10.11 – Devotional service is the arena to become lost and found

10.11 – Devotional service is the arena to become lost and found

Most people want to get lost in something.

They find life routine and monotonous. Few things appear exciting enough to attract their full attention. Even when things are important, their mind is usually too restless to stay fixed on any one thing for long.

As they are bored externally and distracted internally, they try to lose themselves in something appealing. Movies, spectator sports, video games, alcoholic drinks and narcotic drugs are today’s popular self-forgetting avenues.

However, like everything material, all such means of losing oneself are temporary. They leave one with nothing lasting or transforming. Sometimes a feeling of relaxation. More often, some kind of hangover. If not a headache, then at least an annoyance: why do I have to return to the same dreary daily world?

Gita wisdom offers us a far more rewarding retreat from material reality: the arena of devotional service, wherein we lose ourselves to find ourselves.

When we try to serve and remember Krishna, we connect ourselves with the highest reality. Krishna acting as the eternal sun illumines us with his supreme wisdom, as the Bhagavad-gita (10.11) proclaims. The more we lose ourselves in Krishna through service and remembrance, the greater the inner illumination.

By the light of this divine wisdom, we find ourselves both spiritually and materially. Spiritually, we understand that we are souls, parts of Krishna, meant to delight eternally in his loving service in his abode. We also glimpse that ultimate spiritual happiness.

Materially, we understand our own psycho-physical nature better; we understand how we can best contribute during our stay in the temporary material world. More importantly, we see how we can best negotiate our way through this world so that we can attain the ecstatic eternal world.

Thus by losing ourselves in devotional service, we find ourselves.