Oblivious – LI = Obvious

Nothing is as amazing as our obliviousness to the reality whose obviousness is evident all around us: death. This was the insightful observation of the virtuous monarch Yudhishthira in a famous Mahabharata passage. He uses the word “amazing” as a euphemism for “amazingly dumb.”

The Bhagavad-gita (3.39) throws light on the cause of our incredible obliviousness amidst obviousness: the illusion spread by lust. Lust infatuates us with the illusory conviction that we can and will enjoy life through our senses. And lust protects this conviction by blinding us to all the facts that play spoilsport. This blinding is most fierce and fanciful toward the greatest spoilsport: the fact of death. This perverted fancifulness is evident in our contemporary attitude towards death.

Death is all the more obvious in our times both in the daily news headlines as well as in popular entertainment movies and cartoons. Yet, most of us are more oblivious than ever before to death for we have reduced it to an information item and an entertainment commodity. In a typical action movie, the bullets whiz all around the hero, but somehow never kill him. Likewise, we subconsciously believe that, though the bullets of death may whiz all around us, they will never down us. This belief survives, even flourishes, despite having no supporting evidence and having universal opposing evidence. What can better testify for the power of the illusion induced by lust?

We could put our obliviousness amidst obviousness in a mathematical equation:

Oblivious – LI (Lust-induced Illusion) = Obvious

Gita wisdom informs us that the more we free ourselves from the illusion of lust, the more we realize as obvious a whole new universe of reality to which we were earlier oblivious. This universe includes and extends beyond the fact of death to the fact of our life of love with Krishna that lies beyond the arena of death.