Bhagavad Gita 18.38

viṣayendriya-saṁyogād

yat tad agre ’mṛtopamam

pariṇāme viṣam iva

tat sukhaṁ rājasaṁ smṛtam

 

Born from senses meeting sense-objects dear,

“This is nectar”—so it seems seductively clear;

“This is poison”—is the later realization;

Such is pleasure in the mode of passion.

 

My dear Lord, repeatedly have I experienced this shocking, frustrating, and infuriating reality: the very pleasures that, before indulgence, feel like nectar—irresistible—turn out, after indulgence, to be like poison: intolerable. Yet why does this realization come to me only after the indulgence? Before that realization come obsession and oblivion: obsession with getting the pleasure, and oblivion about its painful postscript.

O Lord of memory, help my intelligence hold on to the memories of my lived experience of sensual pleasure, specifically of how the anticipation always gives way to the anti-climax. Despite all its aggressive and intrusive glamorization, the actual pleasure turns out to be pathetically paltry and scandalously short-lived. I need my intelligence’s grip on these post-indulgence memories to be stronger than my mind’s grip on the memories of the few moments of pleasure during indulgence.

O omnipotent Lord, I cannot get such penetrating intelligence from my own deliberation and determination alone. I need your merciful intervention to de-infatuate me in those fateful moments when I am about to succumb to temptation.

O merciful Lord, by such rescue operations that release me from the path to relapse, please gradually make my post-indulgence experience firmly and fully etched in my memory. May those memories jolt my intelligence to reflect and redirect: reflect on passion’s pernicious perversion of my perception, and redirect me toward you, who are the deliverer of supreme spiritual pleasure and thereby my saviour from seductive sensual pleasure.

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18.38 That happiness which is derived from contact of the senses with their objects and which appears like nectar at first but poison at the end is said to be of the nature of passion.