While driving, where we go depends largely on where we want to go. This principle that our aspiration determines our destination also applies to our overall existence, both in life and beyond.

Gita wisdom explains that we all are eternal spiritual beings on a multi-life journey of spiritual evolution. In different lifetimes, we go through different bodies; and therein, we seek shelter and pleasure according to our level of consciousness. When we transit from one body to another, our disposition at death determines our destination after death (Bhagavad-gita 08.06). This principle has a specific devotional application: If we remember God, Krishna at the time of death, we attain him (08.05). Here, remembrance doesn’t primarily signify the intellectual recollection of something. It signifies essentially the natural gravitation of our consciousness towards its fondest object – the object that has offered us the greatest shelter and pleasure, the object we reflexively seek amidst the moment of the greatest danger: death.

As Krishna is the supreme unchanging, overseeing, all-knowing being (08.08), he can offer us the greatest shelter. Moreover, he is the all-attractive source of everything attractive (10.41) – whatever pleasure we may find in any worldly object, we can find it all and much more in Krishna. To relish shelter and pleasure in him steadily, we need to diligently practice bhakti-yoga. This time-honored process redirects our consciousness from its present worldly attachments to Krishna.

The more we cherish Krishna as our greatest love, the more our inner faculties, our mind and intelligence, become absorbed in him (08.07). When he sees us consistently choose him above all alternatives, he reciprocates by elevating us at the time of death beyond this world. He takes us to his abode, to delight forever in that which we have delighted lifelong: in him.

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