Before you read
What was left for him to do, what was left to take up and what to set down, when everything in sight lay filled with one consciousness, the way the whole world lies filled by the water of the great deluge?
The Song on Mount Meru
Vasistha had been telling Rama how the wise look at the world: the ignorant find it solid as rock, the wise watch it pass like a wave, and the swan on the lake never turns its head toward the moss. Then he turned from the teaching to a song. “On this very matter, Rama, I will give you the holy song that Kaca sang long ago, the son of Brihaspati, the teacher of the gods.” Kaca was living then in a grove somewhere on Mount Meru, and by his devotion he had found the tranquility of his spirit in the Supreme soul.
His mind was filled with the ambrosial draughts of divine knowledge, and the sight of the visible world, built of the five elements, gave him no satisfaction at all. Rapt in the vision of the one Spirit, he saw nothing else beside it, and he spoke fervently to himself.
“What is there for me to do, or to refuse? What is there to receive, or to reject? What place is there for me to go to, or to keep away from, when this whole is filled by the Divine Spirit, as the world is filled by the water of the great deluge?”
“I find pleasure and pain inherent in the soul, and the sky with all its quarters held within the soul’s magnitude. Knowing all things to be full of the holy spirit, I forget my pains and sink them in my spirit. The spirit is inside and outside every body; it is above and below and on every side of everything. Here, there and everywhere it is the same spirit, and there is no place where it is not.”
“The spirit abides everywhere, and all things abide in the spirit. All things are the self-same spirit, and I am situated in that same spirit. There is nothing, intelligent or insensible, that is not the spirit. All is spirit, and so am I. The spirit fills the whole of space and is present in every place. I am as full of that spirit and its ineffable bliss as the all-encompassing water of the great deluge.” So Kaca mused to himself in a bower of the golden mountain.
He uttered the sound Om, and it rang out on every side like the ringing of a bell. He sounded first the vocal part of it, the o, and then the nasal n that tops it like a tuft of hair, and he stayed meditating on the spirit in his mind, as neither inside it nor outside it, the soul that pervades everything.
“So, Rama, Kaca went on musing in himself and chanting his holy hymn, freed from the foulness of flesh and rarefied in his spirit like the breath of the wind. His soul was as clear as the air in autumn, after the dark clouds of the rainy season have scattered.”
The Question of Escape
“Now I have told you the story of Shikhidhvaja in full,” Vasistha said, “and I hope you will follow his example and set yourself free from all sorrow and misery. Shut the visible world out of your sight, shut your passions and affections in close confinement within your heart, and stay attached to the supreme spirit with a dispassionate mind. Reign in your kingdom with the liberation of Shikhidhvaja, and conduct yourself so as to secure the fruit of both worlds. As Shikhidhvaja came by degrees to his enlightenment, so did Kaca, the son of Brihaspati, receive the light of his reason, as I will now tell you.” “Tell me in short,” Rama said, “how Kaca, the saintly son of the sage Brihaspati, came to his reason and right understanding, after he had been deluded by error as Shikhidhvaja was.”
“Hear another tale, Rama, as interesting as Shikhidhvaja’s, and how Kaca, the child of the godlike Brihaspati, was awakened to the light of truth.” Kaca had passed the period of his youth and was about to enter on the career of worldly life, and he had already acquired a full knowledge of worlds and things. He went to his father, who knew all righteousness, with a question. “How is the living spirit, bound to the body by the too-thin thread of life, released from that bondage in this temporary world?”
“The soul, my son, is well able to fly away, easily and swiftly, over the perilous ocean of the world,” Brihaspati answered, “by abandoning its concerns with it.”
Hearing this holy word of his father’s, Kaca abandoned all his earthly property and expectations, left his house, and went to the forest, where he took shelter. Brihaspati was filled with sorrow at his going, because it is the nature of good-hearted men to feel the same anxiety at the union of their friends and household as at the parting.
Eight Years Later
After the sinless Kaca had passed three and five years in his solitude, his father came seeking him in the wood and came upon him unawares. The son rose and did homage to his venerable father, who took him in his arms and to his breast, and then Kaca spoke to his father, the lord of speech, in words that flowed like honey from his lips.
“You see that for these full eight years I have forsaken everything and kept to this solitary retreat. And still, why is it that I do not enjoy the lovely and lasting peace of mind I have been seeking so long?”
On hearing these sorrowful words of Kaca’s, the lord of speech told him again to abandon his all, and then he left him and made his way to the upper sky.
After his father had gone, Kaca cast off his mantle of the bark and leaves of trees, and his frail body appeared out of it like the clear autumn sky after the sun has set and the stars have gone. He moved to another forest and took shelter in the cave of a rock, which kept the rain and the rain clouds off him as the autumn sky keeps the floods off the land.
There he lived apart, on one side of a wood, with his naked body and a tranquil, empty mind, breathing only the breath of his life. One day, when he was afflicted in this state of body and mind, he saw his father standing before him. The pious son rose from his seat and did reverence to his sire with every mark of filial piety, and clasped in his close embrace he asked, in a faltering voice, “See how I have forsaken everything. I have even cast away my ragged wrapper and my shelter of reeds and weeds, and still, why do I not find my rest in my god? What must I yet do to come to that state?”
“I told you, Kaca, to forsake your all,” Brihaspati said, “and this all means the mind, which holds all things inside it. It is by forsaking your mind that you gain perfect felicity, because the learned know the mind to be all in all. It is the container of everything, and there is nothing besides the ideas of things in our minds.” With that the lord of speech flew hastily into the sky.
From then on Kaca strove to relinquish the thoughts and the operations of his mind.
Searching for Chitta
He found it impossible to subdue his mind, or to suppress its action and its motion, and so he recalled his father to his mind and thought of getting himself into his presence.
He considered that the mind was no part of his body, nor anything among the known categories of nature. It stood quite aloof and apart from everything, and so it was perfectly guiltless in itself. Why, then, should he abandon so innocent and constant a companion? He would go to his father and learn how and why the mind is reckoned the greatest enemy of men; and learning that fully, he would forsake it at once and buy his felicity with it.
Having thought so, Kaca went upward to the upper sky, and meeting the lord of speech there he bowed down to him and did him homage with a son’s love. Then he called him aside and asked him to tell him the true nature and form of the mind, so that he could detect it and forsake it.
“The mind is known as the egoism of a man,” Brihaspati answered, “by those who are acquainted with the science of the mind. The inward feeling of one’s egoism takes the name of his mind, and no more.”
Kaca addressed him as the whole of heaven did, as the teacher of thirty-three million gods, and asked him to explain this intricate point, the identity of the mind, the intellect and the egoism. “I see the difficulty of forsaking one’s mind, and the difficulty of forgetting one’s egoism, one’s own personality, and I grant too that there is no consummation without relinquishing both. Tell me, then, how it is possible to be rid of them in any way at all.”
The Answer About “I”
“Why, Kaca, the demolition of our egoism is as easy as the twinkling of our eyelids, and easier far than the crushing of flowers; there is not the least pain in rejecting this feeling. Now hear how it is done in a trice, and how it is removed, like a long-standing bias of ignorance, by true knowledge of the nature of the thing.”
“There is no such thing in reality as what you call your egoism, your personality. It is an unreality that appears as a reality, a false chimera like the ghost that little boys fear. Like the fallacy of water in a mirage, like the mistake of a serpent in a rope, like every other error that appears as truth, the misconception of egoism is a mere delusion of the understanding. It is a delusion of the eyes that shows two moons in the sky and doubles so many things; in the same way it is an error of our understanding that presents us with our false egoism in the place of the one real and everlasting ego.”
“There is one real Ego alone, without beginning or end, quite pellucid in itself, more transparent than the clear air, an Intelligence that knows all things. He is always everywhere, as the light of all things and the life of all living beings. It is his essence alone that spreads throughout all nature and shines in all her phenomena, as the one essence of water displays itself in all the rolling surges and waves and moving bubbles of the sea. That being so, tell me what this special egoism of ours is, and how and from where a separate personality could come to exist. Where can you find dust rising from water, or see water springing from fire?”
“Shun your false belief in the difference of this one and that other, and of yourself as a third thing apart from both, and stop thinking of yourself as a mean and contemptible being shut within the limits of space and time. Know yourself as unbounded by space and time, spread everywhere in your essential transparency, always the same in all the seeming varieties, the one invariable, pure and simple Intellect. You are situated in the fruits and flowers and leaves of all the trees on every side of you; you abide in everything, as the pith and marrow by which it subsists and as the moisture by which it grows. The pure intellect eternally inheres in everything as its soul and essence. Tell me then, Kaca, where you get the belief in your egoism and your personal existence.”
Kaca, advised by his venerable father in this best kind of yoga meditation, began to muse in himself as one liberated from his personal entity, lost and absorbed in the essence of the sole and self-existent Deity. He remained freed from his egoism and from his sense of mine, with his mind tranquil, cut off from all the ties of nature and apart from the bonds of worldly life. “So I advise you, Rama,” Vasistha said, “to remain unchanged and unmoved amid all the changes and movements of earthly bodies and the vicissitudes of a mortal life.”