When our plans are thwarted by things beyond our control, we usually become irritated and distracted.

Such disruption of our plans often blinds us to the reality that there is a higher order in life. Gita wisdom informs us that the world moves under the supervision of Krishna, who is our omnibenevolent friend. So whatever happens to us is ultimately an opportunity under the purview of his plan to move towards our supreme wellbeing.

But to perceive and participate in Krishna’s plan, we need to be present where that plan is in action – in the present. Our infatuation with our plans often transports us to the future mentally and traps us there emotionally. The Bhagavad-gita (14.12) indicates that the mode of passion generates insatiable cravings, thereby riveting us to a fantasy future where those cravings will be satisfied.

Why is such a future a fantasy future? Not because our desires may never be satisfied in the future – they may be sometimes. But still such satisfaction won’t free us from the mode of passion that generates cravings and rivets us emotionally to the future. And so that vision of a future when our cravings will be satisfied will forever remain a fantasy that distracts us from the reality of today.

How can we retrain ourselves to be where we need to be?

By seeing beyond our emotions to our emotional patterns. Gita wisdom helps us to see beyond our emotional responses to specific events like frustration of a plan to our generic emotional tendency of living in the future. By helping us identify the mode of passion as the underlying cause of this dysfunctional emotional pattern, it provides us the impetus to purify ourselves through devotional service and thereby learn to live in the present.

Bhagavad Gita Chapter 14 Text 12

“O chief of the Bharatas, when there is an increase in the mode of passion the symptoms of great attachment, fruitive activity, intense endeavor, and uncontrollable desire and hankering develop.”