Chapter-7, Verse 1

Ashtavakra Gita Verse 7.1

जनक उवाच 

मय्यनन्तमहाम्भोधौ विश्वपोत इतस्ततः। भ्रमति स्वान्तवातेन न ममास्त्यसहिष्णुता॥१॥

1. In Me, the shoreless ocean, the ark of the universe, moves here and there, driven by the wind of its own mind (universal mind). I am not impatient.

In a Man of Realisation it is absurd to say that he recognises no world of plurality around him nor that his mind and intellect have no thought flow in them. But unlike us he is never disturbed by the confusions within and without him, because he is ever abiding in his deep experience: ‘I am the Infinite Self’. 

In this shoreless ocean of Consciousness, like the waves, the universe rises up, plays about and merges back. The peaceful surface of the clear Consciousness is whipped up into waves of names and forms by our own mental storms. An individual mind creates individual worlds of its own likes and dislikes, of its joys and sorrows. 

Thus, my world is created by my mind and your world is created by your mind. Though, we both are living in one and the same universe, perhaps at one and the same time and space, yet, each one of us lives in an individual, self-interpreted, private world of one's own. The universe is the common field where all the existing minds can experience freely their own individual worlds of joys and sorrows. Therefore, the total universe is not the projection of an individual mind but it is the play of the total mind, or we may call it as the universal mind. 

‘By the wind of its own mind’ (svānta vātena), the universe of names and forms moves along its path of history, bumping along, now through brilliant eras of creative beauty and now through dark ages of miseries and sorrows. Janaka realises that the disturbances in the individual life and in the universal life around are all illusory confusions projected by the individual mind and the universal mind. The royal saint naturally confesses, ‘I am not impatient’. No wise man is impatient either with the disturbances around him or at the daily stories of achievements and failures of the world of his era. This ever-changing phenomenal world and its ceaseless modifications do not affect the Self in the least.