Life’s uncertainties often make us feel insecure. Our insecurities can be grouped into two broad categories: those related with providing for what we need and those related with protecting what we have.

All material things are temporary, so they can’t provide lasting security. Therefore, the Bhagavad-gita urges us to seek security at the eternal spiritual level of reality. And while guiding us towards spiritual reality, it uses the dual compound yoga-kshema (provision and protection) twice at two progressive levels: the level of the soul and the level of Krishna.

The Gita uses yoga-kshema first (02.45) while urging us to become possessors of the soul (atmavan). As we ourselves are the souls, this usage of “possessor” is figurative, meant to convey our possession of the awareness of our spiritual identity. When we realize and remember that we at our core are non-material, we understand that material things are peripheral to our essential being. That understanding can substantially decrease our worries about gaining and retaining material things.

The Gita uses yoga-kshema again in the well-known verse (09.22), which assures that for those devoted to Krishna, he personally takes care of their protection and provision. When we seek security in the soul, we have to depend on our intellectual insight to stay fixed in spiritual reality. But when we seek security in Krishna, we are assisted by his omnipotent mercy. He mercifully grants us faith and taste: faith in his benevolence to take care of things by his supreme intelligence, which far exceeds our best intelligence; and taste for absorption in his remembrance, knowing that he is the reservoir of all happiness.

When we thus raise our consciousness from detachment arising from understanding our spiritual identity to devotion arising from understanding our spiritual relationship with Krishna, we can relish the supreme spiritual security.

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