15.10 – How can we pursue that which we don’t perceive?
Our vision determines our action. If on a road we don’t see a speed-breaker, we won’t slow down and so get jolted. If at a crossroad we don’t see the two ways ahead, by default we will take the only way we see.
Such shrinking of options can happen in our life-journey too. If we don’t see life’s spiritual side, by default we will pursue life’s material side alone.
Of course, our seeing of life’s spiritual side case is not literal, but intellectual. When doctors ask us to see tuberculosis infection by pointing to the patterns of black and white on a chest x-ray, we don’t actually see the disease or the germs. But an intellectual understanding of how a disease affects the patterns on an x-ray enables us to see the disease.
By similar intellectual inference, from the presence of consciousness we can see the soul. Or from the presence of design in the universe we can see the hand of God. We can further clarify and verify such logical inference by scriptural revelation.
However, if we don’t intellectually perceive life’s spiritual side, we just can’t pursue it, as the Bhagavad-gita (15.10) indicates. If we wish to make our spiritual journey steady, we need to ensure that our intellectual perception of spirituality is not one-time, but all-time. By regularly studying and contemplating scripture, we can refresh our spiritual perception. Thereby we will revive our momentum whenever we find ourselves becoming slack in our spiritual pursuit.
The more steadily we perceive, the more diligently we will pursue. Till finally our inner spiritual vision will awaken. Then we will start perceiving spiritual reality as lucidly as we presently perceive material reality. At that time, all doubts and distractions will disappear – and we will march straight and strong to Krishna.
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The foolish cannot understand how a living entity can quit his body, nor can they understand what sort of body he enjoys under the spell of the modes of nature. But one whose eyes are trained in knowledge can see all this.