The mind often makes problems far bigger than what they actually are. We get a negative appraisal, but the mind chews and stews on it so much that it chokes our energy and creativity, making our situation worse than it needs to be.

The problems’ magnified mental versions are akin to mental phantoms. They hover constantly as a disconcerting background presence and make periodic forays into the territory of our consciousness whenever we think of the problem. And the more we mentally stew on the problem, the more we let these phantoms extend their hold till eventually they take over the whole territory. At that time, our worries become obsessions and we feel chronically and even clinically depressed – the mental phantoms haunt us so relentlessly that we sometimes feel depleted and defeated internally even before we have started tackling the outer problems.

Being illumined by Krishna’s inner presence, we can see the mind’s phantoms for what they are – unwarranted dystopian figments of imagination.

How can we free ourselves from such phantoms?

By devotional contemplation on the transcendental person, Krishna, the Supreme Absolute Truth.

The Bhagavad-gita (09.22) assures us that Krishna protects those who meditate on him. This protection may or may not remove the problem immediately at the external material level, but it does come unfailingly in one way internally – it protects us from the mind’s problem-magnifying spree. When we fix our consciousness on Krishna, he manifests his illuminating and empowering presence there. Being illumined, we can see the mind’s phantoms for what they are – unwarranted dystopian figments of imagination. Being empowered, we can by filling our consciousness with Krishna push back and eventually eliminate the phantoms.

No doubt, we do have real problems that need real solutions. But our quest for such solutions is most obscured by the mind’s phantom-producing propensity. And such real solutions are often best discovered when the mind is pacified and purified by becoming connected with Krishna.

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