Today’s culture and media goad us through aggressive ads to collecting – buy this, exhibit this, enjoy this. Goaded thus, millions become shopaholics, compulsive shoppers who shop things they don’t need – a shopping mania afflicts them and makes them buy.

Overall, materialistic culture indoctrinates us into believing that happiness is found in collecting more and more things. However, more than collecting things, we need to be collected. That is, we need to collect our thoughts and focus them constructively. If our own thoughts are running in a hundred different directions, we can’t be happy, no matter how much we collect. Why not? Because our fragmented thoughts will keep going to things over which we have no control, forcing us to crave for what we don’t have and being dissatisfied with whatever we do have. The Bhagavad-gita (02.66) cautions that those who are disconnected from spiritual consciousness can have neither peace nor happiness for their mind and intelligence is unsteady.

Instead of spending so much of our energy in collecting things, we can focus our energy on collecting our thoughts. Meditation and devotion help us to collect our thoughts, though the materialistic perspective which focuses on collecting things will consider these practices worthless.

Once we are well-connected, we can decide what all we need to collect. By our inner connection with Krishna, we get the internal security that protects us from the compulsive collecting that characterizes those who are internally insecure.

When we are connected, we are collected. When we are connected through a calm mind and a clear intelligence with Krishna, then our thoughts stay collected and focused on constructive things in his service. Thus, we can be satisfied with what we right now have and also intelligently decide where to invest our energies.