We all want to do something special, and thereby get some special happiness.

To get this happiness, we need to re-educate ourselves about what is actually extraordinary. Our culture aggressively glamorizes sensual pleasures, especially sex. This makes us believe that doing extraordinary things means to indulge in sensual pleasures in non-conventional ways such as in public view.

However, all sensual pleasures pander to the basic bodily drives for eating, sleeping, defending and especially mating. All living beings pander to these drives, so our indulging in them is utterly ordinary, nothing extraordinary.

Then what is actually extraordinary?

Spiritual love.

Among all species, we humans alone have the capacity to transcend bodily drives and seek non-physical fulfillment. Gita wisdom explains that the best such fulfillment comes through spiritual love. We are all immortal souls and can relish everlasting happiness by loving the supreme eternal being, Krishna. Grabbing the privileged opportunity offered by the human body to love Krishna is truly extraordinary. 

The set of activities that kindle this love comprise the essence of religion. Unfortunately, many people treat religion as a pious tool for fulfilling bodily drives. Thus, they do the extraordinary for the ordinary.

No doubt, an aspect of religion – the tripartite program of dharma, artha and kama – guides us to do even the ordinary in a spiritually progressive way. But to reduce religion to a tool for bodily gratification is regressive; it makes us mistake religion to be impotent or irrelevant: impotent if we don’t get bodily pleasure through it; irrelevant if we get bodily pleasure without it. Worse still, this misunderstanding about the purpose of religion deprives us of its supreme gift: eternal happiness.

Those who do the extraordinary for the extraordinary are truly extraordinary, as the Bhagavad-gita (07.03) indicates. They alone relish life’s most extraordinary happiness.

Bhagavad Gita Chapter 07 Text 03

"Out of many thousands among men, one may endeavor for perfection, and of those who have achieved perfection, hardly one knows Me in truth."