Philosophy and Religion / Yoga Vāsistha / Yoga-Vāsistha (6.2): Nirvāna-Prakarana

Válmiki

Yoga-Vāsistha, Book 6: Nirvāna-Prakarana (On ultimate extinction) - part 2. Chapter 25 - Vasistha's Admonition to Manki

Vasistha said: Consciousness ¹, their reflection, the desire of having them and their imagination, are the four roots of evil in this world; and though these words are meaningless, yet considerable sense is attached to them ²; as the four sources of knowledge.

Know that knowledge ³ is their reflexion also, which is the seat ⁴ of all evils; and all our calamities proceed therefrom, as thickly as vegetation springs out of the vernal juice ⁵.

Men garbed in the robes of their desires, walk in the dreary paths of this world, with very many varieties of their actions ⁶, as there are circles drawn under a circles ⁷.

But these aberrations and wanderings over the earth, are at an end to the wise together with their desires; as the moisture of the ground, is dried up and diminishes at the end of the vernal season.

Our various desires, are the growers of the very many thorny plants and brambles in the world; as he vernal moisture is the cause of growing the thick clumps of kadalī or plantain trees.

The world appears as a dark maze to the mind, that is cloyed in the serum of its likerish appetites; as the ground is shaded under the bushy trees, by the sap supplied by the vernal season.

There is nothing in existence except the clear and vacuous intellect, as there is nothing in the boundless sky, beside the hollow vacuity of the air. ⁸

There is no intelligent soul beside this one, and all else is the everlasting reflexion of this one alone; This it is which is styled ignorance and error, and the world also.

He is seen without being seen, and is lost upon being seen, ⁹. On looking, to it an unreal or evil spirit appears to sight instead of the true and holy spirit, like ghosts and gob­lins appearing before children. ¹⁰

It is by rejecting all visible sights, the understanding views the one essence of all, and all things dwindle into it, as all the rivers on earth, run and fall into one universal ocean. ¹¹

As an earthen were cannot be without its earth; so all intelligent beings, are never devoid of their intelligence or the intellect. ¹²

Whatever is known by the understanding, is said to be our knowledge; but the understanding has no knowledge of the unknowable, nor want of understanding can have any knowledge, owing to their opposite natures. ¹³. ¹⁴

As there is the same relation of knowledge between the looker, his seeing and sight; ¹⁵; so it is omniscience of Brahma which is the only essence. (Sāraikarasyam), all else is as null as an aerial flower (Kha puspa) which never exists.

Things of the same kind bear an affinity to one another, and readily unite in one ¹⁶; so the world being alike to its notion, and all notions being alike to the eternal ideas in the mind of God, the world and the divine mind, are certainly the same thing and no other.

If there be no knowledge or notion of wood and stone on us, then they would be the same as the non-existent things of which we have no notion;- ¹⁷.

When the outward and visible features of things, are so exactly similar to the notions and knowledge of them that we have in our minds; therefore they appear to be no other than our notions or knowledge of them. ¹⁸

All visible appearances in the universe, are only the outstretched reflexions of our inner ideas; their fluctuation is as that of the winds, as their motion is as that of the waters in the ocean.

All things are mixed up with the omnipresent spirit, as a log of wood is covered over by lac­dye; both of which appear to the mixed together to the unthinking, but both are taken for the one and same thing by the thinking part of mankind; ¹⁹.

The idea of reciprocity is unity, and the knowledge of mutuality is union also; such as the interchange of water and milk, and so the correlation of vision and visible; and not as the union of the wood and lac-dye with one another. ²⁰

The knowledge of one's egoism is his bondage, and that of his unegoism is his emancipation from it; thus one's imprisonment in and enfranchisement from the confines of his body and the world; being both under his subjection, why is it that he should be slack to sit himself at freedom from his perceptual tharldom?

Like our sight of two moons in the sky, and our belief of water in the mirage, we believe in the reality of our egoism, which is altogether an unreality. ²¹

The disbelief in one's self or his egoism, removes his meity (māmatā) or selfishness also; and it being possible to everyone to get rid of them, how is it that he should be ignorant of it?

Why do you maintain your egoism only, to be confined in the cell of your body, like a plum drowned in a cup of water, or like the air confined in a pot? Your relation to god is to be no other but like himself and to be one with him, is to have the reciprocal knowledge of yourself in the likeness of God ²².

It is said that the want of reciprocal knowledge, makes the union of two things into one ²³; but this is wrong in both ways, because neither does any dull material thing or any spiritual substance, lose its own form ²⁴.

Neither is force converted into inertness ²⁵, from the indestructibility of their nature, and whenever the spiritual is seen or considered as the material, it becomes as duality, and there is no unity in this view of the two. ²⁶

Thus men being under the influence of their desires, and beset by their vanities of various kinds ²⁷ are going on downward still, as a stone torn from the head of a cliff, falls from precipice to precipice headlong to the ground.

Men are as straws carried here and there by the current of their desire, and whirled about in its eddy; they are overtaken by and overwhelmed in an endless series of difficulties which impossible form to enumerate..

Men being cast like a ball flung from the palm of fate, are hurried onward by their ardent desires till they are hurled headlong into the depth of hell; where being worried and worn-out with hell torments, they take other forms and shapes after lapses of long periods, ²⁸.

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