There is a particular cruelty in the low mood, and it is not the pain itself. It is the certainty the mood carries with it that this is now permanent, that the grey has always been here and will not lift, that the version of you who laughed four months ago was a fool or a fraud. Depression does not merely hurt you. It lies to you about duration. It presents itself as a discovery about the nature of existence rather than as a weather system that has moved over your house. And you believe the lie, because while you are inside it there is nothing available to compare it to. So let me put before you what Kṛṣṇa says to Arjuna on that battlefield, and notice one thing above all. He does not begin by disputing the pain. He begins by disputing the timescale.
Winter and Summer: The Gita on Enduring the Mood That Will Pass
The word Kṛṣṇa uses is mātrā-sparśa, the touch of matter, the contact of the senses with their objects. This is not poetry. He is naming a mechanism. Your senses meet the world, the meeting manufactures heat or cold, pleasure or pain, and because a meeting is an event it must have a beginning, a duration and an end, exactly as any event must. He makes the point explicit in Bhagavad-gītā 5.22, where He tells Arjuna that the enjoyments born of contact with the material senses have a beginning and an end, and that the intelligent man does not take his delight in them. Read that slowly, because the same law governs the other side of the ledger. What has a beginning and an end when it is pleasant has a beginning and an end when it is unpleasant. The low mood is not exempt from the physics of its own arising. It came in through a door and it will leave through that same door. And the one to whom all this is happening is not built out of the same material as the thing happening to him. In Bhagavad-gītā 2.13 Kṛṣṇa observes that the embodied soul passes through boyhood, youth and old age within a single lifetime and that the sober man is not bewildered by it, because the one who passes through the changes is not himself the change. Hear now the verse itself.
mātrā-sparśās tu kaunteya śītoṣṇa-sukha-duḥkha-dāḥ āgamāpāyino ’nityās tāṁs titikṣasva bhārata
— Bhagavad-gītā 2.14
Translation: O son of Kuntī, the nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons. They arise from sense perception, O scion of Bharata, and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed.
Purport: Take the words one at a time, because Kṛṣṇa wastes none of them. Āgamāpāyinaḥ, coming and going. Anityāḥ, nonpermanent. He does not say the winter is imaginary. Anyone who has stood in it knows it is not imaginary, and Kṛṣṇa, who set the seasons turning, is not confused about whether cold is cold. He says the winter is dated. It has an arrival written into it and a departure written into it, and both were there before you noticed the frost. Then comes the instruction, tāṁs titikṣasva, tolerate them. Now notice what He withholds. He does not promise Arjuna a warm morning. He promises him the capacity to stand in the cold one without being carried off by it. And He calls him Bhārata, son of a great line, as if to remind the man what he is made of at the moment He asks it of him.
Sense Contact Manufactures Both the High and the Low
Understand next what tolerance is not, because the word has been handled badly and you will be tempted to hear it as an order to grit your teeth and keep quiet. Titikṣā in the Vedic sense is not hardness. In Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 3.25.21 the sādhu is described as titikṣavaḥ kāruṇikāḥ, tolerant and merciful in the same breath, friendly to every living being, peaceful. Tolerance is placed there beside mercy, not beside stone. A man who has gone hard has not become tolerant, he has become numb, and numbness is simply a fourth season, not a release from the weather. Real titikṣā is quieter than that. It is what appears in a person who has stopped demanding permanence from an arrangement that was never built to supply it. He is not clenched, because he is not surprised. When Kṛṣṇa describes such a man in Bhagavad-gītā 2.56 He calls him one whose mind is undisturbed in the midst of the threefold miseries and unelated when happiness comes, free from attachment, fear and anger, and in Bhagavad-gītā 2.57 He adds that this man neither praises nor despises whatever good or evil reaches him. It is not that nothing touches him. It is that he has stopped signing contracts with what touches him. And to the man who arrives at that steadiness Kṛṣṇa attaches a promise so large that it should stop you where you are sitting.
“Kṛṣṇa never promises to remove your winter. He promises you the steadiness to stand inside it until it leaves on its own schedule, and then He calls that steadiness the qualification for immortality itself.”
Titiksasva: Tolerance Is an Instruction, Not a Platitude
Let me say this plainly, without ambiguity. If what you are carrying is clinical depression, if your sleep, your appetite and your thinking have broken down over weeks together, that is a medical condition and it warrants proper medical treatment exactly as a fever does. Go to a competent physician. Stay under it for as long as you are told to. Nothing in this verse and nothing in this teaching tells you to endure a treatable illness without treatment, and if anyone has told you that tolerance means refusing help, they have misread Kṛṣṇa. He legislates about your body. In Bhagavad-gītā 6.16 He states flatly that there is no possibility of becoming a yogī for one who eats too much or too little, who sleeps too much or too little, and in Bhagavad-gītā 6.17 He makes regulated eating, sleeping, recreation and work the means of mitigating material pain. A teacher who issues rules about your dinner and your bedtime does not despise your body. What I place before you here is the soul's dimension of the matter, the part no tablet reaches and no honest physician claims to treat. Take the medicine and take the verse. They are not rivals. And while both work, do the small prescribed thing. Bhagavad-gītā 2.47 gives you a right to the work and never to its result, and in Bhagavad-gītā 9.14 the great souls chant and bow down with determination, not with enthusiasm.
yaṁ hi na vyathayanty ete puruṣaṁ puruṣarṣabha sama-duḥkha-sukhaṁ dhīraṁ so ’mṛtatvāya kalpate
— Bhagavad-gītā 2.15
Translation: O best among men , the person who is not disturbed by happiness and distress and is steady in both is certainly eligible for liberation.
Purport: Read the reward again, because it is not what the subject led you to expect. Kṛṣṇa does not say the steady man will feel better. He says so 'mṛtatvāya kalpate, he becomes eligible for immortality. The endurance of an ordinary grey season is placed by Kṛṣṇa on the very same road as liberation from birth and death. Brahmā says the same thing in Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 10.14.8, that one who waits patiently for the Lord's causeless mercy while bearing the reactions of his own past deeds becomes a rightful claimant to liberation. And in Bhagavad-gītā 14.20 the one who transcends the three modes is freed from birth, death, old age and their distresses. So the hours you are getting through with nobody watching and nobody applauding are not empty hours. They are qualifying hours. He calls Arjuna puruṣarṣabha, bull among men, while asking him only to sit still.
The Steady One Becomes Eligible for Immortality
Now the deepest part of it, and I will not decorate it for you. You cannot manufacture equanimity by resolving to have it. If you could, the instruction would be cheap and every suffering man would have finished with his suffering long ago. Look closely at how Kṛṣṇa describes the man who is unwavering through all the reactions of the material modes in Bhagavad-gītā 14.22 through 14.25, equal in happiness and distress, equal in honour and dishonour, the same toward a lump of earth and a piece of gold. Then look at what He says immediately afterward in Bhagavad-gītā 14.26, that such a person is one who engages in unfailing devotional service in all circumstances. The steadiness is not the cause of the devotion. The steadiness is the residue of it. The reason the winter cannot carry that man off is that he is already holding something over which the winter has no jurisdiction. In Bhagavad-gītā 5.21 the self-realized man is described as enjoying a pleasure within himself, and this is exactly why the outer weather loses its power of veto over him. A man with a fire burning in his house is not indifferent to the cold outside. He is simply no longer dependent on it. And in Bhagavad-gītā 2.20 Kṛṣṇa tells you what you are underneath the whole arrangement, unborn, eternal, undying, not slain when the body is slain. The mood is dated. You are not.
Here is the shelter instruction, small on purpose, because you will not manage a large one. Do not wait for the winter to break before you approach Kṛṣṇa. Approach Him inside it, in whatever voice this day has left. Queen Kuntī prayed in Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 1.8.25 that calamity might come again and again, because calamity was where she met Him and prosperity was where she lost Him. You are standing in her weather. Chant His holy names, Hare Kṛṣṇa Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa Hare Hare, Hare Rāma Hare Rāma, Rāma Rāma Hare Hare, for five minutes, flatly, feeling nothing. Bhagavad-gītā 18.37 warns that the happiness of goodness tastes like poison at first and nectar at the end. Do not judge it by the first mouthful. He promises in Bhagavad-gītā 18.66 to deliver the one who takes shelter of Him, and He sets no condition about how you feel while doing it.
From the Book
This article draws on the Depression chapter of Bhagavad Gita for Everyday Life, my forthcoming book applying Kṛṣṇa’s instruction to the specific afflictions of ordinary life. The chapter treats every verse the Gītā assigns to depression, verse by verse, with the word-by-word meaning and its application to work and family.
Go deeper now: The Steady Sage.
