Manah Sodhanam -Verse 10

We saw how Lord Krishna himself attests to the practice of inquiry here. The 10th verse is like a promise that we make to ourselves to consciously practice self inquiry to remove the impurities of mind, like anger, fear, likes, dislikes etc.

ETAD  BHAGAVATO  VAKYAN  SVATMASUDDHYAIKASIDDHAYE

VICARYATE  MAYA  SAMYA  SRI  HARIRME  PRASIDATAM

Through these lines, we promise to ourselves that " I undertake inquiry into the meaning of these words of Lord, for the sole purpose of gaining purity of mind. May Sri Hari be pleased with me and bless me."

I am really amazed by this line. We are saying here that we will inquire into the meaning of the Lord's statement to the best of our ability. While we have already seen that we have to have full faith in the words of the Vedas and the teachings of our Guru, here the text says that we have to inquire into it. Learning biology was something that I so enjoyed in school -especially botany. You know why? Because, we can actually see for ourselves the various forms of leaf arrangement, petal arrangement, seed arrangement etc. My friends and I used to pick each and every flower on our way to school and call out the petal arrangement in that flower, For that matter, am sure we all would have felt a bit of amazement when the theories that we learnt in the physics book unfold in front of our eyes in the physics lab. I guess we can somewhat compare that feeling to what we will experience when we actually get to know what our Vedas talk about the self. Right?

To really know and appreciate the teachings of the Vedas and our Guru, we must first put in enough and more effort to understand what exactly they are talking about. Let me again draw a parallel with our studies. I really enjoyed studying at school. I truly understood what I was learning and even now, I can recollect most of the theories and formulas. But then, I went to engineering college. I hated being there and I barely understood the purpose of all the subjects that I studied. Or rather, I must say that I mugged up my lessons purely for the purpose of passing my exams. I didn't enjoy or even try to understand what I was studying. As a result, I can't recollect even the names of more than half of the 48 papers that I wrote during the course of the 4 years. What a waste of my time and my parents money. 

We can see the parallel here I hope. Unless we really put in an effort to understand what we are studying, we can never know the true meaning of what we are seeking. And this, requires tremendous discipline, steadfastness, consistency and a true desire to know the supreme Truth. Hari Om!