10.18: Relish the ultimate feast of the heart

Love has its own life, and it needs its own food to survive and thrive. The food that love feasts on is the beauty, the glory and every attractive quality of the beloved.

This universal principle underlying all love is the basis of the primary activities of devotional service: hearing, chanting and remembering Krishna. The more we hear, speak and think about our divine beloved Krishna, the more we feed our fledgling love for him. And the more we nourish our love for Krishna, the more it assumes its own life and speed of growth. It longs to grow faster, thereby making us even more eager to hear about Krishna.

This joyous and glorious cycle – increased contemplation on Krishna and enhanced love for Krishna mutually enriching each other – raises the heart of a devotee to lofty summits of ecstasy.  Though these summits may be presently unknown to us, we can glimpse them by hearing the words of those devotees who are atop the summits. The Bhagavad-gita (10.18) shares with us one such first-person account when Arjuna expresses unabashedly his intense and immense longing to hear Krishna’s glories ceaselessly.

Verses like these can rejuvenate us when we find our mental inertia choking our devotional enthusiasm. These verses remind us that every word of Krishna’s self-revelation is a feast that we are depriving ourselves by giving in to our mental inertia. Thoughts of the feast awaiting us empower our devotional hunger to curb and counter the mental inertia. Once we free ourselves from mental inertia, devotional activities animate not just our body, but also our heart. This heartfelt engagement in devotional activities opens the doorway for us to relish constantly the ultimate feast of the heart.