Yoga Vasishta - Post 21

 Vasishta speaking:—

Then the two goddesses sat on a cooling village seat, much like the two states of joy and liberation meet in the tranquil spirit of the man knowing the Divine Spirit. By this time Leela had become personified to the form of pure consciousness through her knowledge of meditation. She had become a seer of the three times presenting themselves before her.  She remembered the whole course of her past life and derived pleasure relating the events of her former life and death.

Leela said, “By your favor, O goddess, and by sight of this place, I recollect all that I did and thought of in my past life. Here I grew up to old age, and here I withered and become lean and thin as a skeleton.”

“I was a brahmani here and had my body scratched by dried sacrificial grass (kusa). I was the legal wife of my lord and producer of his race. I was employed milking cattle and churning curd. I had been mother of many sons and a kind hostess to my guests. I was devoted to the service of the gods, brahmins and good people, and rubbed my body with cow milk and ghee.”

“I used to pick out worms from the ears of the milk cow, and was prompt to water the garden of greens with watering pots in hand. Every day I used to go to the lake and get fresh green grass to feed my tender calves. I used to wash and clean the house every morning, and paint the doorway with the white tints of pasted and powdered rice (gundi). I had to correct my servants with gentle rebukes and tell them to keep within their bounds like the waves in the rivers.”

“With my infirm body and ears shaking like dried tree leaves, and supporting myself on a stick, I lived here under the dread of old age.”

As she was speaking in this manner and walking with Saraswati about the village in the valley of the mountain, she was astonished to see her former seats of pleasure, and she showed them to the goddess. “This was my flowery tree garden, decorated by these torn patala plants, and this was my garden alcove of flowering asokas. This is the bank of the pond where the calves were loosely tied to the trees. 

“There I see the altar of my house, so beautifully decorated with flowering vines, clusters of fruits and flowers hanging over its windows. Here lived my husband, whose life in its aerial form has fled to the sky and became lord of the earth reaching the surrounding seas. I remember how he had fostered the fond wish of obtaining royal dignity, and how ardently he looked forward to its attainment. I see, O goddess, his royal dignity of eight days, which had seemed to be so long in duration.”

“I see the soul of my husband in the same form as his kingly state residing in the empty space of this house, invisible to all like the air in the sky, and like the odors borne by the winds. It is in this empty space that his soul is contained within the form of a thumb that contains in its bosom the whole extent of my lord’s realm stretching thousands of leagues in its circumference. I also see the spacious kingdom of my lord in the space of my consciousness which, by the miraculous power of God called illusion (maya), makes room for thousands of mountains.”

“O Goddess, now I wish to see the earthly city of my lord again. Let us therefore turn our course that way, as no place is distant to the resolute.”

Vasishta said:—

Having said so, Leela bowed down to Saraswati and entered the shrine. Then, like a bird, she flew into the air with the goddess. It was a region devoid of darkness and as fair as a sea of moonlight. Then it became as blue as the body of Narayana and as bright as the back of a locust. They passed above the regions of the clouds and winds, then beyond the spheres of the orbits of the sun and moon. 

Passing beyond the spheres of embodied living beings and of the bodiless souls of the dead, they proceeded far and farther to the unknown regions of empty space. 

 Vasishta said:—

There is no beginning, middle or end to that infinite space. It produces nothing, like a barren woman of her offspring. It is only an extended expanse, infinite, calm and without beginning, middle or end, situated in the Supreme Spirit.  Its immensity is as immeasurable as a stone flung with full force from its top. It is impossible for a garuda bird, flying with all his might at full speed over the course of an entire kalpa age, to reach from one end to the other.

Love.