First Blog - Extracts from Bhagvada Geeta during my Vedanta class

I start my new blog with some verses from the Bhagavad Geeta Chapter 13.

I had a chance to understand and listent to these at one of the Vedanta discourses at Bandra ( i shall mention about it more later) . I do find it very difficult to actually try to implement or practise all or many of these in todays real life. But to a knowledge seeker listening to such spiritual words gives answers to some undecissive questions which ones mind and inner self often debates within.

Verse 1-2. Arjuna said: O my dear Krsna, I wish to know about prakrti [nature], purusa [the enjoyer], and the field and the knower of the field, and of knowledge and the end of knowledge. The Blessed Lord then said: This body, O son of Kunti, is called the field, and one who knows this body is called the knower of the field.

Verse 3. O scion of Bharata, you should understand that I am also the knower in all bodies, and to understand this body and its owner is called knowledge. That is My opinion.

Verse 4. Now please hear My brief description of this field of activity and how it is constituted, what its changes are, whence it is produced, who that knower of the field of activities is, and what his influences are.

Verse 5. That knowledge of the field of activities and of the knower of activities is described by various sages in various Vedic writings--especially in the Vedanta-sutra--and is presented with all reasoning as to cause and effect.

Verse 6-7. The five great elements, false ego, intelligence, the unmanifested, the ten senses, the mind, the five sense objects, desire, hatred, happiness, distress, the aggregate, the life symptoms, and convictions--all these are considered, in summary, to be the field of activities and its interactions.

Verse 8-12. Humility, pridelessness, nonviolence, tolerance, simplicity, approaching a bona fide spiritual master, cleanliness, steadiness and self-control; renunciation of the objects of sense gratification, absence of false ego, the perception of the evil of birth, death, old age and disease; nonattachment to children, wife, home and the rest, and even-mindedness amid pleasant and unpleasant events; constant and unalloyed devotion to Me, resorting to solitary places, detachment from the general mass of people; accepting the importance of self-realization, and philosophical search for the Absolute Truth--all these I thus declare to be knowledge, and what is contrary to these is ignorance.

The above verses have been covered in the 2 sessions of the vedant i have attended so far. There shall be more to come as i attend more such sessions.

Hitesh Ramchandani.