When our life has no higher purpose, whatever promises of pleasures controls and drags us. For example, if we have nothing important to do on an evening and a friend invites us somewhere where we aren’t much interested in going, we may just go along with that.

The various forms of infatuation, obsession and addiction that we see in today’s society, be that to lethal substances such as drugs or to relatively lesser things such as mobile phones and internet or shopping – all these are result of our spiritual desolation.

The Bhagavad-gita (16.08) says that when we reject life’s spiritual dimension, then worldly gratification becomes our life’s only purpose because no other purpose makes any sense.

Nowadays, a whole generation, indeed a whole society, is getting more and more infatuated by worldly obsessions. Even if therapists try to get people free from one obsession and even if they succeed in getting people freed, still, those freed soon succumb to another obsession.

Unless we address the spiritual desolation that makes us vulnerable to the pull of sensual gratification, we will not be able to become free from obsession with the worldly no matter how trivial or how harmful it may seem to be.

The spiritual desolation that is gnawing and eating the vitals of humanity from within can be addressed through spiritual education and spiritual experience. The Bhagavad-gita provides us a systematic understanding of life’s non-material dimension, and it provides a process of yoga especially bhakti-yoga by which we can get practical experience of life’s spiritual side, of the reality and the serenity and the ecstasy that is available in devotional connection with Krishna, and thereby we can remove the spiritual desolation. When that root of spiritual desolation is hacked, then all the shoots of sensual obsessions will fall down automatically and will not rise again.