At long last I’m reading the Bhagavad Gita. This classic Hindu text has been suggested to me many times, but I’ve never picked it up before. Although I’ve long felt familiar with its themes through various lectures and reviews, there’s nothing like actually working with the book itself.

For one thing, it shows me how much of Buddhist philosophy was built on Hindu principles. “Krishna” teaches about human afflictions and their mastery with meditative practice in language that sounds quite similar to the Buddha’s. For some reason, reading the Gita is helping me absorb some important truths that I’ve resisted before now, despite having heard them in Buddhist contexts for years.

The Buddha spoke of desire, anger, and ignorance as the major obstacles to realization. The Gita brings up the same three afflictions and identifies their close relationship. It explicitly points out that anger is the natural outcome of desire, which after all gets thwarted more often than satisfied. Psychologists studying infants have found that at the earliest ages of human life a baby will display what looks like anger if you keep him or her from reaching an enticing toy. And so it goes throughout life: we become angry, even enraged, when the world prevents us from enjoying what we want.

We want respect and the world ignores us; we get mad. We want love and our partner seems distracted; we get mad. We want money and financial institutions drain the system dry; we get mad.

If we never wanted the respect, love, and money in the first place, we’d sidestep a lot of frustration.

The connection between anger and desire seems clear, but the ultimate source of misery is ignorance. We mistakenly believe we can create happiness by getting everything to work out the way we want. Once we find a satisfying relationship, a spacious home, an exciting job, financial security, a happy family, good friends, and worldly recognition, we’ll finally settle down and enjoy living. Problem is, we can seldom get all those planets to line up and stay in place. One or another of our precious spheres will inevitably wobble, gyrate, or escape us completely.

So a life driven by desires is doomed to feel unsatisfying. The world simply does not feed our every whim. And even when a hunger gets sated, the nagging feeling of want returns before long. Seeking happiness by following desires leads to frustration, not happiness.

We should remember that desire can make us ache for many things, material, interpersonal, and philosophical: for possessions, for food, for sex, for love, for power, for conformity, for freedom, for politeness, for justice, for equality, for safety, for health, etc., etc. Some of these hungers are more ethically defensible than others, but the world cannot be expected to consistently satisfy any of them. The failure to recognize this inescapable truth is the base ignorance that underlies most of the world’s problems.

This is all spelled out clearly and poetically in the Gita. It especially resonates with me right now because of my recent inner conflict about writing a book. The main motivation for that project was a need for recognition, not a calling to help others. Both aspects were at work in my psyche, but the egoistic hunger for accomplishment was dominant. I was being driven by desire.

This wish for approval runs very deep in me. As a schoolchild I was often complimented on my intelligence. In college and graduate school, professors continued the flattery. Even though I had few friends, I could always use my supposed intelligence to bolster my self-esteem. But the accolades placed expectations on me that I internalized over time. I began to desire greatness.

One world-renowned surgeon signed a personal note in a copy of his book predicting that my accomplishments would eventually eclipse his career. Very heady praise that now sounds rather poignant, seeing how my climb toward success first stalled and then became a tailspin.

I wanted very much to be a recognized authority, to be acclaimed as brilliant. It was a desire that drove me into fields that promised status but not satisfaction. It kept me from following my truer calling, from finding my essential bliss. It was not my friend.

Desire never is a friend of the soul. It is an outgrowth of animal hunger and the shiny bauble of human ego. It leads to endless cycles of craving, transient fulfillment, and recrudescent craving. It is the engine of addiction and the wellspring of hell.

Of course, recognizing desire’s toxicity doesn’t make it go away. That requires lots of meditative work and deep introspection. It takes time and commitment. I have a long way to go down that road but today, with the words of the Bhagavad Gita ringing in my mind, it seems like I might just find true freedom someday.

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