Every Pleasure Carries the Womb of Its Sorrow

You know the hour I mean. The evening went well. The food was good, the company was good, the film ran to its end, and then the screen went dark and you were sitting in a quiet room with something gone flat inside you that was not flat two hours before. Nothing bad has happened. Nobody has insulted you. Nobody has died. And still there is a small grey weight in the chest that the evening put there. So you conclude that you chose the wrong enjoyment, or that you need a bigger one, a longer one, a better one next time. Kṛṣṇa tells Arjuna something more useful than that, and more unwelcome. He tells him the flatness was not a failure of the pleasure. The flatness was the pleasure finishing itself.

Duhkha-Yonaya: Every Material Pleasure Carries the Womb of Its Own Sorrow

Take the claim exactly as He makes it, because it is not consolation and it is not a warning about excess. It is a statement about cause. Kṛṣṇa does not say that material pleasures are sometimes followed by sorrow, or that sorrow comes when you take too much of them. He says they are duḥkha-yoni, the womb of misery. A womb does not stand beside the thing it produces. It holds that thing, carries it, and delivers it in due course. So the heaviness that arrives afterwards was not waiting somewhere else and did not reach you by bad luck. It was inside the enjoyment the whole time, growing there while you enjoyed. He says the same thing in other words in Bhagavad-gītā 18.38, where happiness born of the contact of the senses with their objects is nectar at the beginning and poison at the end. Not nectar that later becomes contaminated. Nectar whose end is poison, by its nature. And in Bhagavad-gītā 2.62 and 2.63 He gives the mechanism stage by stage: contemplating the sense object breeds attachment, attachment breeds lust, lust breeds anger, anger breeds delusion, delusion wrecks the memory, and the wrecked memory takes the intelligence with it. One movement, several stages, wholly predictable. Now hear the verse itself.

ye hi saṁsparśa-jā bhogā duḥkha-yonaya eva te ādy-antavantaḥ kaunteya na teṣu ramate budhaḥ

— Bhagavad-gītā 5.22

Translation: An intelligent person does not take part in the sources of misery, which are due to contact with the material senses. O son of Kuntī, such pleasures have a beginning and an end, and so the wise man does not delight in them.

Purport: Take the word budhaḥ seriously. Kṛṣṇa does not say the good man abstains. He says the intelligent man does not delight, because intelligence here is nothing more mystical than the capacity to see a whole event rather than half of one. He supplies the reason in the same breath, ādy-antavantaḥ, these pleasures have a beginning and an end. Whatever begins in time ends in time, and the ending of an enjoyment you have leaned your weight upon has a name, and the name is grief. Notice also saṁsparśa-jā, born of contact. The misery is not born of your weakness, your history or your temperament. It is born of contact itself, of a temporary sense meeting a temporary object. Kṛṣṇa is describing the physics of this world. He is not describing a defect in you.

Why Enjoyment With a Beginning Must Have an End

Now put the principle where you actually live. When the mood drops, you reach. You reach for the screen, the plate, the purchase, the scroll, the sixth episode. I am not going to call that a vice. It is an attempt at repair, and a reasonable one, because the thing you reach for does lift you. That is precisely the difficulty. It works, briefly, and then it charges you. What you bought was never a lift. You bought a lift with a drop fastened to it, sold as one item, the drop delivered later. Kṛṣṇa explains why that account never settles in Bhagavad-gītā 2.59: the object can be taken away, but the taste for the object remains, and a taste that remains will send you back. He gives the picture in Bhagavad-gītā 2.70 of rivers pouring endlessly into an ocean that is never filled, and says peace belongs to the man whom desires enter in that manner, never to the man who runs to satisfy them. In Bhagavad-gītā 16.11-12 He describes people bound in a network of hundreds of thousands of desires, their anxiety immeasurable until the final day. In Bhagavad-gītā 3.37 He names the agent: lust, born of passion, all-devouring. So the real question is not how to enjoy better. The question is whether any happiness exists that does not carry its own ending inside it. Kṛṣṇa answers in the verse standing immediately before this one.

The Intelligent Man Does Not Take Part

So bring this down into your week. First, hear me plainly on one point before anything else, because I will not be misunderstood here. Clinical depression is a medical condition and it warrants proper medical treatment exactly as a fever does. If your sleep, your appetite and your thinking have broken down over weeks, go to a competent physician, and having gone, stay under that care. Do not stop the treatment because you have started chanting. Nothing in the Bhagavad-gītā stands against medicine. Kṛṣṇa Himself legislates in Bhagavad-gītā 6.16 and 6.17 that yoga is impossible for one who eats too much or too little, who sleeps too much or too little, and that regulated eating, sleeping, working and recreation are the very ground on which practice stands. A teaching that rules on your sleeping hours does not despise your body. What I am placing before you is the soul's dimension of the matter, which no tablet reaches and which no honest physician claims to treat. And understand this clearly: nothing said here makes your suffering your own fault. That you reached for relief is not a sin. Every living being reaches. Kṛṣṇa in Bhagavad-gītā 5.23 praises the man who can tolerate the urge of desire and anger, and He calls that man happy, not virtuous. He is not scolding. He is describing an economy and showing you where it leaks.

bāhya-sparśeṣv asaktātmā vindaty ātmani yat sukham sa brahma-yoga-yuktātmā sukham akṣayam aśnute

— Bhagavad-gītā 5.21

Translation: Such a liberated person is not attracted to material sense pleasure but is always in trance, enjoying the pleasure within. In this way the self-realized person enjoys unlimited happiness, for he concentrates on the Supreme.

Purport: Read the words closely. Bāhya-sparśeṣv asaktātmā, unattached to outer contact. Vindaty ātmani yat sukham, he finds the happiness that is in the self. Akṣayam, inexhaustible, without decay. Kṛṣṇa has not asked you to accept less happiness. He has changed where the happiness is manufactured, from outside you to inside you, and everything follows from that change of address. A pleasure imported through the senses must arrive, must be maintained, must be paid for and must depart. A happiness already resident in the self has no arrival and therefore no departure. In Bhagavad-gītā 5.24 He calls such a person antaḥ-sukhaḥ, happy within, rejoicing within, illumined within. In Bhagavad-gītā 6.20-23 He says the man established there is never shaken even in the midst of the greatest difficulty.

Unlimited Happiness Found Within, Not Imported From Outside

Now the deepest part of it, and I will not decorate it. The arrangement is not cruel and it is not a punishment. It is a mercy operating as a design. In Bhagavad-gītā 15.7 Kṛṣṇa says the living entities are His eternal fragmental parts, struggling here with the six senses including the mind. A fragment of the Supreme cannot be filled by anything smaller than the Supreme. If material pleasure could satisfy you permanently, you would settle here permanently, and the fragment would never go home. So every enjoyment is built to run out. The exhaustion is the invitation. Lord Ṛṣabhadeva puts it bluntly to His sons in Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 5.5.1: do not labour day and night for sense gratification, which the dogs and hogs also obtain. Prahlāda Mahārāja says in Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 7.9.45 that the pleasure men prize is the relief of scratching an itch, and that the itch returns. Kṛṣṇa reverses the whole equation in Bhagavad-gītā 18.37, where happiness in goodness tastes like poison at the start and nectar at the end, awakening the self. That is the trade. You give up the sweet opening and you keep the ending. Detachment, understood correctly, is not austerity. It is arithmetic.

So take shelter, and do not wait until you feel better to do it. Kṛṣṇa says in Bhagavad-gītā 7.14 that His divine energy is insurmountable, and that those who surrender to Him cross beyond it easily, which means the crossing was never your strength to supply. Begin where the strength is not required. Chant His holy names: Hare Kṛṣṇa Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa Hare Hare, Hare Rāma Hare Rāma, Rāma Rāma Hare Hare. Chant it flatly if flatly is what you have. This is the happiness that is not imported, because the name is Kṛṣṇa Himself and He is already within you. Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 1.2.6 says the self is completely satisfied only by unmotivated, uninterrupted service to the Lord. And He promises in Bhagavad-gītā 18.66 to deliver the one who surrenders, attaching no condition whatsoever about how that person must feel while doing it.