Bhagavad Gita 15.10

utkrāmantaṁ sthitaṁ vāpi

bhuñjānaṁ vā guṇānvitam

vimūḍhā nānupaśyanti

paśyanti jñāna-cakṣuṣaḥ

 

When soul departs or yet remains,

Enjoying nature’s shifting chains;

The deluded stay blind in darkness dense,

The seers behold through wisdom’s warm lens.

 

My dear Lord, the lens through which I look at the world keeps me in illusion about the world, about myself, and about you.

O Lord of wisdom, when I study your words of wisdom, I gain a wiser lens to see through the world’s illusions. Yet a fallout of that wiser vision is that I tend to become colder—not wanting to be emotionally entangled in the world’s mirages, I stay withdrawn and distant.

O Lord of love, when I glimpse your love and sense that the world is operating under your loving plan, I gain a lens that is warmer. However, if I am not sheltered by the philosophy that helps me distinguish truth from illusion, then my warmth increases my weakness. In caring for the things of this world, I can become attached to them. What begins as concern can quietly degenerate into self-centered attachment—and I detect it too later, after I have become dangerously deluded or even degraded.

O supremely competent guide, help me take shelter of both your wisdom and your warmth—your wisdom as revealed in your philosophical words meant for my sacred illumination, and your warmth as revealed in your divine manifestations that help me connect with you personally. May I be nourished by both so that I can see the world through a lens that is both wiser and warmer.

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15.10 The foolish cannot understand how a living entity can quit his body, nor can they understand what sort of body he enjoys under the spell of the modes of nature. But one whose eyes are trained in knowledge can see all this.