How can we persist in our resolutions?

Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So, how can we maintain persistence in our resolutions? Whether it be for our career or even for our spirituality. Our desires are not just linear. They are triangular.
What I mean by that is that I may decide I want to do this. And I desire, okay, I want to achieve this grade. I want to get this.
So you may think, okay, that is the object and I am here. And I have a desire for that. So now, linear desire, some of our desires are linear.
But many of our desires are triangular. Triangular means that we see others doing something. Say for example, few months ago, around September, October, I had last time come to America.
At that time there was this huge craze for the video game Pokemon Go. Now, when this game had just come up, initially it did not create such a buzz. In the first few days, okay, there are so many video games, one more and new has come.
So what’s so great? But then people saw somebody playing this game. Completely lost in it. Trying to find some Pokemon and catch them and get scores.
What is this? Let me see it. And then they started playing. And they started playing.
And their friend said, no, no, I want to play now. So what happened? Just seeing the game didn’t induce so much desire. But seeing others playing the game, that induced the desire.
So our desires are not just linear, they are also triangular. So therefore, what it means is, now there are some objects in this world, they are intrinsically attractive. You have some good looking food I see, I don’t have to look at how many other people I eat.
If it looks good, I’ll go and eat it. But there are some things whose attractiveness is not so immediately visible. So often, to sustain the desire for them, we need to tap not just the linearity of the desire, but also the triangularity.
That means we need association that is like-minded. So if we make a particular resolution, if we want to be persistent, we have to have some other friends who also make similar resolutions. If you want to grow spiritually, you want to be resolved about practicing spiritual practices regularly, then we need a spiritual association.
So here you have a program going on. You can get like-minded people. Even in the college, in the university, you’ll find that there are people of different kinds.
So if we associate with people who are here just to have a good time and they’re not really so focused on their career, they just feel that, last moment I’ll study and I’ll do well. So then, we will become like them. So, sangat sanjayate kamaha.
In the Bhagavad Gita in 2.62, Krishna says that, sanga, by our association, kama, desire. Our desire is developed by our association. So the kind of association we cultivate, that has a strong role to play in the kind of desires that we will have and the kind of desire that we’ll sustain.
So, to sustain our resolutions, to be persistent, we need to have supportive association. That’s the first thing. Second thing is also that our willpower is a finite resource.
Sometimes we just feel that we make a resolution and we are unable to keep it. We start thinking that oh, I don’t have willpower. But it’s not that we don’t have willpower, it is that our willpower is a finite resource and we let it get frittered away on small, small things.
If I have a capacity to lift a certain amount of weights, then if I’m going to be part of weightlifting competition and before that only I lift many other weights. By the time I come to the weightlifting competition, I just have no energy left. So willpower is a finite resource.
And that means that if I want to focus on something, if I want to say, if I want to study, then I need my willpower for that. But if I’m surrounding myself with say hundreds of other distractions and then every time I have to choose. Should I do this? Should I not do this? Should I do this? Should I not do this? We may make the right choices over there, but all that is exerting our willpower.
So, we can if we want to focus on something, we can try as much as possible to also close certain options. Don’t let our willpower get expended on unnecessary things. So, it can range for something very simple as, say, if I want to study, I will just shut off my internet for the next one hour.
On my phone, maybe I’ll have an app by which it just gets blocked. Even if I want to unblock, I can’t unblock. So, Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, He just said that a tortoise withdraws its limbs into its body.
Like that, we need to withdraw the senses from the sense objects. So, that means that we may be able to resist those temptations, resist the distraction, but resisting it, it dissipates our willpower. Just close the option, and then we’ll be able to focus much better.
So, by changing our association and by adapting our association, adapting our circumstance, so that our desires are intensified by our association, not dissipated. Our healthy desires, our worthy desires, they are enhanced and not depleted by our association. And secondly, by making sure that our willpower is used for our most important things, not dissipated in small trivial things.
Then we’ll be able to persist and achieve. And foundational for all this is spiritual understanding. Because all this we’ll intellectually know, but spiritual practices, regular hearing spiritual knowledge, regular spiritual practices, that will actually equip us at a foundational level to apply these things.
Thank you.