We all go through ups and downs in life. Often we feel we are fine, and that the material world is not such a bad place, but at other times we can suffer quite a lot. When suffering becomes too acute one can even go into depression or simply lose his will to live. In such cases, the deterioration in mental health can lead also to a deterioration in physical health, creating yet another cascading set of problems. How to escape this cycle?

One thing that I learned is that often the best way to help ourselves is to help others because when we help others our attention becomes fixed on them instead of on our own problems. The more we concentrate on our difficulties, the more these difficulties feel real and, interesting enough, the less we concentrate on them, the smaller they become.

All kinds of material suffering are described in the scriptures as illusory. There are two reasons for it to be described like that. The first reason is that they are temporary, coming and going just like the seasons of the year. Now we may be suffering, and a little later we may be enjoying just to suffer again later on. This is an unavoidable cycle as long as we are in this material world. Everyone here spends so much energy trying to reach a comfortable situation, but we all know it’s not easy, if at all possible, and, even if we reach such a situation, it doesn’t last very long.

The second reason material suffering is described as illusory is that it doesn’t really affect the soul in any way, although it can be quite painful to the mind, with which we currently identify. The driver is not the car, but if the car is damaged the driver suffers because he is attached to the car.

An analogy that could be given is that material life is similar to a computer game in many aspects. Although we identify with the gain and loss we experience inside the game and may even feel some mental pain when we lose, it doesn’t at all affect our situation in the “real” world. The game is real in the sense that it was created by someone and we are experiencing it, but at the same time, it’s illusory. As soon as we stop playing, we see that all situations experienced during the game don’t at all affect us in real life.

All this philosophical knowledge may sound quite nice, but what about practical applications? Even if we know all these things, it doesn’t make life any easier. What can we practically do to transcend our material suffering?

Most of the mental pain we experience comes not from the situations themselves, but from our attitude to them. For example, when Suruci stopped Dhruva from sitting on the lap of his father, Dhruva experienced acute pain and anxiety, although all she did was speak some unkind words to him. He could just have laughed at her foolishness, but instead, he took these words to heart, and because of this he suffered. Of course, in the case of Dhruva Maharaja, this ultimately led to a positive outcome, leading him to go to the forest and meet Lord Vishnu, but in our case, it’s not always like that.

Material conditioning and the consequent material suffering ultimately come from selfishness. In the spiritual world, everything is centered on Krsna, while in the material world, we try to center everything on ourselves. Paradoxical as it may seem, the more we focus on our own needs, instead of serving Krsna and on serving others, the more we experience material pain and anxieties, and conversely, the more we focus on serving Krsna and others, the more we reconnect with our original blissful spiritual nature.

From the two, serving others is easier than directly serving Krsna, because serving others gives us immediate feedback, while we can directly associate with Krsna only in a very advanced spiritual platform. Therefore, spending more time serving other devotees, and helping people in general is a very good way to move our consciousness from ourselves to others, and thus improve our condition.

The main point is that such service should be done with happiness. We should find ways to serve others that result in positive interactions and allow us to build relationships, avoiding situations where people just take our service and go away, as well as all kinds of toxic environments. The best way to find that is to find devotees who are genuinely spiritually advanced and just cooperate with them on whatever they are doing. This can work real miracles in our lives.

If it doesn’t work on the first try, we just need to keep searching, since Krsna can always understand our sincere desire from inside the heart and bring us to the right persons.