I had heard a few lectures on Hindu philosophy before I heard Swami Parthasarathy speak in February 1999. I had read the Bhagavad Gita and bits of the Upanishads, but failed to come to grips with either. The fact that I knew no Sanskrit and that even my Hindi was rusty, seemed only part of the problem.What Swami Parthasarathy said, in English, about Vedanta seemed startlingly practical. Something I could relate to, at what was for me a time of crisis. Serious illness within the family had cast a long shadow. Coupled with this was my continuing inability to write; something I had done intermittently but with a fair degree of success for thirty years. My love of reading fiction - one of the great joys of my existence - also seemed to have vanished. I could see my life changing, but I didn't know where it was taking me.Swamiji went back to the Vedanta Academy he has founded near Mumbai. However, I discovered that some of his disciples, who had attended a full-time, three-year residential course at the Academy, took classes on the Bhagavad Gita and Vedanta in different parts of Delhi. The classes were free and anyone could attend them. Their e-mail address is vedanta-edu.org.In the hour-long, weekly Bhagavad Gita class which I joined first, I found just one or two verses being taken up each time. There seemed absolutely no hurry to finish the text. Questions were allowed and answered throughout the lecture, provided they were not too irrelevant, in which case they were answered after the class.I joined a Vedanta class a month later. The text being studied - Vedanta Treatise - is written by Swami Parthasarathy. Swaimiji defines Vedanta as systematic knowledge of life, which explains both your relationship with the world and your true nature, which is divinity. To be effective, this knowledge must be lived an verified at every step by individual experience. As in the Gita class, the pace was unhurried, the atmosphere friendly, the sincerity of purpose undeniable.I do not know at what stage the knowledge I was being exposed to began to permeate my system. Somewhere along the line I stopped wanting the world to change and began trying to change myself. I started realising that like most of us, I'd been looking for happiness in the wrong place - outside of me, whereas it lay within and always had. It dawned on me that the best way to cope with a changing world and my own changing body and mind was to begin to identify with the changeless, innermost aspect of my own self. Now what Swamiji had said in that first lecture I attended - about centuring oneself and keeping a little distance from both body and mind - started making very good sense.With these realisations has come great contentment, and cheer, and energy I didn't know I had. Above all, I feel grateful. To that ancient knowledge that contains the answers to all our dilemmas. To enlightened people like Swamiji who make that knowledge accessible. To his disciples who guide us patiently until we can guide ourselves.It isn't smooth sailing by any means. Old insecurities and negativities are not easy to eradicate. But there is no going back once one has consciously embarked on the journey that eventually takes one home, in the truest sense of the world. Poets and mystics of all religions bear testimony to this.``The end of all our exploring,'' says T.S. Eliot ``Will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time.''
