Why crave for hours and years for pleasures that last for moments Gita 05.22

Transcript

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reasons why we tend to forget our past lives thank you very much why crave and slave for pleasures for hours and years when the pleasures actually last for a few moments or just a few minutes in our life we are intrinsically guided by a sense of proportion when we purchase something we evaluate whether the cost of the object and the cost of what is returned the cost of what we get in return are proportionate if say a particular food item is neither healthy nor tasty but is very costly then we would think what is the point of purchasing it if a particular gadget say a phone neither looks good nor works well and it costs a lot we would think now why should I waste my money purchasing this so similarly we need to think why do I waste so much of my time and especially my mental energy in craving for pleasures when the actual pleasure that I get in return is so little if we think in terms of proportion the craving lasts for a lifetime and indeed not just a lifetime for many lifetimes from the teenage years the craving begins and it continues throughout it continues tormenting us sometimes especially in youth and thereafter also day in and day out and not just in the day in the night it’s sometimes especially in the night and whatever pleasure we get never lives up to the hype the hype comes from two sources it comes from the world where the media glamorizes this pleasure incessantly and the hype also comes from the mind which is a tireless canvasser of sense pleasure especially sex pleasure now when the eyes get captivated by the sight of good-looking people then the eyes start craving I want to enjoy that and the mind starts fantasizing that if I could get this object then I would enjoy so much however whatever be the object particular object that we are seeking sensual pleasure through ultimately the body’s capacity to enjoy our own senses capacity to enjoy is finite it is limited and it cannot be extended by anything no matter what we do so after craving for hours sometimes for years then when we actually get down to the indulgence we think that all the fantasies for indulgence that we had cultivated they are now going to come true and yet the pleasure just ends within a few moments so of course after the indulgence also especially if it is illicit there are social familial medical and karmic consequences but even if we don’t consider all those consequences simply in terms of proportion the amount of time and energy that we spend on the desire for enjoyment on fantasizing and the amount of pleasure we get the proportion is is appallingly inadequate the bhagavad-gita urges us to think of and reason in this sense when it states that yehi samsparsija bhogadukhyonaya eva te adhyantavanta kaunteya nateshuramate budhah that the wise person does not delight in such pleasures because that person recognizes that the pleasures are temporary they have a beginning and they have an end so our mental energy is precious and we can do so much with that mental energy we can think of constructive things plan pray and we can be permeated with energy to do things if we just had that mental energy free but unfortunately our mental energy is captivated by our attachments and among all our attachments probably the attachment that induces the most uh imagination and thereby causes the expenditure of our mental energy the most that is sensual attachment so sensual desire is actually the desire by which we get captivated by our senses and then we find ourselves fantasizing almost endlessly and though initially even the fantasizing seems pleasurable but over time it starts becoming tiresome because once we recognize that this is actually causing me more trouble than pleasure that this is the path by which i am getting degraded this is the path by which i am getting entangled i am becoming enslaved then we ourselves have to become enslaved to resist or to indulge both addictions are notoriously difficult to give up so at least the awareness of the sense of proportion okay how much mental energy am spending on this and how little am i getting in return the sense of proportion itself can inspire us to start resisting the craving to start turning towards more constructive higher thoughts in our uh mind and when we start practicing bhakti we start directing our consciousness towards krishna we start investing our consciousness in krishna then we start realizing that we can indeed get over sensual temptations by the practice of bhakti the more we become absorbed in krishna the less we become tormented by the worldly desires and thus we realize that how much of our mental energy can be saved and be constructively used and how wonderfully positive krishna bhakti is because although even krishna we need to put some effort in terms of investing our mental energy but in terms of fixing our mind on him but the effort required is far less here and the return in terms of peace purity pleasure is far far greater that’s why we need to strive for not the sensualization of our imagination but the spiritualization of our imagination by using our intelligence to contemplate the sense of proportion thank you