Three Gates of Darkness

Krishna boils it down to three. Out of everything that can go wrong with a human being, these are the root causes: lust, anger, and greed.

Lust isn’t just sexual. It’s the compulsive pull toward anything — power, validation, pleasure — that overrides your judgment. It’s the moment when you know you shouldn’t, but the wanting is so loud it drowns out everything else.

Anger feels righteous, which is what makes it dangerous. “I should be angry about this.” Maybe. But anger has a half-life problem. The thing that triggered it passes, but the anger stays. It metastasises. It starts looking for new targets. Road rage. Twitter fights. The simmering resentment you carry toward someone who wronged you years ago.

Greed is the quietest of the three. It doesn’t announce itself. It just whispers “a little more.” Enough is never enough. The person with more money than they could spend in ten lifetimes still working 80-hour weeks — that’s greed operating below the level of consciousness.

Krishna calls these the gates of self-destruction. Not punishment from above — destruction from within. Each one, left unchecked, systematically dismantles the qualities that make life worth living: clarity, peace, connection, purpose.

The instruction is direct: abandon these three. Not manage them. Not moderate them. Abandon them.

Reflect

Which of the three gates — lust, anger, or greed — has the strongest pull on you right now? What would “abandoning” it actually look like in your daily life?