The Bhagavad-gita (5.22) states that those who are intelligent never delight in sense pleasures because they understand how it always ends in misery.
This verse indicates that we need a functional or healthy intelligence to understand how sense pleasures end in misery. Just as regular physical exercise is essential to keep our body healthy, regular intellectual exercise is essential to keep our intelligence healthy.
What is the exercise for keeping our intelligence healthy?
It is unsentimental contemplation on the fate of sense pleasure.
A valuable contemplation tool for making our intelligence fit is the acronym FIT (Futility, Insubstantiality, Temporality) that encompasses the three possible fates of pursuing sense pleasure
1. Futility: Lust masquerading as love may induce within us the desire for a particular spouse. That person rejects us outright, thereby bursting the bubble of our fantasies in one go, with one unbearable prick.
2. Insubstantiality: That person accepts our proposal and formalizes the relationship, but then we discover that some essential and irreformable incompatibilities exist between us. We are left to watch in helpless dismay as the bubble of our dreams deflates and disappears.
3. Temporality: That person satisfies our heart to some extent, thereby inflating the bubble of our expectations, but then an untimely demise bursts heart-wrenchingly the giant bubble of our hopes.
As these three possibilities are exhaustive and as all of them end in frustration, we can safely infer that sense pleasure is an unavoidably doomed prospect. When we become firmly convinced of this inference, then we can seek unhesitatingly and savor undistractedly the supreme happiness that Gita wisdom offers: the happiness of loving Krishna.
Bhagavad Gita Chapter 05 Text 22
“An intelligent person does not take part in the sources of misery, which are due to contact with the material senses. O son of Kunti, such pleasures have a beginning and an end, and so the wise man does not delight in them.”
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