Our heart naturally longs to move outwards in search of a worthy object of love. However, this search often ends in misery when those we love don’t live up to our hopes.

Being burnt by such distressing experiences, some people develop a fear for love. They put a padlock on their heart, not letting themselves emotionally touch or be touched by anyone. When they explore life’s spiritual side, they gravitate towards its depersonalized depictions. After all, if the Absolute Truth were an impersonal effulgence, and spiritual perfection meant dissolution of individual personal identity by merging into that effulgence, then there would remain no scope for love and the risk of pain thereof.

What our love needs is not a padlock, but a purificatory pathway.

Such fear-driven philosophization about spirituality may sound safe to some, but it’s actually life-denying. It perpetuates the padlock on the heart. What impersonalists think of as protection – suppression of our loving nature – ends up becoming restriction. Impersonalists sentence themselves to eternal emotional deprivation, feeling nothing, living largely like a stone. The longing for love lies at the core of our being – to deny it is to deny the very sentience that defines our existence. Impersonalism is thus self-chosen spiritual deprivation. Pertinently, Bhagavad-gita (12.05) cautions that obsession with impersonal conceptions makes the spiritual path troublesome.

Gita wisdom indicates that what our love needs is not a padlock, but a purificatory pathway. Spiritual perfection requires not the incarceration of love, but its redirection towards Krishna, the highest manifestation of the Absolute Truth. He is the transcendental personal source of the impersonal effulgence. We as souls are his eternal parts and are meant to delight with him in an eternal harmony of love. Our longing for love when reposed in him attains perfect and perennial fulfillment.

Why incarcerate the heart in perpetual lovelessness through impersonalism when bhakti can liberate it into eternal love?

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