If Krishna is not our goal, we hit self-goals

We all want success and happiness. But just the desire or even the ability to succeed is not enough – we need to have the knowledge to transform that desire and ability into success.

Suppose a football player has strong feet well-trained to hit goals. But if that player shoots the football into their own team’s goal, then all the ability ends up being counterproductive.

Unfortunately, we all often end up hitting such self-goals. How? By letting our desires and abilities be dissipated in the pursuit of short-term things – a pursuit that ends only in illusion, bondage and misery. We are at our core souls who are meant to delight in eternal love with Krishna. But our spiritual identity is presently covered by illusion, and the primary agent of illusion is right within us: it’s our own mind. The Bhagavad-gita (06.05) cautions that presently our mind is our enemy.

The mind prompts us to act against our best interests by making us infatuated with the temporary instead of the eternal, with the material instead of the spiritual, with the world instead of its source and Lord, Krishna. Such infatuation doesn’t just deprive us of happiness in the next world; it also deprives us in this world of the fulfillment that comes by commitment to worthwhile, long-term goals. Thus, it makes us score self-goals.

To stop such self-sabotage, we need to make Krishna our goal.

How do we do that? Firstly by striving to increase our devotion to him by practicing diligently the rules of sadhana-bhakti, and secondly by doing our activities in the mood of an offering of love to him.

When our consciousness is thus connected with him through intention and action, we get a higher fulfillment that increases our immunity to the mind’s self-sabotaging suggestions, thereby protecting us from hitting self-goals.