FROM
THE GREAT TEACHERS
The Gita is a gate
opening on the whole world of spiritual truth and experience; and the
view it gives us embraces all the provinces of that supreme region.
Sri Aurobindo
When disappointment stares me in the face
and all alone I see not one ray of light, I go back to the Bhagavad
Gita. I find a verse here and a verse there, and I immediately
begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming tragedies—and my life has
been full of external tragedies. If they have left no visible, no indelible
scar on me, I owe it all to the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita.
—Mahatma Gandhi
The Gita teaching applies to every
level of spiritual seeker. Therefore, it may be described as the heart
of Vedanta—its very essence… The Gita is the support of all earnest
seekers and aspirants. The Gita allows them to swim and survive
in this sea of worldly life. The Gita helps them to traverse all
obstacles and reach their goal.
  Whatever the feelings of a person, the meaning
he will derive from the Gita will be commensurate with his level
of spiritual development…The Gita yields different meanings to
different types of people. Based upon the state of your feelings, each
of you will get the meaning which is appropriate to the stage you have
reached on the spiritual path…
There is plenty of water in the ocean, but
the water you can take away from its shores depends upon the capacity
of the vessel that you have brought. The water will be the same: the difference
will only be in the size of the vessel. Likewise, there may be differences
in your feelings, but the Bhagavad Gita is only one. Its
basic nature is the same for all. Its sacred purpose is to transform
humanity into divinity.
—Sri Sathya Sai Baba
Sense control is something
like the wick in the lamp of your heart. Merely having the wick of sense
control is not enough. You must also have the oil, which is the fuel for
the lamp: that is your devotion. And there must be a container, which
holds this oil: that is your detachment. If you have the container, the
oil and the wick, you’ll be able to light the lamp easily. Still, someone
has to come and light it. That someone is God. Once you have detachment,
devotion and sense control, then God will come and light the lamp in your
heart. In the case of Arjuna, it was Krishna who performed this sacred
act of lighting the lamp and revealing the splendor of the Atma jyoti—the
flame of Self—in Arjuna’s heart.
—Sri Sathya Sai Baba
Action(Karma)
Moksha(liberation) is not freedom from action but
freedom in action.
Swami Chinmayananda
—photo by Joy Von Tiedermann
The secret of action is to become established
in equanimity, renouncing all egocentric attachments, and forgetting to
worry about our successes and failures.
—Swami Chinmayananda
  True action does not displace; it transforms.
A change of heart is action. Activity is not action. Action is hidden,
unknown, unknowable. You can only know the fruit.
—Sri Nisagardatta Maharaj
  Do what you believe in and believe in what
you do. All else is a waste of energy and time.
—Sri Nisagardatta Maharaj
  As he acts and as he behaves, so he becomes.
—Brhadaranyaka Upanishad
Engaging himself in the battle for evolution
and inward mastery, a meditator steadily grows out of the shadowy regions
of his own spiritual ignorance and imperfections, to smile forth in luxurious
extravagance into the sparkling sunshine of Knowledge. When the meditator
keeps his mind undisturbed in the roaring silence within, in the white
heat of meditation his mind gets purified, like a piece of iron in the
smithy furnace… Krishna is trying to make an agitated, restless, inquisitive
intellect understand that positive and dynamic Reality—which can and will
be gained, when the mind and intellect are transcended.
—Swami Chinmayananda
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