Love is the heart’s deepest aspiration; we all want to love and be loved. Through love, we can establish the sweetest connections with others. 

Yet, in the name of love, people sometimes act stupidly, shamelessly, self-destructively – they ruin their own lives or break the hearts of others. Believing that they are “in love,” they may rush into incompatible relationships that soon turn toxic. Or they may wreck their own happy families for unsavory affairs. No wonder love is often deemed blind. 

Actually, love itself is not blind; love distorted by lust is blind. Lust is the self-centered obsession that makes us treat others’ looks and features as sources of irresistible pleasure. When the blindfold of lust falls on our consciousness, we can’t see anything except the way to gratify that lust. And we crave and slave for it, blind to its cost – financially, ethically, relationally, socially, spiritually. The Bhagavad-gita (03.39) underscores this blinding nature of lust when it states that lust covers our knowledge. 

How can we remove the blindfold of lust? By guiding our love with spiritual knowledge. 

Gita wisdom explains that we are, at our core, non-material beings, who are parts of the all-attractive supreme spiritual reality, Krishna. He is the ultimate object of our love – we are meant for an eternal relationship of loving service with him. We can connect with him by practicing bhakti-yoga, the time-honored process for purifying our love and giving us a taste of the immortal joy of spiritual love. 

Once we taste that joy, our love becomes spiritualized: we see others not as objects for our material gratification, but as partners in our spiritual evolution. When we infuse this vision into our relationships, physical infatuation is gradually superseded by spiritual camaraderie. Such a Krishna-centered bond leads to transformational loving exchanges that help bring out each other’s fullest spiritual potential.  

 

Think it over:

  • Why is love deemed blind?
  • How does lust blind love?
  • How does bhakti remove the blindfold of lust?

 

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03.39 Thus the wise living entity’s pure consciousness becomes covered by his eternal enemy in the form of lust, which is never satisfied and which burns like fire.


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