Desirelessness, peace, and the mercy of Kṛṣṇa
How a detached mentality, the performance of duties, and trust in Kṛṣṇa lead us beyond anxiety and temporary happiness.
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In the Caitanya Caritāmṛta (Madhya 19.149), it is mentioned:
“Because a devotee of Lord Kṛṣṇa is desireless, he is peaceful. Fruitive workers desire material enjoyment, jñānīs desire liberation, and yogīs desire material opulence; therefore they are all lusty and cannot be peaceful.”
This verse calls our attention to a very important topic: the real path to happiness.
Many think of happiness in terms of money. They work hard, thinking that more money will bring them more happiness, but we see that not many actually become happy through this process. Not only is money difficult to come by, but even when one’s economic situation factually improves, there is still no guarantee of happiness.
One of the central problems is that no matter how much we have, we will always look around and see someone who has more. This explains why even billionaires don’t stop working. They continually try to get another billion, then another. A second factor is that having something does not mean it is ours eternally. Therefore, we are always in anxiety, thinking we may lose it. Even after securing money and other assets, we need to continue working as hard, if not more, to maintain it. This brings anxiety that also prevents us from being happy.
Then, there is a third problem: eventually we lose it. Nothing is eternal here. We may lose it during our lives or at death, but loss is guaranteed, and loss means suffering. Therefore, achieving a certain position in this world is more like a loan: we get something now, but it comes at the cost of suffering later.
The only way to become fully happy and peaceful is by giving up material desire, because this is what allows us to become fully happy on the spiritual platform.
On the spiritual platform, these three problems do not exist. First, anything that is obtained on the spiritual platform is ours forever. It is never lost. When Viṣnu blessed Dhruva with his own spiritual planet, Dhruvaloka, the passage clearly mentions that this planet is his forever, surviving even the final annihilation of the universe. In the spiritual platform, there is no separation; there is no degradation, and it is always better than we expected.
Understanding this point, the next question is: How to become desireless? How is this even possible?
The answer is that this is possible on the platform of Kṛṣṇa consciousness. As Prabhupāda explains in his purport to text 149:
“One who simply understands that throughout the entire universe Kṛṣṇa is the supreme enjoyer and beneficiary of all kinds of sacrifices, penances and austerities, which should be performed only to attain His devotional service, that Kṛṣṇa is the Supreme Being and thus the proprietor of all the material worlds, and that Kṛṣṇa is the only friend who can actually do good to all living entities (suhṛdaṁ sarvabhūtānām) — one who understands these three principles about Kṛṣṇa immediately becomes desireless (niṣkāma) and therefore peaceful.”
If one comes to this niṣkāma platform, one can live happily even here in the material world. If one comes to the platform of love for Kṛṣṇa, material things become stale, and one stops desiring them without a separate effort. A hungry person may dream about bread, but one who has a pizza finds dry bread unattractive.
Being free from desires, a pure devotee always remains in contact with Kṛṣṇa, and therefore, his stay in the material world is merely technical. We may say that he has a material body and lives with us, and this may be technically correct, but in practice he is already living in the spiritual world, away from the miseries we face here. He may be living with us, but his experience is radically different.
One question we can have at this point is that although it is relatively easy to understand that money in itself doesn’t bring happiness, it is much harder not to desire material happiness in the form of health, family, friends, etc. Not many would agree to live a solitary life of hardships, even if promised eternal happiness.
The point is that this is not necessary. We don’t need to reject our family or give up health; we just need to give up the idea that these are prerequisites for our happiness, because these things are also temporary, just as money or property. We may be attached to our family, but eventually our parents pass away, the children grow up, economic crises wipe out our savings, etc. Similarly, health inevitably goes away as we become older. Affection is natural, but if our happiness is connected with things remaining as they are, we will inevitably have to experience suffering.
What is the solution then? We need to learn to observe things without being attached, understanding that they are temporary. There is something to be learned, and there are goals to be achieved, but the situation in itself will pass, and there is no way to stop this process.
In the Gītā, Kṛṣṇa gives us a practical process to achieve that: cultivate our Kṛṣṇa consciousness while simultaneously performing our material duties. Contrary to what one may think at first, performing our duties does not make us more attached; it’s the opposite. Performing our duties, acting dutifully as a husband, wife, father, mother, etc., helps us to see family life and other situations in this world as a responsibility and not just as a form of enjoyment. A man may chase women in the street as long as he has the idea he can enjoy them freely, but when he is forced to think in terms of marriage and responsibility, the attitude immediately changes.
A useful comparison is a job because it invokes a similar detached mentality. We go to work every day, and we experience happiness and challenges there. We don’t deliberately try to avoid relationships with colleagues, and we build a whole story there. However, when retirement comes, we don’t lament. On the opposite, we welcome it, seeing it as an opportunity to finally do the things we were unable to do previously because the job was occupying so much of our time. Similarly, if we follow the formula of Kṛṣṇa consciousness combined with detached work Kṛṣṇa gives us in the Gītā, we can go through life cultivating a higher taste, and, when the time to go arrives, we will be able to see it with the same detached mentality, seeing it as an opportunity to finally serve Kṛṣṇa without obstructions.
We can develop a similar detached mentality in relation to health. We tend to think that health is a natural situation, something to be expected, and to have some pain or disease is unnatural, something that has to be solved. This is actually correct in the spiritual platform if we consider our original nature as souls. The soul is always healthy, happy, and blissful. The problem is that we try to apply the same expectancy to the material body, which has a different nature.
When we understand that pain, suffering, and anxiety are actually the nature of this world, we don’t become surprised when they come. We do what is reasonable to try to maintain the body and mind in a healthy condition so we can perform our activities, but we don’t become surprised when difficulties appear. We can thus face pain with a similar detached mentality: “I have pain. Yes, that is what having a material body means. That is how it is.”
The question then is not having pain or not, but whether something can be done or if this is simply the way it is. If that is the way it is, then we may just accept the condition and continue our lives, seeing that by our practice of Kṛṣṇa consciousness, we are gradually threading the path that will make us free from it.
If instead we become focused on the pain, we may end up living inside the doctor’s office, and we may end up experiencing much more suffering due to side effects of medications, repeated interventions, and constant anxiety.
A final question is why devotees have to experience material difficulties at all. Why can’t Kṛṣṇa just make everything easy for them? There are several complementary answers here. One is that difficulties are just the nature of this world, and they are thus unavoidable for anyone who comes here, just as heat is inseparable from a visit to the Sahara desert. Another point, however, is that Kṛṣṇa sees in the long term, and thus His arrangements have other priorities apart from mere immediate comfort. The point is not to make prison comfortable, but to get out of it.
For example, Citraketu was the king of the Vidyādhara planet. He was living in great opulence, with many beautiful women around him. Because he was a pure devotee, he remained pure even in this situation, using his time to always chant the holy names. The question is that, as a demigod, his life was extraordinarily long, and he would have to wait all this time before having an opportunity to go back home, back to Godhead. Kṛṣṇa, however, found a shortcut. He inspired Pārvatī to curse him to become a demon so he could quickly take a last birth as Vṛtrāsura, be killed by Indra, and then go back to Godhead.
Hearing the story, one may question how Kṛṣṇa could allow his devotee to be cursed and become a demon, but that was Kṛṣṇa’s arrangement to get him out of jail. Even as a demon, Citraketu remained perfectly Kṛṣṇa conscious, and when he was finally freed from his material body, he was ready to depart.
Similarly, Prabhupāda lost his business and lost all his money. Kṛṣṇa simply wanted him to do something much better, becoming the Ācārya of the Kṛṣṇa Consciousness movement instead of remaining with a family that was not seriously interested in Kṛṣṇa consciousness. This can give us the right perspective when we also have to face difficulties.
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