Many people treat God as a shock-absorber. Just as a car’s shock-absorber is needed to minimize jolts while driving, they think God is needed to minimize shocks during our life-journey.

The Bhagavad-gita (07.16) acknowledges that most people approach God because they are distressed or indigent, meaning that they want God as a shock absorber. Interestingly, the Gita appreciates such people as pious (07.16) and large-hearted (07.17). But then, it (07.19) declares that after such people go through many lifetimes of spiritual evolution, they come to understand that Krishna is everything. He is the embodiment and fulfillment of everything we find attractive, including even the material pleasures whose loss we perceive as shocking.

Gita wisdom explains that our present material existence is intrinsically a bumpy ride. Why? Because herein, we become attached to material things, and those things being external to us are not in our control. The fear that we may lose them anytime agitates us, thus making the ride bumpy. Though God is ready to aid us as a shock-absorber on this ride, still the reality remains that everything material will be lost at death.

Therefore, the greatest aid that God can offer us is not as a shock-absorber, but as a goal-transformer. He wants to give us the spiritual wisdom that helps us see that he himself is life’s best goal – the only goal that can fulfil our deepest longings for peace, love and joy; the only goal that can take us beyond material existence with its inevitable shocks. He is the whole, and we are his eternal parts, meant to delight with him in his imperishable abode in an ecstatic harmony of spiritual love.

When we learn to approach God more as a goal-transformer than as a shock-absorber, we open ourselves to his best blessings.

To know more about this verse, please click on the image
Explanation of article:


Podcast:


Download by “right-click and save”