Chapter-2, Verse 20

Ashtavakra Gita Verse 2.20

शरीरं स्वर्गनरकौ बन्धमोक्षौ भयं तथा। कल्पनामात्रमेवैतत् किं मे कार्यं चिदात्मनः॥२०॥

20. Body, the notions of heaven and hell, bondage and freedom, as also anxiety – all these are mere imaginations. What purpose have I with all these – I whose nature is Pure Consciousness? 

In the previous verse, Janaka despaired that he finds no basis to build up a fanciful world of imaginations. Here in this verse he enumerates some of the common imaginations of the spiritual seekers in religion and philosophy. 

The gross, the subtle and the causal bodies are all examples of our imaginations. They in their turn, feed the imaginations of their individual world of experiences and objects – the sum total of them all crystallised, is the fanciful sceptre of the miserable ‘ego’. None of them can survive in the one, who has become the Pure Self. 

In the relative field, the human mind and intellect, in terms of joys and sorrows, imagine states of perfect joys existing in heavens or of impossible sorrows of a hell. He imagines that he is bound by the equipments and he strives to free himself by continuous effort. In the midst of it all he gets strangled with the anxiety for the future, smothered by fears and crushed by other emotions born out of his sense of fear. 

For all these imaginations, there is no occasion in the bosom of one who is revelling in the infinite Bliss of the Supreme Self. Therefore, the Realised saint in Janaka exclaims: ‘What purpose have I with all these whiffs of imagination!’ None of these fanciful factors can pursue and disturb him, who has attained to the state of the Self. He is ever at rest abiding in his own Real Nature.