The Story of Vitahavya - 3

Sage Vasishtha

Vitahavya continued to contemplate:

O senses, I feel that you have all been dispelled by the light of my admonitions, for you are born of the darkness of ignorance. O mind, surely your emergence as an appearance is for your own grief! See how when you exist, countless beings get deluded and they enter into this ocean of sorrow with all its prosperity and adversity, illness, old age and death; how greed gnaws at all the good qualities and destroys them; how lust or desire distracts and dissipates their energy.

O mind, when you cease to be, all the good and noble qualities blossom. There is peace and purity of heart. People do not fall into doubt and error. There is friendship which promotes the happiness of all. Worries and anxieties dry up. When the darkness of ignorance is dispelled, the inner light shines brightly. Mental distraction and distress cease, just as when the wind ceases to agitate its surface, the ocean becomes calm. There arises self-knowledge within and the realization of truth puts an end to the perception of the world-illusion: infinite consciousness alone shines. There is an experience of bliss not granted to the ignorant who are full of desires. Even as new shoots may arise from burnt leaves, a new life may emerge from this. However, he who would avoid entanglement in delusion once again, rests in self-knowledge constantly. Such are the fruits of your absence, O mind, and there are countless others. O mind, you are the support of all our hopes and desires; when you cease to be, all these hopes and desires cease. You can now choose either to be one with the reality or to cease to be an independent entity.

Your existence as identical with the self and non-different from it, is conducive to happiness, O mind. Hence, be firmly rooted in the realization of your non-existence. Surely, it is foolish to neglect happiness. If you exist as the inner being or consciousness, who will wish for your non-existence? But you are not a real entity; hence your happiness is delusion. You were not real, you came into being through ignorance and delusion, but now through enquiry into your nature and that of the senses and self, you have once again ceased to be. You exist as long as one does not undertake this enquiry. When the spirit of enquiry arises, there is total equanimity or homogeneity. You were born of the ignorance which is the absence of wisdom and discrimination. When this wisdom arises, you cease to be. Hence I salute Wisdom! O mind, you were awakened by many means. Now that you have lost the false characteristic of a min, you exist as the supreme being or the infinite consciousness, freed from all limitation and conditioning. That which arise in ignorance perished in wisdom. In spite of yourself, O good mind, this enquiry has arisen in you; this is surely for the attainment of bliss. There is indeed no min, no mind: the self alone exists, it alone is, there is naught else. I am that self; hence there is naught other than me in the universe. I am the infinite consciousness whose kinetic state alone appears as the universe.