10.41: Our heart deserves more than a consolation prize

Our heart is flooded with many desires that promise happiness. However, most of these desires are unfulfillable due to the limitations of time and resources and other practical constraints. Nonetheless, desires are our primary driving agents without which our lives would become insipid, if not inert. So, we hate to resign ourselves to the reality that our desires are unfulfillable, instead, we wed our lives to fulfilling our desires partially: among our many desires, we try to fulfill as many as possible and within each desire, we try to fulfill it as much as possible. But such partial fulfillment never satisfies us; it is like a consolation prize for the heart, a consolation prize that barely fills a small corner of the inner void.

Gita wisdom offers us a way to provide our hearts something much better that a consolation prize: the champion prize. The Bhagavad-gita (10.41) describes that any worldly object that evokes our desires gets its attractional potential from a spark of Krishna’s supreme attractional potential. As the attractional potential of any such object is just a fragmental, if not infinitesimal, portion of Krishna’s attractional potential, the fulfillment provided by even the best of such worldly objects is fragmental, if not infinitesimal. But if we redirect our heart’s desires from worldly objects to the supreme other-worldly object, Krishna, then he mercifully makes himself fully and joyfully manifest to us in our own hearts, filling and flooding it with satisfaction.