More dangerous than the enemies that threaten are the enemies that tempt Gita 03.37

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna.
More dangerous than the enemies that threaten are the enemies that tempt. For all of us, if you are fighting a war, then the enemy who threatens by directly confronting, they are telling us, if you don’t withdraw, if you don’t submit, we will destroy you. Those enemies are evident for us.
But suppose the enemies tempt us, that they send some agents who say that you just stop this fight and we will give you this reward and we will give you that reward. They are basically trying to bribe or corrupt us. Then if they are still enemies, then what they promise, they will not deliver.
They will use that as a lure to deceive us, to get us to lower our guards and destroy us. But because they are promising us pleasure and not threatening trouble, we may well lower our guards. And once our guards are lowered, then we will be under greater danger.
That’s why the enemies that tempt are more dangerous than the enemies that threaten. And this applies especially in our inner world. We have within us forces of illusion, such as lust, anger, greed, especially lust, which are inimical, but they promise us a lot of pleasure.
And why are they inimical? Because firstly they deliver very little pleasure and then after that they deliver a lot of trouble. We become more entangled in worldly things, we do bad karma for which we get terrible consequences. And thus overall, the more we indulge sensually, the more trouble we caught eventually.
And the Bhagavad Gita, though spoken on the battlefield, stresses that such self-destructive desire which comes with the lure of pleasure is our foremost enemy. In 3.37 it is said, Know that this is your greatest enemy, Arjuna. Who is it? It is Kama.
It is lust which will degenerate into anger and which will impel us to do self-destructive things and even world destructive things. So suppose we knew that there was an enemy who was out to destroy us, maybe a business rival or somebody who has taken a vow to destroy us, we would be extremely alert. But more dangerous than them, than any such outer enemy is our inner enemy.
And we need extreme vigilance to protect ourselves. To be vigilant because this enemy is invisible and because it is insidious, promising pleasure, we need repeated spiritual education, philosophical education and spiritual redirection to protect ourselves. Thank you.