The Gita shows the best peak to seek and the best route to reach it

All of us need something to live for, some target to achieve, some mountain peak to seek.

Materialistic culture offers us many peaks –wealth, sex, power, position and prestige, for example. But all these peaks are unfulfilling; they leave us perpetually dissatisfied, constantly craving for more.

Gita wisdom offers us a new peak, the best peak: the peak of pure spiritual love and the unlimited happiness therein.

However, for those habituated to living materialistically, such a spiritual peak can appear remote, forbidding and inaccessible. In the Bhagavad-gita (06.38), Arjuna metaphorically voices this apprehension of spiritual neophytes: if a small cloud leaves its present cloud cluster desiring to join another cloud cluster, what is the guarantee it won’t be blown away by the winds of temptations, left forever stranded in no-man’s-land (or in this metaphor no-cloud-sky)?

The guarantee is the mercy of Krishna, who (06.40) assures that spiritual trekkers will never be lost either in this world or the next.

Krishna’s mercy doesn’t come as an abstract promise; it comes as tangible aids for the trek. He provides us a map of the terrain in the form of the Gita’s clear philosophical understanding of matter and spirit. Further, the map also contains many well-charted routes in the form of the various yoga systems that take our consciousness from matter to spirit. Moreover, by revealing the all-attractiveness of Krishna and the sweetness of devotion to him, the Gita’s map highlights bhakti-yoga as the most recommended route. And the strongest endorsement for bhakti-yoga is that Krishna himself becomes the trek guide, counseling devotees from within the heart (10.10).

With all these supports, we can surely succeed in our trek to the spiritual peak if we just embark on it enthusiastically with a spirit of adventure.

Bhagavad Gita Chapter 06 Text 38

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