Many people like to be daredevils. Wanting a sense of adventure and achievement, they dive into extreme sports. 

While those living on the edge may be few, we all have an inner daredevil. That’s what makes us seek vicarious thrills by identifying with sports stars, action movie stars or our own digital avatars in video games. 

While such daredevilry might be exciting, it is often unproductive; people can waste awful amounts of time on escapist entertainment. Worse still, daredevilry can be needlessly destructive; super-fast drivers might end up in deadly car pileups. 

Can we channel our inner daredevil constructively? Yes, to fight our inner devils: dark desires such as lust that make us act devilishly. 

The Bhagavad-gita (03.37) states that lust is our vicious and voracious inner foe. The Gita’s focusing on lust as our enemy is revealing. Though it is spoken on a battlefield, it doesn’t focus on the opponents lined up to fight the war. By focusing on lust, it reveals the reality, gravity, and immediacy of the inner war that we all need to fight. 

We usually know that we should restrain our lower desires. But we often see such restraint negatively, as a pleasure-depriving norm or as an impractically difficult austerity. When guided by the Gita, we learn to see the inner war positively. Victory can unleash our spiritual potential, enabling us to make substantial contributions in the world and relish sublime satisfaction that is out of the world. Even the moment-to-moment battles can become exciting; they inspire us to become expert and alert to detect and reject lust’s sneaky seductions. 

If we train ourselves to see the inner fight as stimulating and rewarding, we will gradually find ourselves getting stimulated and rewarded, increasingly and endlessly. By fighting our inner war wholeheartedly, we all can become the ultimate daredevils.

 

Think it over:

  • What is wrong with most daredevilry?
  • Why is the Gita’s focusing on lust as the enemy revealing?
  • How can we see our inner war positively?

 

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03.37 The Supreme Personality of Godhead said: It is lust only, Arjuna, which is born of contact with the material mode of passion and later transformed into wrath, and which is the all-devouring sinful enemy of this world.


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