Chapter-7: An Introduction

Chapter-7: That Tranquil Self

 

Introduction 

Even intelligent educated men readily accept the idea that we come into the world and this implies that the world is something alien to us; something totally different from us. If we pause for a moment to think, it is evidently clear that this idea that we come into the world is against all our day's scientific knowledge. Science insists upon and proves that we do not come into the world; in fact we come out of the world. 

 In the previous Chapter, Janak described his state following Ashtavakra's earlier exhortation to achieve layavastha. Unable to leave it at that, however, Janak goes on to further describe his enlightened state in this chapter. He goes yet one step further, ahead of the knowledge of the scientists and declares that the universe itself comes out of the Self! As ocean ‘waves’, the Self ‘universes’, and the universe ‘peoples’ – if we are permitted to coin and use such strange looking but eloquent terms. 

In short, just as the waves are the ocean, we are not isolated ‘egos’ functioning inside separate bodies nor is the world populated by masses of such separate entities. They all rise from the ocean of Self, when the storms of the mind howl through Consciousness. Even without bringing this surging mind, through contemplation, into its dissolution (laya), the Infinite Self, ever peaceful, from which the very mind has risen, is ever beyond all agitations. 

Except for its waves on the surface, the ocean is calm and serene in its immeasurable depths. Abide in the Self, wherein due to the desires of the mind, worlds of names and forms heave forth, as though produced at the raising of a magician's wand. The creation and the dissolution of the universe are both illusions of the unsteady mind. 

To the Self there is neither the anxiety to accept nor the labour to reject the mind and its imaginary worlds. The ocean of Consciousness ever remains the same, and apparently waves up to play the illusion of names and forms. Having hinted that laya-yoga itself is only for those who have in themselves lingering shadows of 'ignorance' (ego), Janaka seems to feel yet unsatisfied and so he bursts forth into a lyrical song upon the glory of the tranquil Self in this chapter.