18.63: The Gita transforms the head into a runway for the heart

Our heart longs for love, but our head checks us, warning us that the longing for love will bind us in disappointment and frustration. We see time and again how worldly love survives by misleading lovers into suspending and rejecting their intelligence – and paying a heavy price for it. Sooner or later, their sweet dreams are ruptured and shattered by the power of time as it removes the sheen of worldly charm and leaves behind the gloom of disappointment and frustration.

Gita wisdom invites us to a love of a different kind – a love that asks us not to give up our intelligence, but to go beyond our intelligence. The Gita (18.63) calls upon us to use all of our intelligence to deeply deliberate its message of love – and then to decide for ourselves whether we have it in us to tread its path of love. This bold call for intellectual investigation of its teachings reveals that its message of love far differs from worldly love whose survival requires an intellectual paralysis. The trajectory of the Gita’s message goes as far as our intelligence goes, meaning that its wisdom answers the sharpest of our intelligence’s questions about how and why its love is enduring and fulfilling. But then the Gita’s trajectory supersedes the farthest reach of the intellect – and goes further into the realm of love, individualized love for the personalized divine. The Gita goes through our head to help us discover within a forgotten recess of our heart a love that withstands and transcends the head: love for Krishna, the all-attractive Lord.

No wonder then that the Gita (7.19) indicates that the person who has ascended the highest summit of knowledge discovers there a smooth runway to takeoff on the fight of divine love through voluntary surrender.