Your life and your dreams are both made of stories. You
won't forget this if you immerse yourself in one of the greatest storybooks
ever made. The earliest version of the Yogavasistha was
probably compiled in the seventh century. Its original title was the Mokshapaya,
or Way of Release. Authorship has been attributed to the sage Valmiki, also
credited with producing the epic Ramayana. The voice we hear
is that of another sage, Vasistha. He takes on the task of restoring the
spirits and the will to action of the boy prince Rama of Ayodhya. Hence the
full title of the text, The great story of Rama as told by the sage
Vasistha in order to expound his philosophy of Yoga. Rama’s services
are urgently required to defend gods and humans against an army of demons, but
he has slumped into lethargy and despair.
Rama asks the sage, “What is the point and purpose of this
useless existence?” The whole dialogue that follows - filling more than 27,000
verses and powered by sixty-four extraordinary stories - is a response to that
question. Vasistha charts the path to release from vasanas, the
habitual tendencies and karmic traces that hold the soul in bondage to the
wheel of repetition. He describes the way of ascension through higher worlds to
the realm of pure consciousness. But this is not only a guide to moksha,
or liberation. It is a call to re-engagement with the world, to live the bigger
story.
Vasistha is my kind of teacher. He offers real philosophy, deep
as Advaita Vedanta or the Upanishads, but he does not teach through
admonishment or abstraction; he teaches by telling really good stories.
One of his core teachings is that "this universe is but a
long dream...There is no real difference between the waking state of reality
and the dream state. What is real in one is unreal in the other - hence, these
states are essentially of the same nature." [1]
Beyond other systems of yoga, the yoga of Vasistha hinges
on seeing the world as a dream. [2] In order to be truly
awake, one must fully understand sleep and dream. The world appears and
disappears, realities come and go like dream states.
Make that worlds. There are countless worlds,
including universes concealed inside stones or subatomic particles. "In
every atom there are worlds within worlds." The Sanskrit term
is jagadanantya, which literally means "the endlessness of
worlds".[3] Hugh
Everett III might want to join the conversation at thsi point; he was
the atheist proponent of the Many Worlds Interpretation in quantum mechanics
which holds that the universe is constantly splitting into parallel versions.
The sage continues: "No one can count the number of universes (and
consequent creations) that are arising at this minute from the Supreme Being.
The mind that humans possess is ever fluctuating and gives rise to all things
in these visible worlds. This external appearance which exists as a reality is
a creation of human desires. It is as unreal as a goblin shown to terrify
children. This world is as unstable as a stool made of banana leaves.”
The longest story in the Yogavasistha, and one of the most
wildly entertaining, is the tale of Lila, or rather The Two Lilas. Queen
Lila, fearing the death of her beloved husband, King Padma, prays to the
goddess Sarasvati that they should not be separated. When the goddess appears
after the death of the king, she shows Lila how to preserve his body while
traveling to find his soul essence in different realms. Lila is excited though
incredulous when the goddess tells her than among other life experiences she
and her husband have shared is the partnership of Visastha - no less - and his
wife in a universe within a tiny space. How can Lila know this for
sure? The goddess explains that she can go there and see for herself. But
for this kind of travel, Lila must affirm to herself, “I shall leave my body
here and take a body of light. With that body, like the scent of incense, I
shall go to the house of the holy man."
Once Lila learns to drop her physical body and travel in a
subtle body, she embarks on a series of fantastic journeys, involving parallel
lives, reincarnation, mind-created worlds and the ascent to pure consciousness
beyond the illusions of form. Lila and Sarasvati "roamed freely in
their wisdom bodies. Though it seemed that they had traveled millions of miles
in space, they were still in the same 'room' but on another plane of
consciousness."
They fly to the top of Mount Meru, they see spaceships ang gods
and celestial dancers and the abode of the creator. In a marvelous skirl of
humor, the narrator tells us "like a couple of mosquitoes they roamed all
these planes."
In a scene made for big-screen sci fantasy, Lila meets her
double - also a queen, in another life story - in a palace where they watch a
futuristic battle. Rockets burst into a thousand warheads and gunships like
elephants rain fire from the sky. "What looked like elephants had been
propelled into the air from the battlefield and they were raining fire on the
city." It seems a ninth century author is able to foresee twenty-first
century battles or Star Wars scenarios from the ancient
future. In this world at war King Padma is embodied as another king, Viduratha,
who will be slain in battle because he has set his mind on liberation, not
victory. “Whatever vision arises within one’s self is immediately experienced."
Lila wants to know why there is an exact double of herself in this
scene. They can see and interact with each other though others may see only one
of therm. Sarasvati explains that it was the longing of her deceased husband,
Padma, that generated Lila’s double in this world where Padma has been reborn
as Viduratha. “Due to excessive love towards you your husband Padma
thought, at the moment of death, of enjoying your company without being ever
separated. Accordingly he was able to get you here. Whatever is thought of by
one at the time of his agonizing death, that will be realized by him
afterwards."
We are given a fascinating description of soul transfer, or body
swapping. After the death of Viduratha, Sarasvati puts his jiva - his soul -
into the embalmed corpse of the first Lila’s dead husband, Padma.
Through the nose
Saraswati, removed the grip she had
on the jiva of Viduratha which therefore entered into the
nasal orifice of Padma's body in the form of prana and
permeated the whole parched up body. Whereupon blood began to circulate freely
throughout and the deceased king woke up, rubbing his eyes. Padma woke up and
asked who they were.
Lila is eventually able to remember
eight hundred of her past lives and step in and out of lives that her parallel
selves are living beyond the wheel of time.
We are given hints as to the nature of the true life
teacher. Sarasvati tells Lila she is more than a goddess; she is higher
consciousness. Beyond the play of reality and illusion, waking and dreaming,
there is the limitless nondual field of pure consciousness. This is the only
reality. Both liberation and enlightened reengagement with the world require
the jiva to understand this fully.
Which brings us to Vasistha's most important teaching You
must transcend the world but then return and embrace it. The aim is to
become the jivanmukta, the living liberated being, who can engage
with the world without being entangled with it. Lila means play. Beyond the
gloom of the world, seek the divine play. If life is a dream, grow your ability
to change the dream or create a new one.
Vasistha’s purpose in telling stories to Rama is not only
to awaken him to the fluid interplay of reality and illusion, and the
conditions for moksha (liberation) but to help him acquire the non-attachment
that will enable him to act in the world without succumbing to its entrapments
“doing yet not doing what has to be done” The stories show that our
lives are shaped by the mind’s capacity to create and sustain reality.
Existence is a dreamlike projection of consciousness. Boundaries between waking
life, dreams, past and future lives, and parallel realities are fluid.
So, reality is not as fixed as we tend to tell ourselves.
When we recognize that much of what we accept as real is a mental construct, we
can change the construct.
If we see life and death as illusions, perhaps we
can bring more clarity and courage to our actions. Why fear death?
And why get stuck in the conditions of a single life experience? We are
many. Lila identified eight hundred incarnations before she stopped counting.
How many doubles and counterparts does any one of us have, whether as aspects
of our present personality or transpersonal counterparts in different times or
dimensions?
We are led to assume that all of this will bring Rama into the
field to fight the demons. Be in the world not of it. Knowing
that the world is an illusion does not mean withdrawing from it. We want to
navigate with awareness and to live with awareness and non-attachment, lucid in
the dream of life, taking part in life’s play while remembering that it is a
playground.
Vasistha teaches us that will (paurusa)
can overcome fate (daiva) when exerted by a mind that has
awakened. “Those who have removed the veil from reality can imagine things
so precisely that those mental perceptions are actually experienced.” Certain
people, of whom Vasishtha is one, have the power of making their dreams, become
physical objects- objects that did not existed until a powerful dreamer dreamed
them into reality. [4] Don't forget
Your real life is a dream and the dream is real
Your real life is an illusion and the illusion is real
CODA: A Crown Prince Recommends a Book of Stories to Take
You Beyond This World
In the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin is a Persian
translation of the Yogavasistha with 41 miniature paintings, probably
commissioned by the first Mughal emperor Akbar and completed under the
patronage of his son and successor Jahangir. There is a fascinating note in
Jahangir's own hand in the margin of folio 1b. A recent translator gives us
this version:
"God is great! - This book Ğög Bäsistha [sic] which
belongs to the stories of the ancients, (and) which I translated in the time
when I was crown-prince ...is a very good book. Whenever somebody hears it with
the ear of understanding, and if he considers only one percent of it, it is
surely to be hoped that he will make the bațin ['what is beyond this world']
his destination by the instrument of the zahir ['what belongs to the apparent
world']" [5]
From his time as crown prince, Jahangiir not only claims
full credit for the translation but pierces to the main intent of this
astonishing Hindu text, where philosophy is animated by amazing tales of
doubles, parallel worlds and oneiric adventures. The yoga of Vasistha leads to
awakening to ultimate reality "beyond this world" through the magic
of story - and then guides the hearer to act in the world with the clarity and
courage of non-attachment. To hear or read just one of Vasistha's stories, it's
been said, is to become enlightened.
References:
1. Swami Venkatesananda. Vasistha’s Yoga. (Albany NY: SUNY Press 1993) p. 71. Unless otherwise mentioned, all quotations from the Yogavasistha in this essay are from this 800-page abridgment.
2. Christopher Key Chapple gives an elegant summary of the seven states in Vasistha’s yoga: “Vasiṣṭha’s sevenfold Yoga begins with restraint from activity (nivṛtti) leading to deep thinking (vicāraṇa) and non-attachment (asaṃsaṅga). After these three preliminaries Vasiṣṭha proclaims that in the fourth state one sees the entire world as if it were a dream. For Vasiṣṭha, this process of dissolution holds great lessons. Is the world real? According to Vasiṣṭha, the answer is a resounding no. Once one sees through the fixity of any given circumstance. In the fifth Yoga, one can descend (or ascend) into the realm of an experience of non-duality, wherein one operates as if in a state of deep sleep, translucent and transparent (advaita suṣupta). This catapults the individual into a state of true freedom (jīvan mukta), preparing one for the seventh Yoga, one’s final release from the body (videha mukta) at the time of death. Unlike any of the other Yoga systems, the Yogavāsiṣṭha process hinges on seeing the world as a dream.” Christopher Key Chapple. “Worlds of Dream in the Yogavāsiṣṭha: Virtual and Virtuous Realities” Embodied Philosophy 2020
3. Garth Bregman. “The Existence of an Endless Number of Worlds Jagadānantya in Mokṣopāya and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” in Christopher Key Chapple and Arindam Chakrabarti (eds) Engaged Emancipation: Mind, Morals, and Make-Believe in the Moksopāya (Yogavāsistha) (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015) p.97.
4. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty.“The Dream Narrative and the Indian Doctrine of Illusion in Daedalus vol. 111, no. 3 (Summer, 1982),p.102
5. Heike Franke. “Akbar's Yogavāsiştha in the Chester Beatty Library” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 161(2) (January 2011) 359-375
Illustration: Two Lilas with the Goddess. RM + AI
