If a guard is protecting a bank vulnerable to thieves, he needs to be vigilant. If he happens to be asleep when thieves attack, he needs to be awakened. But instead, if the thieves give that lethargic guard a sleeping injection, the bank will be rendered defenseless.

Our intelligence is like the guard for the inner bank of our consciousness wherein lies the wealth of our integrity and our spirituality. Self-destructive materialistic desires are like thieves bent on plundering our inner wealth. Our intelligence needs to be awake and alert, screening the stimuli entering our consciousness. If instead, our intelligence is stupefied, we succumb to self-destruction. The Bhagavad-gita (02.63) cautions that when our intelligence falls, we fall.

What stupefies our intelligence? Worldly attachments. The same Gita (02.44) indicates that steady intelligence is impossible for people attached to sensual indulgence and worldly opulence. Thoughts of sex and money act likes soporifics for our intelligence – they infatuate us with dreams and schemes of pleasure, blinding us to our long-term well-being.

Our mainstream culture, being materialistic, bombards us with sensual stimuli that numb our intelligence. Triggered by such sensuality, when we contemplate on specific sense objects, that contemplation acts like the sleeping injection for our already-lethargic intelligence. With our defense thus disabled, our consciousness is abducted and plundered by self-defeating indulgences.

To protect ourselves, we need to awaken our intelligence. How? By studying the Gita. It reminds us of the deceptiveness of sense pleasure and the joyfulness of the supreme spiritual reality, Krishna, who is the supreme object of love and the supreme source of happiness. Through such reminders, it acts as an energy booster for activating our intelligence.

By understanding that contemplating sense objects weakens our intelligence and contemplating scripture wakens it, we can replace sensual contemplation with scriptural contemplation.

To know more about this verse, please click on the image
Explanation of article:


Podcast:


Download by “right-click and save”