Self pity makes feel bad seem feel good Gita 18.35
Transcript
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Hare Krishna. Self-pity makes feel bad seem feel good. Generally, when we feel bad, say if somebody hurts us or something which is very important for us doesn’t work out, or sometimes we ourselves make a big mistake, and we feel bad.
And normally, we don’t like to feel bad. So we try to come out of that bad feeling and seek to feel good by various ways. Now, of course, sometimes such feel good might be very cosmetic and superficial and not really very useful because it may well happen that we just get into mindless entertainment or mindless overeating, binge eating or binge Netflix watching or whatever to just forget our bad feeling.
And while any kind of feel good is often not the way to be good, but some feel good can be very deceptive. So for example, when we are afflicted by self-pity, feel bad becomes the way to feel good. What that means is that the more bad we feel about ourselves, the more we start feeling that, oh, my life is so terrible.
And in that way, we attract people’s attention and hopefully their affection or at least their compassion or whatever else. So if we are to stop feeling sorry for ourselves, because just stopping feeling sorry for ourselves doesn’t make things better. It makes us feel good that life is so unfair, people are so bad.
And sometimes even I am so worthless that unless the world stops whatever it is doing and pays attention to me, that is, how can I improve? It is we who have to take responsibility for ourselves. That means that we have to choose that, OK, not so much whether I’m feeling bad or feeling good, but am I doing something to become good and thereby cure that tangible fee, that take tangible steps to cure that bad feeling? Say a classic example of feel bad as the way to feel good at the physical level is hypochondria, where people pretend to be sick to attract people’s attention and affection. The same thing we can do at the psychological level.
And such self-destructive emotion is characteristic of obstinacy, which is in the mode of ignorance. In 1835, the Bhagavad Gita Krishna says, या स्वप्नं भयं शोकं विशादं मतमेवचन विमुञ्चति दुरमेधा धुर्ति सापार्थ तामसी That dhriti saaparth tamasi, when daydreamings, lamenting, moroseness, fearfulness, all these are self-destructive emotional patterns and we need to recognize that going beyond self feel good and feel bad, we do what is good, what will make us good and then our emotions will eventually become good. Thank you.
Hare Krishna.