Tripura Rahasya

Sage Dattatreya said,

Hemalekha continued,

• Just as a yokel unacquainted with the system cannot understand the dazzling lights of the royal audience-chamber at night and so ignores its magnificence at first sight, so it is that you miss the Self.
• Attend dear! Blank darkness was visible after you controlled your thoughts. In the short interval before its appearance and after the control of mind, there remains a state free from the effort to control and the perception of darkness.
• Always remember that state as the one of perfect and transcendental happiness. All are deceived in that state because their minds are accustomed to be turned outward.
• Though people may be learned, skillful and keen, still they search and search, only to be thwarted and they do not abide in that holy state.
• They grieve day and night, without knowing this state. Mere theoretical knowledge of sculpture can never make man a sculptor.
• Though he be a pandit well grounded in the theory and the discussion of the philosophy of the Self, he cannot realize the Self because it is not realizable but already realized. Realization is not attained by going far, but only by staying still; not by thought, but by cessation of thought.
• Effort towards Realization is like the attempt to stamp with one's foot on the shadow cast by one's head. Effort will always make it recede. Just as an infant tries to take hold of his own reflection being unaware of the mirror, so also common people are taken in by their mental reflections in the mirror of the pure, luminous Self and are not aware of the mirror because they have no acquaintance with the Self. Although people understand space, they are not aware of it because they are taken up by the objects in space.