The guru first draws the thread of bondage to a close, and offers a fine relief. This bondage of the non-self, rooted in ignorance, feels natural, and no starting point for it can be found; it keeps producing a running current of the suffering of birth, death, sickness, and old age. Notice the word the guru chooses. He calls this bondage beginningless. He does not call it endless. However long a night runs, no one can name its first moment, and still, the instant morning comes, it is over. The bondage is beginningless. It is not deathless. Its root is only one, ignorance.

Now the guru names the one tool that can cut that root, and first he throws out everything else. This bondage cannot be cut by any thrown or handheld weapon, nor by wind, nor by fire, nor by ten million acts of karma. Karma cannot cut it, because bondage carries no material substance; it is only a misunderstanding, and no hammer breaks a misunderstanding, only seeing it clearly erases it. There is one weapon, that great sword of discerning knowledge, made sharp and beautiful by the grace of the creator. The guru calls it “manju”, beautiful; this sword cuts the way light does, with no violence in it. And then he lays the map of the whole road into a single shloka, the one who holds shruti as authority keeps faith in his own dharma, from that comes the cleansing of the mind, to a clear intellect comes knowledge of the Supreme Self, and from that knowledge comes the destruction of the world down to its root. Faith, the cleansing of the mind, knowledge, the end of the world, a straight staircase, and the bridge in the middle is the cleansing of the mind.

Now the central image of the whole part arrives. The atman, covered by the five sheaths beginning with annamaya, does not show clearly, exactly like that same pond water covered by layers of algae grown from the pond’s own power. Every piece of the image says something, the water is covered while it stays clean; the algae is “grown from its own power”, meaning these sheaths grow out of that very life, they are not troubles arriving from outside; and the algae can be removed. Then the guru names the fruit of the solution, the moment that algae lifts, the clear water shows through properly, taking away thirst and heat, giving a person the highest happiness at once. One word stands out, “sadyah”, at once. Removing the algae can take effort and time, yet the moment it lifts, the water shows immediately. The peace and happiness the living being wanders after all its life, out in the world, is under the algae, already, its own.

The guru says in advance what will be found at the end of the peeling, so the student keeps that same goal in view for the whole journey. On the denial of all five sheaths this pure atman blazes up, a single rasa of eternal bliss, the inner nature, the highest, self-luminous. One word draws attention, “apavada”, denial; the sheaths are not there to be broken, the work is only to see clearly, of each one, that it is not the atman. The body will remain, the mind will remain, the intellect will remain. The guru is not asking you to erase them. He is asking you to drop the false identity fastened to them. This is why he says next, to be free of bondage the knower must discern the atman from the non-self; by that alone he becomes full of bliss, knowing himself as sat-chit-ananda, being-consciousness-bliss. The name of the book grows clear here again, the whole method sits in one word, viveka, discernment. And its fruit is liberation, and also becoming full of bliss. Then the guru gives an everyday picture, like drawing the reed out of munja grass, gently, carefully separating the inner, unattached, action-free atman from the whole crowd of things that are seen, and then dissolving everything into it and resting in that very form, that one is free. Two words are the key to knowing that reed, “asanga” (untouched) and “akriya” (action-free); whatever joins, binds, and acts is the grass, the reed is the one that only watches.

Now the first layer opens, the annamaya kosha, this gross body, and the name says the whole thing, “anna-maya”, made of food. This body lives on food, and without food it perishes; how can this heap of skin, flesh, blood, bone, and waste be the ever-pure atman? What begs for bread every few hours is not that nature which is always, on its own, complete. The guru drives the inquiry deeper, this body was not here before birth, will not remain after death, born in an instant, changing in character, inert, and “seen the way a pot is seen.” That last line lands hardest, what is “seen” cannot be the “seer”.

The guru offers a very practical argument. This body with its hands and feet is not the atman, because even when a limb is cut off life goes on, and those powers are not destroyed; and what is itself controlled cannot be the controller. If someone loses a hand, their “I” is not diminished at all, so the “I” does not live in any part of the body. The body is “niyamya”, a servant that takes orders, and a servant cannot be the master. Then a flawless point, of the body, its properties, its acts, its states, whatever is the witness of all these and is always present, that atman stands proven apart from all of them on its own. A witness and the event it testifies to can never be one. Merely being able to say “my body is tired” proves the witness stands apart from the body, and this is “self-evident”, only a matter of paying attention.

The guru gives that same dry, honest description of the body again. This heap of bones, smeared with flesh, filled with waste, deeply unclean, how can it be the “knower”, which is itself entirely apart from it? This is not here to teach disgust. It is a medicine, to loosen a grip on the body that has grown too tight; consciousness and a physical heap are things of two entirely different orders, flesh cannot “know”. Then the guru sets two kinds of person face to face, in this heap of skin, flesh, fat, bone, and waste the deluded person builds up the sense of “I”, while the reflective person knows his own true nature, the highest truth, as entirely apart from it. The difference is not intellect or schooling. It is one steady question, “is this really me?”

Now the guru lays out three grades of understanding, like a staircase. “The body is I”, this is the understanding of the dull-minded; “the living self housed in the body is I”, this is the understanding of the learned; and “I am Brahman”, this is the understanding of the great soul who has the knowledge of discernment, settled in the true self. At the bottom an “I” shrunk down to flesh and bone, in the middle a small, hemmed-in “I” caught in the world, and at the top the boundless, free, essence of all. Above the place where most people stop there is one more rung, and the whole book is the work of carrying you to it. From this the guru addresses the student directly, and a little sternly, you of dull mind, drop the “atman” understanding in this heap of skin, flesh, fat, bone, and waste, and finding the highest peace in Brahman, the self of all, the changeless one, worship it. In this sternness there is the love of a mother’s scolding as she pulls her child back from the fire. Notice, what the guru names is the giving up of the “self-idea”, while the body stays; let the body remain, only let the stamp of “I” come off its forehead.

Then the guru says something that stings, especially for the educated reader. As long as the learned man does not drop the “I” understanding that rose from confusion about the unreal body, senses, and the rest, there is not even talk of liberation for him, however fine a judge he may be of the whole reasoning path of Vedanta. Saying the word “medicine” does not cure the disease; if the knowledge sits stored in the head while the fear and craving of “I am the body” run on in life just as before, then that knowledge did no work. Then a very clever shloka, just as you hold no “this is me” understanding about your shadow, about the reflection in a mirror, about the body in a dream, or about a body shaped in imagination, let it be the same about this living, waking body too. All four of these look like a living being, yet you feel not the slightest attachment to them; the only difference is that this body feels more “solid”, and that solidity is only a difference of degree, the two are the same in kind.

Now the guru closes the annamaya kosha section, and puts all his weight on one word, “seed.” The understanding that “the body itself is the atman” is the seed of all the suffering of birth and the rest for people of wrong understanding; so it must be destroyed with effort, and once the mind lets go, there is no more fear of another birth. A seed is small, yet the whole tree lies hidden in it; if the entire problem has grown from a single seed, then merely pulling out that one seed dries up the whole tree. The first layer peels away here, the annamaya kosha is left behind.

Now the second layer, the pranamaya kosha, the sheath of life-energy. This prana, joined to the five organs of action, is the very energy that fills the annamaya kosha and makes it fit for all its work. A puppet lies lifeless, the strings pull and it springs to life; prana is that string-power for the body. Yet the guru shows at once that this too is not the atman. The pranamaya kosha is a form of air, moving in and out like air, never knowing good or bad, nor itself, nor another, and always under another’s control. Prana does not “know”, and it is “paratantra”, in another’s grip; what is itself subject to something else is not that nature which is free and aware. The second layer peels away.

Now the third layer, the manomaya kosha, the mind, and this is where the longest cluster begins, because the mind is the real player. The organs of knowledge together with the mind make the manomaya kosha, the cause of “mine, I” and of the split among things, the maker of divisions of name and the rest, far stronger than the earlier sheath, filling it and spreading past it. The mind is the factory where “I” and “mine” are forged every moment. The guru shows it as a yajna fire, a fire-rite, fed higher by the five senses as its priests, fed higher by the poured stream of sense-objects as its ghee, blazing with the fuel of countless vasanas, deep tendencies, this manomaya fire keeps burning the world. The senses are the priests who keep casting offerings into the fire, the offering being everything seen, heard, and tasted, and the fuel the stored desires; a fire like that does not go out, it keeps growing. This is the restless mind.

Now the most forceful shloka of this cluster arrives, and the mask of ignorance comes off. There is no ignorance apart from the mind, the mind itself is ignorance, the cause of the world’s bondage; when it is destroyed everything is destroyed, when it spreads out everything spreads out. On one side this is frightening, the problem so near, inside one’s own mind; on the other side it is deeply freeing, because the fight stands right here, within reach, with no unknown demon out there to face. The guru makes it surer with the dream, in a dream, where nothing at all happens outside, the mind by its own power builds the whole world of experiencer and the rest, and in waking it is exactly the same, no difference, all of it is the mind’s spreading out. Then a flawless proof, in deep sleep, when the mind dissolves, nothing remains, and this is everyone’s known experience; from this it is clear, a person’s world is forged by the mind, and does not stand on its own. In waking there is a mind, so there is a world; in dream there is a mind, so there is a world; but in deep sleep the mind is dissolved, and there is no world at all; whatever vanishes the moment sleep comes was never “there” on its own strength, it was tied to the mind.

Hearing “the mind itself is ignorance”, it can seem the mind is an enemy to be destroyed, yet the guru steadies that picture at once. The wind brings the cloud, and then that same wind carries it away; in the same way, the mind forges bondage, and liberation too is forged by that same mind. It all depends on which direction it flows, a mind flowing outward weaves bondage, that same mind turned inward leads toward liberation. The guru sets this in a solid picture, by forging attachment in the body and all the other sense-objects the mind binds the person like an animal with that rope of attachment, and later, for the one who has grown wise, by forging a poison-like distaste in those same objects that same mind also frees him from bondage. Then he comes to a clear conclusion, in the making of both this being’s bondage and its liberation the cause is the mind, a mind stained by rajas, the quality of restless energy, is the cause of bondage, and a pure mind free of rajas and tamas is the cause of liberation. So you do not kill the mind. You clean it, the difference between a dirty mirror and a clean one; the mirror stays the same, only the grime lifts, and only in a clean mirror does the reflection of the atman appear.

How will the mind become pure? The guru gives a practical piece of advice. Through an abundance of discernment and dispassion the mind gains purity and becomes the instrument of liberation, so the wise seeker of freedom should first make both of these firm. One word matters, “agre”, first of all; many people want to leap straight into the higher practices, yet if the mind is still full of rajas those practices will not hold, foundation first, building after. Then a sharp, memorable warning, a great tiger named the mind roams the forest of sense-objects, and seekers who long for freedom should not go there. A tiger is not so dangerous in the open field, and it is at its strongest in its own forest; the mind too is most uncontrollable in the setting of sense-pleasures, so while the mind is still being tamed, do not take it onto its own strongest ground.

Now the guru says something very deep, most of the living being’s world is a world of “divisions”, and all those divisions are the mind’s own making. The mind alone gives birth, for the experiencer, to all the sense-objects, in gross form and in subtle form, all the divisions of body, class, life-stage, and birth-group, and quality, action, cause, and fruit, all of it the mind is forever composing. These partitions are the mind’s making, and no part of any final truth, and this is a freeing thing, that so large a share of the burden of identity pressing down on the living being is a ready-made arrangement of the mind, while the true nature stays beyond all these compartments. Then the whole problem in one sentence, by deluding this unattached consciousness-nature, by binding it with the qualities of body, senses, and prana, the mind casts it into the confusion of “I and mine”, without pause, into the enjoyment of its acts and their fruits. The atman is “asanga”, untouched; the mind never lays a real chain. It only raises an illusion, and by that alone the boundless atman begins to feel itself a small, bound creature, a borrowed story that breaks the moment it is known to be false.

Here one word is the key, “adhyasa”, the central word of all Advaita, the laying of one thing over another. From the fault of adhyasa the person’s wheel of worldly existence turns, this bondage of adhyasa is forged by this very mind, and it is the root cause of the suffering of birth and the rest for the undiscerning person marked by rajas and tamas. The snake was laid over the rope, the shine of silver was laid over the shell, and our largest adhyasa is laying the body and mind over the atman; this laying-over is the mind’s work, so bondage has no reality of its own, it is a superimposed identity, and what is superimposed can be removed. From this the scholars who see the truth of things call the mind itself ignorance, by which the whole universe is spun around, exactly like a mass of clouds by the wind. Clouds do not drift on their own. The wind drives them; this whole worldly spread and stir is spun by the wind of the mind. The reason for repeating this again and again is that it breaks a habit, the mind keeps treating problems as “out there”, and slowly the guru turns your finger to one place, the mind. This is not despair. It is relief, because the mind is within reach.

Now the guru gathers this cluster to a hopeful close. The seeker of freedom should clean that mind with effort, and once it becomes fully pure, liberation becomes like a fruit set on the palm, plain and easy to see. What could be clearer, or nearer, than a fruit set on the palm, no distance, no doubt; let the mind become truly clean once, and liberation grows exactly that certain. Then he gives a practical recipe for shaking off rajas, by holding attachment to liberation alone, by pulling out the attachment to sense-objects down to the root, by giving up all karma, and by staying fixed with true faith in hearing and the rest, the one who does this shakes off the rajas-nature of the intellect. “Dhunoti”, to shake off, like dust from a cloth; rajas has nothing deep or permanent about it, it is settled dust. With one hand remove the old dust, with the other give the clean direction of hearing and reflection, and above all “moksha-eka-sakti”, the longing for one thing only; when scattered longings draw together and become one, the scatter of rajas begins to settle on its own.

And now the third layer too peels away. The manomaya kosha is not the Supreme Self either, because it has a beginning and an end, it keeps changing, it is suffering by nature, and it is an object, a thing that is known; because the seer is never seen in the form of the thing that is seen. The mind has a beginning and an end, it stops in sleep; the mind changes moment to moment; the mind is suffering by nature; and the fourth point, the deepest, the mind too is “seen”. Being able to say “my mind is restless today”, “my mind is calm”, proves the mind is a “seen thing”, and the witness is its “seer”. The mind too, in the end, is like a pot, it is known, and what knows it is beyond the mind. Half the journey is done now, three layers behind; two more remain ahead, the intellect, and bliss.