptions has been opened for us by Krishna.