People say “Pursue your passion.” Is such passion coming from the soul or the mind?

From Sudheer P

Many people will say ‘follow your heart’, ‘You have to pursue your own passions what your inner voice says’. I want to know what is that inner voice or passion of the heart. Are those words are given by the soul or just feelings by the modes of material nature. or can those statements can be true in any sense. please tell some few words regarding this.

Transcript

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Question from Sudhir Prabhu. Many people say follow your heart, you have to pursue your own passions, what your inner voice says.
I want to know what is that inner voice or passion of the heart? Are those words given by the soul or just feelings by the modes of material nature? Or can those statements be true in any sense? Answer, when people say follow your voice, follow your heart, we have to understand that this can refer either to the fleeting desire that come on our mind or that can refer to our own psychophysical inclinations. So if it is referring to the fleeting desires that keep coming and going in the mind, then we are not really following our heart, we are following our mind over there. So mind says, okay, today I want to watch this, I want to eat this, I want to go here, I want to do that.
These are desires which come and go. And those, if we just keep giving into them, then we will be like a leaf going, being tossed here and there by the wind. And we will never be able to achieve anything worthwhile in our life, either materially or spiritually.
So we shouldn’t assume that every inner voice is the voice of the soul or is connected with our real self at all. Now, that does not mean that everything internal we have to reject. All of us have a particular nature.
And in the Vedic culture, the Varanashram system was primarily meant to help people to live according to the nature. So according to the particular Varna, they could engage in activities and that’s how they would be able to get what in today’s language could be called a job satisfaction, where one is engaged according to one’s talents, one’s inclinations, then one does well in that particular vocation and also feels satisfied by doing that. There is external competence and there is an inner compatibility, inner comfort is also there.
So today the Varanashram structure is mostly not there. And that’s why we may have to individually find out what is our nature and how we can best engage according to that nature. So for that, we have to do introspection.
And the difference between the mind’s fleeting passions and our nature is that what is according to our nature remains steadily attractive and productive for us on a long term basis, not just for a few moments or occasionally for a few days, but that’s what we feel like doing regularly. So for example, a person with a Vaishya propensity will like to do business and if that person is told to study and teach, the person will not like that. On the other hand, a person who is of a Brahmana propensity will like to study and teach.
So in that sense, where today’s society often offers a unidimensional definition of success, for example, all students are urged to become engineers or doctors, then this creates a lot of material dissatisfaction also. So it’s not that we have to reject our inner voice entirely, but we have to introspect over a steady period of time by which we can discover what our inner nature is actually, what our psychophysical nature is and then act accordingly. So inside there are the voices of the mind and beyond that there are the spiritual voices.
So to differentiate between the two, we need to study scripture properly. Just our introspection alone is usually not enough because Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is the example of weeds that grow in a garden and sometimes the weeds look just like the trees. So which are the weeds and which are the creepers that are intended to grow that need to be nourished, we may not be able to understand.
That’s why studying scriptures and practicing devotional service, it helps us to increase our intellectual acumen. It helps us to connect with Krishna internally as well as externally through his manifestations of Guru Sadhu Shastra and thereby we are able to understand what is what. Just as an educated eye can understand the difference between a weed and a creep and the desired creeper.
Similarly, we can understand what are the super by studying scripture when we become trained, then we can understand what is the difference between a superfluous desire and our central nature and then we can act according to our calling. Then we can discover our, we can follow our heart. So till that time following our heart may, we may end up doing things which are damaging to us and we may not actually be following our heart, we are following just the mind’s temporary passions.
So that we have to be cautious and not get carried away by pop slogans in today’s culture, but understand them in the light of scripture and apply properly based on careful discriminating understanding of scripture as it is relevant