09.11: Avoid a void

All of us, at sometime or the other in our lives, feel a void within. This sense of incompleteness, even emptiness, in our hearts is due to our lacking a satisfying object for our love. We generally offer our love to the people and things of the world, but experience soon reinforces what we subconsciously know: nothing of this world satisfies our heart’s longing for love. Nonetheless, our longing for love is so indispensable among our core needs that we keep shifting our love from one object to another, hoping to find fulfillment somewhere. Unfortunately, nothing fills the void; in fact, experience enlarges that void as we find more and more objects incapable of filling it.

For some people, this inner void becomes so gigantic that it consumes their entire sense of being – and even their conception of all of existence. Due to being repeatedly disappointed in their attempts to fill the void, they infer mistakenly that the void itself is the undeniable ultimate reality of life. So they make entry into that void the supreme goal of their lives. 

The Bhagavad-gita (9.11) indicates that both these categories of people – the materialists and the voidists – are victims of a root misconception: the assumption that the heart’s void has to be filled by only a worldly, material object. Gita wisdom points us to a non-material, other-worldly object of love: the transcendentally enchanting supreme person, Sri Krishna. When we offer our heart’s love to Krishna, he being eternal and perfect reciprocates beyond our expectations and fulfills our heart’s dreams better than our dreams.

Learning to love Krishna, therefore, is the best way, indeed the only way, to avoid a void within.