In our introspective moments, we often sense a void within: a feeling of incompleteness, even emptiness. This void in our heart is due to our not having a satisfying object for our love.
We generally offer our love to the people and things of the world, but experience shows that nothing of this world satisfies our heart’s longing completely. Nonetheless, this longing for love is indispensable among our core needs. So, hoping to fulfill this need somehow or the other, we keep searching for the right object, shifting our love from one object to another. Unfortunately, nothing fills the void; to the contrary, experience enlarges it as more and more objects turn out to be incapable of filling it.
For some people, this inner void becomes so gigantic that it consumes their entire sense of being – it even dominates their conception of all of existence. They infer mistakenly that the void itself is life’s ultimate reality. So they make entering that void their life’s supreme goal.
Both these categories of people – the materialists who live with the void as life’s unavoidable reality and the voidists who live to attain the void as life’s ultimate reality – are victims of a root misconception: the assumption that the only way to fill the heart’s void is by a worldly, material object.
The Bhagavad-gita (09.11) points to the cause of this misconception: they are ignorant of the best non-material other-worldly object of love, the transcendentally enchanting Supreme Person, Krishna. When we offer our heart’s love to him, he being eternal and perfect reciprocates inconceivably and wonderfully, exceeding our expectations and fulfilling our heart’s longing fully and forever.
Learning to love Krishna, therefore, is the best way – indeed the only way – to avoid a void within.
Bhagavad Gita Chapter 09 Text 11
“Fools deride Me when I descend in the human form. They do not know My transcendental nature as the Supreme Lord of all that be.”
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