INTRODUCTION TO THE SONG OF ASHTAVAKRA: THE MYSTERY OF AWARENESS! ❝ The most unique conversation that has ever taken place on this planet ❞ ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar Ashtavakras words begin after almost everything else has been said. They barely touch the page. They are often on the point of vanishing. My child, you can talk about holy books all you like. But until you forget everything, you will never live in your heart. Understanding the vanity of scripture, I hardly expected Ashtavakra to solve in a single epiphany the mystery of awareness. And yet, as I read his spare and simple verses, I felt that here at last were words which in some measure consumed my astonishment. They spoke so directly, and so modestly. They seemed so austere, and yet so generous. I found myself once more a child, tipped between the sea and the sky, but hearing now in the winds exuberance a clearer music, touching the heart of the ultimate mystery. What is the rising or the vanishing of thought? What is the visible world, or the invisible? What is the little soul, or God Himself? Awareness. Pure awareness. The clear space, the sky, the heart of awareness! It is written as a dialogue between an Emperor Janaka, the Father of Sita, and his Guru, Ashtavakra. However the Gita [Song] has only one voice, Ashtavakras, a voice of singular compassion and uncompromised clarity. He is not concerned to argue. This is not speculative philosophy. It is a kind of knowledge. Ashtavakra speaks as a man who has already found his way and now wishes to share it. His song is a direct and practical transcript of experience, a radical account of ineffable truths. He speaks, moreover, in a language that is for all its modesty physical and direct. He is not abstract, though some translations, laboring to render his special terms faithfully, make him sound difficult, even abstruse. On the contrary, Ashtavakra is very simple. We are all one Self. The Self is pure awareness! Everything else is an illusion: the little self, the world, the universe. All these things arise with the thought I, that is, with the idea of separate identity. The little I invents the material world, which in our ignorance we strive hard to sustain. Forgetting our original oneness, bound tightly in our imaginary separateness, we spend our lives mastered by a specious sense of purpose and value. Endlessly constrained by our habit of individuation, the creature of preference and desire, we continually set one thing against another, until the mischief and misery of choice consume us. But our true nature is pure and choiceless awareness. We are already and always fulfilled. It is easy, says Ashtavakra. You are the clear space of awareness (cidakasa), pure and still, in whom there is no birth, no striving, no I. Then how do we recover our original awareness? How do we dispel the illusion of separation? Some commentators suppose that Ashtavakra is really not concerned to answer these questions. For them, this Gita is a transcendent confession too pure to be useful. Others see it as earnestly didactic, a manual of conduct. Both are right. Ashtavakra is indeed wild, playful, utterly absorbed in the Self. Since words are of the mind, which arises only to obscure awareness, words are indeed folly. And who would teach folly? Ashtavakra would. His is an eminently compassionate and practical madness. Even while cutting the ground from under our feet, he shows us at every turn what to do. With a crazy solicitude, he tells us how to end our Self-estrangement. Be happy. Love yourself. Dont judge others. Forgive. Always be simple. Dont make distinctions. Give up the habit of choice. Let the mind dissolve. Give up preferring and desiring. Desire only your own awareness. Give up identifying with the body and the senses. Give up your attachment to meditation and service. Give up your attachment to detachment. Give up giving up! Reject nothing, accept nothing. Be still. But above all, be happy. In the end, you will find yourself just by knowing how things are. It would be perverse and humorless to suppose that just because Ashtavakra, with his irreducible nondualism, considers meditation merely a distracting habit, he means us to abandon our practice. Of course, from the perspective of unconditional freedom, where nothing makes any difference, meditation seems a comically self-important waste of time. But Ashtavakra makes it plain. The moment a fool gives up his spiritual practices, he falls prey to fancies and desires. God help the seeker who presumes that since he is already and always fulfilled, he can give up trying. It is all a matter of knowing. We are all indeed already perfect, but until we know it, we had better deal with our ignorance, and that cant be done just by listening to words. It requires sadhana, trying, doing what we do not wish to do. It means long, hard self-effacing work. The heart of Ashtavakras advice is not to give up our practice, but to abandon our strenuous indolence. Striving is the root of sorrow, he says. But who understands this? Look at the master, he says. Who is lazier? He has trouble even blinking! He certainly does not run around puffing himself up looking for God or liberation, busily making excuses for not finding himself. Dealing with our ignorance also means, for almost all of us, finding someone like Ashtavakra to help us. We cannot easily break the spell ourselves. Here again, Ashtavakra is very practical. At least half of the book describes the nature of the master, the man who has found his way. It is an austere and enchanting portrait. The master is a child, a fool, a man asleep, a leaf tumbling in the wind. Inside, he is utterly free. He does exactly as he pleases. Rules mean nothing to him. He doesnt care who makes fun of him, because he is always playing and having a wonderful time. He lives as if he had no body. He seems to walk on air. He is unsmudged, like the clear sky or the smooth and shining surface of a vast lake. Because we are subject to the dualities which he has transcended, we glimpse his nature only through paradox. He sees but he sees nothing. He sees what cannot be seen. He knows but he knows nothing. He sleeps soundly without sleeping. He dreams without dreaming. He is busy, but he does nothing. He is not alive, nor is he dead. His secret, and the ultimate paradox, is that he stands on his own. He is completely by himself (svasthya). Only by an absolute independence (svatantrya) has he discovered his absolute oneness with all things. Who was this Ashtavakra, this uncompromising poet and saint? Since Ashtavakras whole point is that individual identity is an illusion, it is perfect irony that the only certain thing we can say about him is that he was not Ashtavakra. Though he casts his verses as a debate, there is, as I have said, no real dialogue. Only one voice is heard, speaking through the assumed character and with the borrowed yet potent authority and special facelessness of Ashtavakra. And it is entirely appropriate that the real master of the Gita remain forever unknown since, as he has Ashtavakra say of himself, for what he has become there is no name. We not only know next to nothing about him, we cannot even be sure when he lived. Sanskrit was so static, especially after Paninis account of it became prescriptive, a little before Christ, that its literature is hard to date on linguistic evidence alone. Since we have only the slimmest literary, historical, or philosophical evidence besides, it is very hard to date the Ashtavakra Gita with any accuracy. Ashtavakra ends his Gita with a litany of self-dismissive questions, all of them utterly rhetorical. What is good or evil? Life or death? Freedom or bondage? Illusion or the world? Creation or dissolution? The Self or the not-Self? The Sanskrit literally asks where? rather than what? Where is the little soul, or God Himself? Within the ever-fulfilled and ubiquitous Self there is no place for these or any distinctions. There is no place even for spiritual enquiry. Who is the seeker? Ashtavakra asks. What has he found? What is seeking and the end of seeking? These final questions dissolve even the voice which asks them. Who is the disciple, and who the master? With this last gesture of self-erasure, the nameless master is finally free to declare his real identity, which he shares unconditionally with all beings. For I have no bounds. I am Shiva. Nothing arises in me. In whom nothing is single, nothing is double. Nothing is, Nothing is not.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 04:27:51 +0000
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