Gita 02.08 Don’t let comforts lure you away from life’s purpose
Bodh Gita 2.8 I am not saying anyway Chokap Uchoshanam Indriyanaam The way to get rid of this, become free from this grief which is drying up my senses.
Even if I get a fabulous kingdom, widely spread all over the world, Rajyam, Suranam, Apichadi Padhyam, or even the kingdom like that of the gods, still I will not be able to be peaceful. Why not? Because external possession does not provide internal consolation, internal relief. That means that when we are troubled by something, at that time we need relief at that level.
If I am thirsty and I am provided water, that is providing me relief. If I am thirsty and somebody provides me a garland, that won't provide me relief. If I am feeling hot and somebody provides me a gulab jamun, that's good.
Gulab jamun tastes good but that's not addressing the specific problem. So Krishna is telling that when there is internal agony, it is not going to be solved by external things. Similarly in today's world, we see that there is a great confusion among people about the best way, the most effective way to deal with life's issues.
That physical comforts are often thought of as everything. Suppose there are some people living according to a traditional worldview, which is harmonious, which is devoted, which provides them higher meaning and motivation to their life. And say there is a Christian missionary who is trying to convert them from what that missionary considers.
They consider a primitive, pagan system and make them civilized, make them Christianized. And say the traditionalists are not very interested. But then one of their children, a child of theirs is terribly sick and none of their medicines are working.
And at that time, the missionary remembers that they had put a pencil in the bag last moment. They just take the pencil in and offer it. And the child gets cured miraculously almost for the tribals.
And for some of those tribals, this may seem to be like an act of God. Their God saved our child and therefore we should surrender to their God. But if those tribal people were capable of proper reasoning, they would say that, oh, this missionary offers, has some knowledge, which has produced some medicine which cures the body very well.
But that doesn't necessarily mean they can provide answers to questions for them, to questions about the deeper aspects of life, about the why's of life, why we are living, where we have come from, where we are meant to go. If those questions can't be answered, then what is the point? And we can accept the knowledge provided by these people for what it is worth. But along with that, we can also, while treating our body with their medical knowledge, we can also hold on to our own tradition's ideas, tradition's thought worlds.
They provide a bit better orientation about the meaning and purpose of life. This kind of balanced understanding is what we need in today's world. And materialism promises us so much pleasure.
And materialist science promises us so much technological facility and comfort and even wizardry because technological knowledge tells us nothing about life's ultimate purpose. So science doesn't tell us much about life's ultimate purpose. So we needn't take its worldview as having capacity to explain everything and reject that which we have used earlier, which is rooted us in a meaningful and motivational life.
So Arjuna was at one level like a typical Kshatriya of his times, following that predictable career chart, that means Kshatriyas should be very valorous, should be capable of fighting, they should live dharmically, fight dharmically, expand and have a lot of kingdoms and then beyond that, they can go to heavens and there also they will have heavenly delights, kingdom in this world, prosperity in the next world. And that is considered like a dream career chart. But Arjuna recognizes that this dream career chart will not relieve him of the nightmare that he is going through internally at the mind's level.
The external dream can't necessarily free us from the internal nightmare and recognizing this is crucial for those who want to live a balanced life amidst today's materialistic culture that no matter how powerful, how influential be science's capacity to provide us facilities to perform with the aid of technology, still science doesn't provide answers to any of life's fundamental questions. That's why we need to make sure that we don't let ourselves get carried away by that which does not provide us meaningful answers to life's questions. So life's comforts should not become like bribes which lure us away from life's purposes.
Our purpose is not just a comfortable life. Our purpose is something more. We want to live and love and live and love forever.
And that knowledge of how to live and love forever, that will be told by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. That spiritual knowledge is needed by all of us even today in today's world because material knowledge does not address the issues of the heart. It does not address our core concerns.
It does not tell us who we are, what we are meant to live for, what our ultimate destination is meant to be. This knowledge doesn't come from materialism and it doesn't come from materialism's greatest champion today, that is science. It comes only from our deeper side, from our spiritual core.
From the spiritual wisdom that addresses our spiritual core. And that we will find in the Bhagavad Gita. Thank you.