Did the Bhagavad Gita go through you?

The great teacher of Vedanta, prolific writer and commentator on the scriptures and founder of the Chinmaya Mission Swami Chinmayananda would ask his listeners in his pravachans (lectures), “You went through the Bhagavad Gita but did the Bhagavad Gita go through you?”. A profound question indeed. Have you noticed how thirsty the human mind is for that exquisite proverb or pithy saying? When you read the Rumi poem, “Knocking on a door, it opens I have been knocking from the inside”, a chill goes through your spine and immediately you want to write it down in your ‘My documents/Personal/good quotes.doc’ file. People spend decades collecting this ‘mind stuff’ and ‘keep adding to the content of the mind’ as Eckhart Tolle likes to say. But did the Bhagavad Gita go through you? The Upanishads tell us to ‘stop seeking’ because seeking can only get you more knowledge or yet another guru. The real guru only points and lets you experience the truth yourself. In the Bhrigu Valli in the Taittiriya Upanishad, Bhrigu’s father and guru keeps sending him back to the meditation seat everytime Bhrigu comes back to him to relate what he discovered. As a great contemporary saint said, “The language of the body are words, the language of the mind are thoughts, the language of the self is silence”. Everyday just sit in silence for twenty minutes, whatever silence means to you. Sit quietly and watch like a witness everything that happens. The little sounds you hear, the small creak of the wood floor, the spontaneous twitch or move of your index finger, the little itch on your neck that appeared by itself. Realize that life is happening by itself without you doing anything. Tell yourself that everything is just fine (even if it is not). This will change your life as you take the path of least resistance like a leaf floating in a fast flowing stream, collides with one rock then another but moves on downstream till it disappears from view. Wish you much peace and silence.