Yoga Vasishta - Post 28

Leela & Saraswati enter King Viduratha’s Tent; He Remembers His Past Lives; Everything Is within the Temple of the Mountain Brahmin; Discrimination of Error

 

Vasishta said:—When the ladies entered the tent, it appeared like a bed of lotuses. Its white ceiling seemed as graceful as the vault of heaven with two moons rising at once under it. 

 

The cooling and moon-bright radiance of the ladies roused the king from his sleep as if he had been sprinkled with the juice of ambrosia. He saw the forms of two apsaras sitting on two stools, appearing like two moons risen on two peaks of Mount Meru.  

 

The king saw them with wonder and after composing his mind, he rose up from his bed like God Vishnu rises from his bed of the serpent.  Then advancing respectfully to them, with long strings of flowers in his hands, he made offerings of them to the ladies with handfuls of flowers flung at their feet.

 

Leaving his pillowed sofa in the midst of the hall, he sat with folded legs on the ground. Lowly bending his head, he addressed them saying, “Be victorious, O moon-bright goddesses who by your radiance drive away all the miseries and evils and pains and pangs of life, and who by your sun-like beams dispel all my inward and outward darkness.” 

 

Then the goddess, desiring to reveal the ancestry of the king, inspired his minister, who was lying nearby, to relate it to Leela.  Upon waking, the minister saw the nymphs manifested before him, and advancing humbly before them, threw handfuls of flowers upon their feet. The goddess said, “Let us know, O king, who you are and when and of whom you are born.”

 

Hearing these words of the goddess, the minister spoke saying, “It is by your favor, O gracious goddesses, that I am empowered to relate of my king’s ancestry to your kind graces.”

 

“There was a sovereign born of the imperial line of Ikshvaku named Mukundaratha, who had subjugated the earth under his arms.  He had a moon-faced son by name of Bhadraratha, whose son Viswaratha was father to the renowned prince Brihadratha.  His son Sindhuratha was the father of Sailaratha, and his son Kamaratha was father of Maharatha.  His son Vishnuratha was father of Nabhoratha, who gave birth to this my lord of handsome appearance.”

 

“He is renowned as Viduratha and is born with the great virtues of his sire, as the moon was produced of the Milky Ocean to shed his ambrosial beams over his people. He was begotten by his mother Sumitra like the god Guha of Gauri. He was installed king of the realm in the tenth year of his age, owing to his father taking himself to asceticism. He has been ruling the realm with justice since that time, and your appearance here tonight indicates the blossoming of his good fortune.”

 

“O goddesses, whose presence is hard to be had, even by the merit of long devotion and a hundred austerities, you see here present before you the lord of the earth, famed Viduratha. After saying these words, the minister remained silent with the lord of the earth.

 

They were sitting on the ground with folded legs, clasped hands and downcast looks when the goddess of wisdom, by her inspiration, told the king to remember his former births. So saying, she touched his head with her hand and immediately the dark veil of illusion and oblivion was dispersed from over the lotus of his mind.  It opened like a blossom by the touch of the genius of consciousness and it became bright as the clear sky with the rays of his former memories. 

 

By his intelligence, he remembered his former kingdom, of which he had been the sole lord, and recollected all his past play with Leela.  He was carried away by the thoughts of the events of his past lives, as one is carried away by the current of waves, and reflected in himself that this world is a magic sea of illusion.

 

He said, “I have come to know this by the favor of the goddesses, but how is it that so many events have occurred to me in course of one day after my death? Here I have passed a lifetime full of seventy years and remember having done many works and having seen my grandson. I recollect the bygone days of my boyhood and youth, and I remember well all the friends and relatives and all the clothes and attendants that I had before.”

 

Love

 

Yoga Vasishta - Post 27

Rama asked, “How is it possible sage, that the gross bodies of the goddesses, with their limited dimensions, could enter the tent through one of its holes, as small as the pore of a piece of cloth?”

Vasishta answered saying that:—

It is impossible for someone who mistakes himself to be a material body to enter a small hole with that gross body. But it is possible to go anywhere one pleases if he understands that he is only pent up in his physical body like in a cage and obstructed by it in his flight, and if he does not believe that he is confined by his material body but has the true notion of his inner subtle spirit.  He who perceives his original spiritual state to be the better half of his body may pass as a spirit through a chink. But whoever relies on the lesser half of the material body cannot go beyond it in the form of his intellect.

This intellectual, consciousness body of beings is of the nature of an uninterrupted understanding, ever calm and serene in its aspect. It is possessed of its intellectual form from before the creation of the visible world, and being all comprehensive as emptiness itself, it understands the natures of all beings.  It is as unreal as water in a mirage, but by its intelligence, it manifests itself as a reality to the understanding. Without this exercise of the intellect, the intellectual man is as nothing as the son of a barren woman, and as blank as the figure of a body seen in a dream.

Rama asked, “What is that mind to which you attribute so many powers? What is that which you say to be nothing? Why is it no reality and something distinct from all that we see?”

Vasishta replied:—

All individual minds are provided with these faculties, except those whose minds are engrossed with the error of the outer world. 

There is an unconsciousness which overtakes every man before his death. This is the darkness of his dissolution (maha-pralaya-yamini). Just like the spirit of God, for its re-creation after the dissolution of the world, assumes his triune form with the persons of Brahma and Virat (the Universal Form), so every person after his death receives the triplicate form of his spiritual, intellectual and corporeal being.

Rama said, “As we believe ourselves to be reproduced after death by reason of our memories, so must we understand the re-creation of all bodies in the world by the same cause. Hence there is nothing uncaused in it.”

Vasishta replied:—

The gods Hari (Vishnu), Hara (Shiva) and others, having obtained their disembodied liberation (videha-mukti) at the universal dissolution, could not retain their memory to cause their regeneration.

But human beings, having both spiritual and intellectual bodies entire at their death, do not lose their memory of the past, nor can they have final liberation like Brahma unless they obtain their disembodied state, which is possible to all in this life or hereafter only by the edification of their souls through yoga meditation. Birth and death of all other beings like yourself are caused by their memory and because they lack disembodied liberation and eternal salvation. The individual soul, after its pangs of death are over, retains its consciousness within itself, but remains in its state of unconsciousness by virtue of its own nature.

This world resembles a forest where every being is like a detached tree. The dark clouds are its leaves and the stars its full blown flowers.Walking men are its restless deer and the aerial gods and demons its birds of the air. Broad daylight is the flying dust of its flowers and the dark night the deep hiding place of its grove. The seas are like its streams and fountains and the eight boundary mountains are its artificial hills. The mind is its great water reservoir containing the weeds and shrubs of human thoughts in abundance.

The world according to the sense in which I take it, as the seat of God, is highly interesting, but not so in your sense of it being a sober reality. So the meaning of the words “I” and “you” according to me refers to the intellectual spirit, and according to you to the individual soul and body.

Hence Leela and Saraswati, being in their empty astral bodies, were led by the pure desire of their souls to every place without any obstruction or interruption. The spirit of consciousness has the power to present itself wherever it likes, on earth or in the sky, and before objects known or unknown and wished to be known by it. It was by this power that they could enter into the tent of the prince.

Continued...

Love.

Yoga Vasishta - Post 26

Vasishta said:— Then waves of cavalry mounting to the sky made the battlefield appear like a raging sea. 

The battlefield had become like a wonderful field of the air in which the furious war, like a tremendous earthquake, shook hills like moving clouds in the sky. 

Heaps of arrows rising in spires above the ground drove the cowards and the wounded far away from the battlefield.  Hills of dead bodies of men, horses and elephants, heaving in promiscuous heaps and appearing like clouds fallen upon earth, invited the demon yakshas, rakshasas and carnivorous pisachas to come and play in the wide ocean of blood.

The forest of the army howled in a tremendous roar until it was burnt down by the all devouring fire of the enemy. Hacked by the Assamese, their weapons snatched by the Bhutas, the Dasarnas threw away their staffs and fled like a herd of cows. 

Rama, what more shall I say about this war which baffles even Sesha, with his hundred tongues and mouths, to attempt a full description?

Vasishta continued:— Now as the war waged fiercely, with mingled shouts on both sides, the sun shrouded his polished armor under the mist of darkness and was about to set.

The day declined after it had run its course of eight watches and assumed the graceful countenance of a hero returning in glory after he has fought his battle. The army, like the day, declined in splendor, being battered in its cavalry and shattered in its force of elephants. 

At last a thick cloud of darkness covered the face of the sky, and the hills, valleys, gardens and groves became hidden under an impenetrable gloom. Infernal spirits were loosened from their dismal abodes and ravaged at large over the battlefield like a hurricane under the vault of heaven.

It was in the still hour of this gloomy night, when the host of heaven seemed to be fast asleep, that a sadness stole in upon the mind of Leela’s magnanimous husband, King Viduratha.  He thought about what was to be done the next morning in council with his counselors, and then he went to his bed which was as white as moonlight and as cold as frost.  For a while his lotus-eyes were closed in sleep in his royal camp, which was as white as moonbeams and covered by the cold dews of night.

Then the two ladies issued forth from their empty abode and entered the tent through a crevice, like air penetrates into the heart of an untouched flower bud.

Rama asked, “How is it possible sage, that the gross bodies of the goddesses, with their limited dimensions, could enter the tent through one of its holes, as small as the pore of a piece of cloth?”

Continued

Love