mātrā-sparśhās Tu kaunteya śhītoṣhṇa-sukha-duḥkha-dāḥ
āgamāpāyino ’nityās tāns-titikṣhasva bhārata
BG 2.14: O son of Kunti, the contact between the senses and the sense objects gives rise to fleeting perceptions of happiness and distress. These are non-permanent, and come and go like the winter and summer seasons. O descendent of Bharat, one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed.
Just because the seasons change, we never stop performing our duty. We continue on. This text, tells us that we have to learn to tolerate the ups and downs and learn to not be distracted from our main purpose. We tolerate our failures, we tolerate our success, because both can distract us.
Our sensory perception is designed to do what it does. If we taste something good, we want more. If we smell something nice we want to smell it again. If we see something beautiful we want to keep looking at it. This goes for negative things as well. If we hear some ugly screeching sounds we want it to stop. Here Krishna is saying to Arjuna, don’t worry about these perceptions, just tolerate it. Tolerate not giving in to what they are telling your mind. They are designed for survival. We love sweet foods because sweet foods in nature provided very useful calories when food was scarce. The problem with evolution is that we have changed our environment much faster than evolution has changed our reaction to things. There were no candy bars, soda, cake, or cookies lying around our gathering paths 500 years ago. Food was scare. Especially sweet food. There were no packages of cigarettes or bottles of alcohol rolling around either. There were very few instant gratifications. And even in all of that, 400BC Vyasu had the foresight to give us this advice. Tolerate the changes. Tolerate the urges. Tolerate desires when the mind is designed to desire. And the more you do so, the more those desires fade away.
Why let them fade away? Why do we not want them. He says right there in the text, they are fleeting perceptions of happiness. They are temporary. And once you satisfy one of them, another immediately arises. Over and over and over until you are living your entire life just to temporarily satisfy a desire only to turn around, and do it again. We believe there is more to life than that. There is sustainable happiness outside of all that. Without all that. Within.