Uddalaka: Mind, Om, and Undivided Being

The Cave on Gandhamadana

“Put no trust in the course of the mind,” Vasistha said to Rama. “It runs on and on, and then it is gone in a moment; it is flat and even, and then sharp as the edge of a razor. The seed of intelligence takes a long time to sprout in that field, so water it now, while you are young and the blades are tender, with the cold water of reason, and hold the plant up on that prop until the body itself fades. Do what the sage Uddalaka did: shake off the idea that the five elements are the cause of all creation, and go deeper, by patient inquiry, to the cause of causes.” Rama wanted that story. “Tell me how Uddalaka got rid of his thoughts of the five-element creation and reasoned his way down to the original cause of everything.”

“In a spacious corner of this old mansion of a world,” Vasistha said, “on the northwestern side of this land, there is a country of rugged hills, and among them stands the high hill of Gandhamadana, with a tableland on top that is full of camphor arbors forever dropping the scent of their flowers on the ground. Birds of every color come there; wild animals keep to the banks; in one place the gems swell bright out of the rock and in another the lotuses stand full-blown, and some stretches lie under tufts of snow while crystal streams slide over others like glass. On the highest cliff of that hill, among sarala pines, with flowers strewn ankle deep under the shade of the tall trees, lived a silent sage named Uddalaka: a youth of a great mind and a high sense of his own honor, who took up his hard austerities before he had even reached his full growth. As soon as his intellect opened, the light of reason came up in him, and he woke to noble aims and great expectations before he had any rest or quiet to go with them. He went on with his austerities, his sacred studies and his rites, and right reason came and stood before him like a new year standing before the world. Then one day, sitting apart in his solitude, tired of thinking and frightened by a world that never stopped changing, he began to ask himself questions.”

“What is the best of all gains, the one that, once you have it, leaves nothing more to want, nothing more to do with being born and dying in this world? When shall I come to rest in that holy state past thought, and stay above everything, as a cloud rests on the top of Sumeru, as the pole star stands over the pole and never shifts? When will my loud desires for the things of this world go down into peace, the way the roaring waves go down into the sea? When will the calm of my mind smile to itself in secret at the wishes of mankind, who mean to do this thing after they have done that one, and go round forever in the circle of their misery? When will my mind be loosened from the noose of desire, so that I stay unattached to everything, like a drop of dew on a lotus leaf? When shall I cross the stormy sea of my fickle wanting on the raft of good understanding? When shall I laugh at the foolish doings of worldly people as at the play of children? When will my mind stop swinging back and forth in the cradle of its likes and dislikes and come to rest, as a madman comes to himself when the fit has passed? When shall I have my luminous body, deride the course of the world, and be satisfied within myself like the all-knowing spirit of Viraj? When shall I be as calm as the sea after the churning is over?”

“When shall I look at the fixed scene of this world as I look at a dream, and stand apart from it? When shall I see the inner and the outer worlds as one fixed picture in my imagination, and think the whole thing through as a single system? When shall I have that supernatural light in me that opens the inner eye of the blind from birth? When will the sunshine of meditation show me the pure light of my own intellect, by which I may see things far off as I see the parts of time in myself? When will this long dark night of my ignorance end, this night infested with my faults like the birds of ill omen, with its frost withering the lotus of my heart? When shall I sit like a cold stone in the cavern of a mountain, cool in an unbroken samadhi? When will the elephant of my pride, giddy with its own greatness, fall to the lion of right understanding? When will the little birds of the forest build their grass nests in the braids of hair on my head, when I sit fixed in silence and do not move? When will the birds of the air settle on my chest without fear, as they settle on the tops of rocks, because they find me as motionless as a rock? When shall I cross this lake of the world, choked with the weeds and thorny brambles of my desires, and reach the far shore where happiness is?”

Sunk in questions like these, the twice-born Uddalaka sat down to meditate in the forest, and his mind would not do what he asked. It was a monkey of a mind. It turned toward the things of the senses, in one way and then another, and found no home where it could be happy. Sometimes it swung away from outward objects and chased the realities of the inner world with real eagerness; then it left those intangible things and came back, fond as ever, to outer objects laced with poison. Again and again he saw the sunlight of the spirit rising inside him, and again and again his mind turned from that golden prospect to stare at gross things. It left the soul in its inner gloom and flew out to the objects of sense like a bird. Turning from inner to outer and outer to inner, it came to rest at last in the space between the two, between the light of the one and the dark of the other, a twilight of indifference to both. The meditating Brahmin sat in his high cave like a tall tree in a beating storm; he held his attention as a man does in the face of a danger, and his body rocked forward and back as if small waves were slapping it against a bank.

Unsettled like this, he took to wandering about the hill, as the sun goes its lonely daily round about the polar mountain. And wandering, he came one day on a cavern that lay beyond the reach of every living thing, as quiet and still as the liberated state of an anchorite. No wind troubled it. No bird or beast came there. Gods and Gandharvas had never seen it, and yet it was as full of light as the bright concave of heaven.

It was heaped with flowers and carpeted with young green grass, and because the floor was a layer of moonstone it seemed to be paved with emerald. The cool, kind shade in it was lit by the mild light of the gems in its sides, so that it looked like the secret haunt of forest goddesses who came to play there; the glow from the stones was neither hot nor cold, like the gold of the rising sun in autumn. The cave stood like a new bride dressed in flowers with a garland in her hand, her face soft under the gem lamps and fanned by the whistling wind: a house of tranquility, a resting place for the lord of creation, charming with its blossoms and as mild as the cell of the lotus that Brahma was born in. Uddalaka went into that grotto as a bee goes into a lotus cell on its rounds, and sat down in it for the sake of intense meditation, as the lotus-born creator sat down in seclusion when his work of creation was done. He spread unfaded leaves on the floor for a seat, as Indra spreads his carpet of layered clouds, and over them he laid his deerskin, as the stars are laid over the blue clouds of heaven. He sat on it watchful, light as an empty cloud settling on the top of Rishyashringa. He sat firm in padmasana, like the Buddha, with his face turned upward, his legs and feet folded over his lap and his fingers telling the beads of Brahma. He reined in the swift deer of his mind from the desires it bolted toward by fits and starts, and he began to reason with it, to make it steady.

Five Senses and an Unfindable Ego

“My senseless mind,” he said, “why are you so busy with worldly acts that come to nothing? Sensible people never take up what will turn out to be their bane. Whoever leaves his peace to chase pleasure is a man who walks out of a grove of mandara flowers into a forest of poison plants. You can hide in some cave of the earth, you can find a seat in the highest abode of Brahma, and still you will have no quiet there without the quietness of your own spirit. Stop hunting the things you want; they are hedged with difficulties and they breed worry and grief; run from them to your chief good, which you will find only in retirement. Every one of these objects you fancy is temporary, and every one of them is for your misery, whether you are seeking it, enjoying it or losing it. Why do you run like a fool after the hollow sound of some imagined good with nothing solid in it, like frogs that set up their glee at a thundering cloud that promises them nothing? All this time you have been roving with your froggish heart, blind after profit and pleasure. Tell me what great boon all your ramblings over the earth have brought you. Why not fix yourself on that quietness which promises you something, your own sufficiency, where you can rest, liberated, while you are still alive?”

“My foolish heart, why do you start up at the sound of some good that reaches your ears, and run in the direction of the sound, and fall a victim to it? The deer is caught in the snare that way, lured by the hunter’s horn. Take care not to let carnal appetite take possession of your breast and lead you to destruction; that is how the bull elephant is caught, lured into the pit by the trained female the catchers send out to him. Do not let the appetite of taste make you cram down bitter gall for sweet, or bite the fatal bait laid to hook the foolish fish. Do not let your fondness for bright and beautiful things bewitch you to ruin, as the sight of a bright flame invites the silly moth to be burned. Do not let your love of sweet odors tempt you, as the poor bee is drawn to the liquor that runs from the elephant’s temples, only to be crushed by its trunk. See how the deer, the bee, the moth, the elephant and the fish are each destroyed by addiction to a single sense, and then consider the danger a foolish man is in who wants to satisfy all five of his unruly senses at once. My heart, it is you yourself who spread the snare of desire for your own feet, as the silkworm spins its cell from its own saliva and shuts itself inside. Be washed clean of your impure desires and become as clear as the autumn cloud that has poured out its rain; when you are purged and buoyed up like that cloud, you are free of every bond. You know the course of the world is pregnant with the rise and fall of men and ends in disease and death, and still you cling to it, to your own destruction.” He stopped. “But why do I scold my heart like this, for nothing? It is by reasoning with the mind that men govern their hearts. As long as gross ignorance reigns over the mind, the heart stays dull, as the low ground stays under mist and frost as long as the sky above is shrouded in rain clouds. Let the mind be cleared of its ignorance and the heart grows lighter too, as the frost lifts when the clouds break up. As the heart grows lighter and purer by the mind’s reasoning, its desires grow thinner and weaker, like the light clouds of autumn. Scolding the unrighteous is as useless as blowing wind at falling rain. So I will rid myself of this false, empty ignorance; the shastras say to be rid of it by every means.”

“I find that I am the inextinguishable lamp of intellect, without egoism and without a desire in me, and I have nothing to do with the false ignorance that is the root of egoism. That this is I and that is another: that is the suggestion of a delusive ignorance, which presents such fallacies to us like an epidemic disease, for our destruction. The slender, finite mind cannot take in the nature of the infinite soul, any more than an elephant can be packed into the shell of a bilva fruit. I will not follow the dictates of my heart; it is a deep, wide cave with every misery-making desire living in it. What is this delusive ignorance that blunders, like a thoughtless boy, into seeing the one self-existent being as I, you, he and the rest?” He went looking for the owner of the word. “I have analyzed this body atom by atom from the head to the feet, and I have failed to find the thing we call I in any part of it. This is the flesh of my body and this its blood; these are the bones and this the whole frame; these are my breaths. Where is that I, that ego, sitting? Its pulse is the work of the vital wind and its feeling is the action of the heart; decay and death go with the body. Where is its I? Flesh is one thing and blood another and the bones are different from both. Tell me, my heart, where the I is supposed to be. These are the organs of smell and this the tongue, this the skin and these my ears, these the eyes and this the touch. Which of them is the soul, and where does it sit?”

“The I am that is, fills the whole universe and is the only one in all three worlds; it is the unknowable consciousness, present everywhere and apart from all. Its size cannot be known and it has no name; it is neither this nor that, neither immensity nor minuteness, and the ignorance of it that causes all our misery is to be destroyed by the light of reason. I am none of the elements of the body, nor the mind, nor its desire. I am the pure intellectual soul, a manifestation of the divine intellect. That I am everywhere, and yet nothing at all that is anywhere, is the only knowledge of the real that can be had, and there is no other road to it. I have been deceived a long time by my own deceitful ignorance and carried off the right path, as a tiger carries off a young animal into the woods. By good fortune I have caught this thief at last, and I will trust the robber of truth no more. I am beyond the reach of affliction; misery has nothing to do with me, and my union with these things is as temporary as a cloud’s with a mountain. Under my egoism I say I speak, I know, I stay, I go; let me look at the soul and the egoism is lost in the universal soul. I truly believed my eyes and the rest of my body belonged to me, but if they are something beside myself, let them stay or perish with the body; it is no concern of mine. Shame on it! What is this word I, and who invented it first? It is the slip-slop and baby talk of some demon child of the earth. All this time I have been groveling in this dusty den, roving like a stray deer on a sterile rock without a blade of grass. Look hard into the true nature of things and the meaning of the word I goes missing, and that word is the cause of all our woe. Try to feel your I by touch: you will find nothing but a ghost of your imagination. You set it on your tongue and utter it, and you relish no taste whatever of that empty word. You hear it ringing in your ears and it is as empty a sound as the air, and you cannot say where this rootless word came from. The sense of smell, which carries the fragrance of things to the inner soul, brings no scent of it to the brain. It is a mirage, a false idea of something we do not know, and it can only be an error, a thing of which we have no idea and no sense at all.”

“I see that my will is not always the cause of my actions, either, since my eyes and the other organs go about their functions without my volition directing them. But there is a difference between the acts of the body and the acts of the will: the acts done without the mind’s will carry no pain or pleasure with them. So let the organs of sense do their several acts without your willing them, and by that means you escape all the pleasure and the pain of success and disappointment. It is in vain that you blend your will with actions that happen of themselves through body and mind; the act of will carries a grief of its own, like the grief of children when the dolls they made in play get broken. Your desires and what they produce are copies of your mind, made of the same stuff, as waves are made of the water they rise from. It is your own will that guides your hand to build the prison you are confined in, as the silly silkworm is confined in a pod of its own making. It is because of your desires that you are exposed to disease and death, as it is the dim sight of the traveler on the mountain that pitches him headlong into the gorge. Desire alone attaches you to others in one place, as a thread passing through the holes of pearls ties them in a string around a neck. And what is this desire? A creation of your imagination, a fancy that something is good for you; the moment you stop fancying a thing, your desire for it is cut off as if by a knife. This creature of your imagination is the cause of all your errors and your ruin too, as the breath of air both feeds a lamp and puts it out. So now, my heart, source and spring of the senses, join all your sensibility and look into your own unreality, and feel in yourself the state of your utter annihilation, nirvana at the end. Give up egoism and worldly desire, those endless endemics of this life; put on the amulet of their abandonment, and resign yourself to God, and be free of every fear on earth.”

“The intellect is an unthinkable substance. It reaches to the limits of endless space, and it is smaller than the smallest atom; it stands aloof from everything, and no desire can reach it. Mind, understanding, egoism and the gross senses cannot touch it, while our empty desires spread as wide as the shadows of huge demons. From all my reasoning I perceive an intelligence inside me, and I feel that I am the stainless Intellect. This body of mine, the storehouse of my false and evil thoughts, may last or be lost without gain or loss to me. The intellect is free of birth and death; nothing in the all-pervading intellect can perish. What then does the death of a living being mean, and how and by whom could it be put to death? Life and death belong to the wishing, imagining powers of the mind, and never to the pure soul. Whatever has the sense of ego has the knowledge of its existence and nonexistence, and that is the mind; the soul, having no egoism, has no sense of being born or dying. Egoism is a fallacy born of ignorance; the mind is an appearance like water in a mirage; the visible objects are all gross bodies. The body is flesh and blood; the mind, by itself, is a nullity; the heart and the limbs are dull objects; the organs of sense are busy keeping the body going; properties remain properties and substances remain substances, and the being of Brahman is wholly calm and quiet. Where is the ego among them? Tell me which of these it is, what its form, its genus, its attributes, its ingredients. There is only one Being, pervading all, subsisting in all bodies, existing at all times, immense in itself: the Supreme Spirit, the intelligent soul of all. There is nothing here that can be called the ego, as an entity or as a non-entity, and nothing anywhere that it resembles or relates to; it is a perfect non-entity, and its fiction of a duality beside the unity of God comes to nothing. Everything in the world being full of the spirit of God, I am no other than that reality, and it is in vain that I think myself otherwise and grieve over it. As there is no relation between stones and iron nails, so body, senses, mind and intellect have no relation to one another, though they are found living together in one person. Once the great error of the unreal ego got its footing among men, it put the world in an uproar of mine and yours. It is the want of the light of reason that gave rise to that meaningless, marvelous word, and under the light of reason it vanishes, as ice dissolves under the heat of the sun.”

“The error of egoism shows itself in as many colors as the sky; better to wipe it out of the mind at once than to keep a trace of it: I am this child, this youth, this old man. Here is death following close on life, and a new life waiting on death, round and round in our transmigration, to our great annoyance only. This I have gained, this I will gain: these thoughts fill men’s minds, and the desire of a new gain is kindled in the senseless without end, as the flame of the sun-stone grows in summer heat. The decay of egoism withers the tree of worldliness, which then stops sprouting, like a plant on barren rock. Your desires are black snakes creeping in the hole of your heart, and they pull in their heads at the sight of Garuda, the snake-eater, who is reason. A pot made of earth long ago stays the same at all times, and so does the body, which came into existence long ago. A wave is water at its beginning and water at its end, and only shows a figure in the middle; so the beginning and end of bodies is earth and water, and the middle is a bustle and a commotion. Only the ignorant trust that fluctuating state, which, like the wave, is hurrying back into its original quiet. Think of what happens in dreams, in drunkenness, in a journey by boat, in a fever, in extreme joy and grief: objects come into sight and vanish, look smaller or larger than they are, seem to move. So do all the objects of our vision appear and disappear in the course of time. My heart, you do the same in your joy and your grief; you make the long short and the short long, as a single night is an age to parted lovers and an age of plenty is a moment. Or it is my long habit of thinking that makes the untruth look true to me, and the mirage of life presents its falsehoods as realities, like the mirage of the desert. Everything we see in the phenomenal world is unreal in its nature, and as the mind comes to know the nothingness of things it feels its own nothingness too. Then its desire for worldly enjoyment fades like the green of autumn, and when it sees the pure soul by its own light it is rid of its exertions, freed from its passions, and rests calm in itself. The heart reaches its perfect purity when it compresses its organs of sense and casts itself into the flame of the supreme soul, where all its dross is burned away.”

“The mind is the enemy of the body and the body of the mind; each grows at the other’s expense, and both die for want of the desire that supports them. Since they are hostile to each other, it is better to root out and destroy them both for the sake of supreme bliss. Neither of them survives death to enjoy heaven, any more than an airy fairy fares on earth. The mind, swollen with its avaricious desires, loads the body with labor and feeds on its life, as a yaksha ghost preys on the body of a boy; the body, harassed and oppressed, tries to stop the mind, as an impious son means to kill a father who has become the open enemy of his life. No one is a foe or a friend by nature; he becomes a friend to the one who deals kindly with him and a foe to the one who deals ill. What good can come of the union of two things so repugnant, which by their natures can never be reconciled? When both grow stout together they break every bond, as the lake and the rain join to overflow the banks, and troublesome as they are, their union to one end is useful, as fire and water cooperate to cook. But the body pines with the weakness of its desires and of the mind, while the mind never grows weak with the weakness of the body; therefore it is the mind that has to be curbed by every means. So I must cut down the weed wood of my mind, with the trees of my desires and the plants of my thirst, and having cleared that tract of land, roam over it at my pleasure. When my egoism is lost and the net of my desires is taken away, my mind will get back its calm and clearness, like the sky when the clouds disperse at the end of the rains. It is nothing to me whether this body, a heap of humors and a great enemy of mine, wastes away or lasts after my mind is dissolved. What this body craves is not mine, and I do not belong to it; what is bodily pleasure to me?”

“It is certain that I am not the body, and the body is in no way mine, just as a corpse with every part intact is no body at all. So I am something besides this body, something everlasting, whose glory never sets, and it is by that that I have the light in me by which I see the shining sun in the sky. I am neither ignorant of myself nor subject to misery, nor am I the dull unintelligent body that misery belongs to; my body may last or not, I am beyond every bodily accident. Where the self is, there is no mind, no senses, no desire of any kind, as low ruffians never live next door to princes. I have reached the state in which I have gone past all things: my solitude, my extinction, my indivisibility, my freedom from desire. I am loosened from the bonds of mind, body and senses, as oil is pressed from sesame seeds and parted from the sediment. I walk about freely in this state, and my mind, unchained from the body, treats its limbs as instruments that go along with it. I find myself in a state of transparency and buoyancy, self-contentment, intelligence and true reality; I feel my full joy and calm, and I keep my reserve in speech. I find my fullness and magnanimity, my comeliness and evenness of temper; I see the unity of all things, and I feel my fearlessness and my freedom from duality, from choice and from option. These qualities attend me always; they are constant and faithful, easy and graceful and always kind to me, and my steady attachment to them has made them as dear to me as beloved wives. I find myself as all and in all, at all times and in every way, and yet I have no desire for anyone and no dislike of anyone, and I am equally unconcerned with whatever is pleasant or unpleasant to me. Clear of the cloud of error and melancholy, released from doubt and duplicity in my thoughts, I drift like a thin cloud in the cool air of the autumn sky.” He had come as far as thinking could take him. He sat up straight in padmasana, let his eyelids fall half shut, and reached in his clear mind for a syllable.

Om in Three and a Half Measures

The syllable was Om. He took it for the true emblem of Brahman: whoever utters that one word rises to the highest state. He sounded it in a raised voice on a high note, and it rang out of him like the ringing of a bell. The utterance shook the seat of his intellect in the skull and reached the seat of the pure soul in the crown of his head. The pranava, the Omkara, is made of three and a half matras, three and a half beats, and sounded with its first part, the letter a, in the high udatta accent, it fills the whole body with the breath of inspiration.

With the first part he let out the rechaka, the exhaling breath, and the inner air was drawn out of his whole body until it was as empty as the sea after Agastya drank it. His vital breath, filled with the sap of the intellect, left his body and rested in the outer air, as a bird leaves its snug nest and floats in the open sky. Then the fire of his heart burned his whole body and left it as dry as a forest scorched by the hot wind of a conflagration. This was the first step of his yoga through the pranava, and he gave no attention at all to hatha yoga, which is too arduous at the start.

He went on to the next part of the syllable and stayed unshaken under the kumbhaka, the held breath. His vital breaths were not allowed out of his body, and not allowed to circulate up and down inside it; he shut them up in his nostrils like water penned in a drain. The fire that had been burning his burned body went out in an instant, like a flash of lightning, and he left his whole frame consumed to ash, lying cold and gray on the naked ground. His white bones seemed to sleep there on the bare shore, resting quietly on a bed of grayish ash, like camphor powder strewn on the earth. The winds lifted the ashes and the bones and heaped them on him, until he looked like Shiva himself smeared with ash and wearing his string of bones; then the high winds flew up to the face of the upper sky and scattered the ashes and bones through the air like an autumn mist. That was the second, the middle stage of his pranava yoga, and he reached it by the kumbhaka breath and never by hatha yoga.

Then came the third stage, by the puraka, the inhaling breath, which gives the yogi quiet rest and is called puraka because it fulfills his object. In this practice the vital breath is carried up through the intellect to the region of the void, and there it is cooled by the climate. From the void the breath climbed to the lunar sphere, where it grew as cold as rising smoke that turns to rain cloud in the upper sky, and it came to rest in the orb of the full moon as in an ocean of ambrosia, as cool as the cool of a meritorious samadhi. From there the breaths came down again as cooling showers of rain, brightened by the moonbeams into fine wires of gold, and fell as a dewdrop on what remained of the ashes, as the heavenly Ganga fell on the crest of Shiva, and the burned body was brought back to its former shape. It grew as bright as the orb of the moon, and it wore the four arms of Vishnu; it glistened like the parijata tree on the seashore when the Mandara mountain had just churned it out. Uddalaka’s body stood there to be seen as the body of Narayana, his bright eyes and lotus face shining with a celestial light. The vital breaths filled him with moisture, as a lake fills with sweet water and the trees drink in the spring; the inner airs filled his lungs and the cavity of his heart, as the waters of the sea run toward a whirlpool and roll into it. And then his body was restored to its natural state, as the earth comes back to its prior, purer condition after the rains have washed it.

Now he sat in padmasana and held his body fixed and firm, straight and erect, and he began raja yoga, in silence, with a graceful face. The five organs of his senses were bound as fast as the feet of an elephant in strong chains. He tried for an unshaken samadhi, a hibernation, and wanted to make himself as translucent as the clear autumn sky. He restrained his breath by pranayama, reined in the swift stag of his respiration from bolting in every direction, and tied his heart from its inclinations as if by a rope to the post of his chest; he stopped it by force from running madly to the pits of its affections, as men stop a flood with embankments. His eyes were half hidden under their lids, the pupils as fixed as the closed petals of a lotus against the bees that buzz about it for honey. He drew his senses out of their objects as oil is drawn from sesame seed and pulled the organs in under himself as a tortoise pulls in its limbs. He threw outer sensation far off, as a rich gem throws off its outer coating and rubbish and then casts its rays to a distance, and he compressed what remained without touching it, as trees draw their sap in under the bark in the cold season. He stopped the circulation of breath to the nine openings of his body, its passage through the mouth and the anus, and with kumbhaka he compressed the winds into the inner cells of his body. He held his neck erect like the peak of Meru to receive the light of the soul, which flowered before the vision of his mind. He penned his subdued mind in the cavity of his heart, as men pen a great elephant in a cavern of the Vindhya once some trick has brought it under their power.

When his soul had gained its clearness, like the serene autumn sky, it gave up its unsteadiness, as the ocean lies calm when it is full and no wind stirs it. The mist of doubt that used to gather in his breast and dim the light of his reason fled before him like a cloud of gnats before the wind. Still the doubts kept rising, crowds of them, of their own accord, and he scattered them boldly with the sword of his reason as a hero drives his enemies before him. With the thick mists of doubt gone, and all worldly desire with them, he saw the bright sun of reason rising in his breast out of the parting gloom of ignorance, and the sunbeams of his full intelligence rose in his mind like a wind and swept the clouds of doubt from the sky. Then he saw a beautiful gathering of light come down and settle on his lotus seat, like the morning twilight after the shade of night: his sattvic state, his purity. And soon the rajas of his mind, his worldliness, devoured that clear light of the soul, as a young elephant eats the red land lotuses, as the Vetala goblins lick up drops of blood. With the heavenly light gone, his mind went flighty with the giddiness of tamas; he grew as drowsy as the lotuses that sleep at night and as tipsy as a drunkard over his cups. Then his reason came back and shook the sleep off him, as wind disperses clouds, as the snake draws in the air, as the elephant tears up the lotus bush, as sunlight breaks the dark. With the drowsiness gone, his mind saw the broad expanse of a blue firmament filled with fancied shapes of animals and flights of peacocks and other birds. And then, as rainwater washes the blackness off tamala leaves, as a gust of wind drives off the morning mist, as the light of a lamp disperses the dark, his spiritual light returned to him and took away the blue void of his mind by filling it with its own radiance.

The idea of an empty vacuum gave way to his consciousness of himself, and his idea of the mind was absorbed into that, as a man’s drunken frenzy is drowned in his sleep. His great soul rubbed the impressions of error off his vitiated mind, as the sun drives from the world the shades of darkness that covered it at night. Freed like this from its shades of light and dark, from the dross of its drowsiness and error, his misty mind came to rest in that state of samadhi, that trance, which no language can describe. In that calm his limbs dropped as in the drowsiness of sleep, and their powers were drawn into the channel of his self-consciousness, as a flood draws back into its basin when an embankment holds it. From his consciousness of himself he advanced, by constant inquiry, to the state of his intellectuality, as gold shaped into a jewel is melted back to the pure metal. Then, leaving intellectuality, he thought himself the intellect of his intellect, and took another form and figure, as clay is turned into a pot. Then, leaving his nature as a thinkable thing, an object, he became the thinking intellect itself, the subject; and after that, one with the pure universal intellect, as the waves of the sea resolve their drops into the common air. Losing sight of particulars, he saw the Great One as the container of all, and became one with the sole, empty intellect. He found his happiness in that state beyond phenomena, in the noumenon, which, like the ocean, is the reservoir of all moisture. He passed out of the confines of his body, went to a certain place, and leaving his ordinary form there, he became an ocean of joy.

His intellect swam that ocean of joy like a floating swan, and it stayed there for many years, with the serene luster of the full moon in a clear sky. It remained as still as a lamp in windless air, as the shadow of a figure in a painting, as calm as a clear lake without a wave, as the sea after a storm, as motionless as a cloud that has poured out all its rain.

The Invitation After Six Months

While Uddalaka sat in that full blaze of light, he saw the aerial Siddhas coming toward him, and a company of gods with them. The Siddhas were eager to confer on him the rank of the Sun and the rank of Indra, and they gathered around him from every quarter of heaven with crowds of Gandharvas and Apsaras. The saint took no notice of them. He paid them no honor; he stayed in his deep thought and his steady meditation, as the sun stays in the northern hemisphere for half the year. And while he went on in his state of living liberation, the gods Hari, Hara and Brahma themselves waited at his door, with Siddhas, Sadhyas and other deities beside them.

He stayed in that indifference which lies between the two opposites, sorrow and joy, neither of which lasts long, while the middle state, the state of not minding, endures forever. When the mind sits in that neutrality, for a moment or for a thousand years, it has no more relish for pleasure, because it sees the joys of the next world already begun in this one. Holy men who have gained that state in this life look no more at the outer world; they turn aside from it as a man avoids a thorn bush. A man riding in the heavenly chariot of Chitraratha never gets down to sit in a khadira thicket. They take no account of the visible world who enjoy that felicity of the invisible inside themselves, as a rich man who has everything takes no account of the condition of the miserable poor. The wise heart that has found its rest there keeps itself from every thought of this world, or shrinks from it with disgust.

Uddalaka stayed in that seat for six months. Then he woke from his trance and moved from the spot, as the sun comes out of the frost mists in spring, and he found before him the assembly of bright beings, faces shining like the moon, hailing the hermit with reverence. They were fanned with chowries that moved about them like swarms of bees dusted white with mandara pollen, and they sat in their heavenly chariots with flags waving in the sky. Great saints, Vasistha said, men like ourselves, sat among them, with rings of the sacred grass on their fingers, and Vidyadharas and Gandharvas with their women waited on them. They spoke to the great-souled Uddalaka. “Venerable sir, look at us. We have been waiting here to greet you. Mount one of these heavenly chariots and come to our celestial home; heaven is the last abode, where after this life you will have the full gratification of every desire.”

“Stay there and enjoy what you want until this kalpa ends. Pure heavenly bliss is the inheritance of saints, and the whole aim and object of ascetic austerity on earth. Look: the Vidyadhara women are waiting for you with fans and wreaths of flowers in their hands. They have been calling and inviting you, as the young cow elephant entices the great bull toward her. The desire of enjoyment is the whole object of riches and meritorious acts, and the greatest enjoyment we have is the company of fairy women, as flowers and fruit are what the spring season is for.”

The hermit heard his heavenly guests out. He honored them as he ought, and nothing they said moved him. He paid them no compliments and offered them no courtesies, and he did not change the even, unexcitable tenor of his mind; he bade them go in peace and went back to his accustomed devotion. The Siddhas honored him for his steadiness in his pursuit and for refusing every carnal gratification. They lingered for some days trying to entice him to their fields, and then they left for their own paradise without him.

Afterward the saint wandered where he pleased, in his character as a living, liberated yogi, and visited the hermitages of ascetics at the skirts of the woods and forests. He roamed freely over the mountains of Meru, Mandara and Kailasa and over the tablelands of the Vindhya and the Himalaya, and traveled through woods, groves and deserts to distant islands on every side. At last he chose a cavern at the foot of a mountain for his home, and gave the rest of his life to devotion and meditation in that seclusion. Sometimes it was a day, sometimes a month, sometimes a year or a run of years before he rose once from his meditation. When his yoga was over he came out and mixed with the world, and though he was sometimes busy with the affairs of life, he stayed reserved in his conduct and abstracted in his mind. Practiced in mental abstraction, he became one with the divine mind and shone in every place like broad daylight. He was in the habit of pondering the community of the mind, until he became one with the universal Mind, which spreads alike through the universe and neither rises nor sets anywhere, like the light of the sun. He gained perfect tranquility and evenness of mind in every place, and it released him from the snare of doubt and from the pain of repeated births and deaths; his mind was as clear and quiet as the autumn sky, and his body shone like the sun wherever he went.

Undivided Being Through Every State

Rama stopped him there. “You are the sun of the day of spiritual knowledge, and the fire that burns through the night of my doubts, and the cool moon to the heat of my ignorance. Explain to me what you meant just now by community of existence.”

“When the thinking principle, the mind, is wasted and weakened until it seems extinct and null,” Vasistha said, “the intellect that remains, common to all beings, is called the common intelligence of all. When that intellect is without intellection, absorbed in itself, as transparent as if it were nothing at all, it is called the common intellect, the samanya. When it ignores the knowledge of all its inner and outer objects, it remains the common intellect, unconscious of any personality. When all visible things are seen to have one common existence and to be of the same nature as oneself, that is the common intellect, the whole pressed into one as a tortoise draws in its limbs. When the phenomena are all swallowed of themselves in the one common spirit, and nothing remains that is different from it, that is the one common entity. This common view of all things as one and the same is called transcendence, and it is the same for embodied and disembodied beings in both worlds; it sets the liberated being above the fourth stage of consummation. Only the enlightened soul, lifted by samadhi, can have this common view of all as one; the ignorant cannot make that highest generalization. All great and liberated beings hold it, as it is the same moisture and the same air that spread through the whole earth and the whole sky. Sages like ourselves, Narada and the others, and the gods Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, see all things in existence this way.”

“The saintly Uddalaka held this view of the community of all beings and things, and having reached by it the state of perfection that knows no fear and no fall, he lived on this earth as long as he liked to live. After a long time he thought of enjoying the bliss of disembodied liberation in the next world, by giving up his frail mortal frame here. With that intention he went into the cave of a mountain, made himself a seat of dried leaves, and sat down on it in padmasana with his eyes half closed under their lids.”

“He shut the openings of the nine organs of sense, pressed their properties, touch and the rest, into the single sense of perception, and confined them all within that, in his intellect. He compressed the vital airs in his body and held his head erect on his neck, fixed the tip of his tongue to the roof of his palate, and sat with his blooming face turned up to heaven. He let no breath pass up or down, out of his body or into it, or fly off into the air; he let neither mind nor sight fix on any object; he pressed them all into himself with his teeth clenched in the struggle. The breathing of his vital airs stopped entirely. His face was composed and clear, his body erect with the consciousness of his intellect, and his hair stood on end like thorns.”

“His habitual consciousness of intellection taught him the community of the intellect, and through his constant communion with it he felt a flood of inner bliss stirring in himself. That bliss led him to know himself as identical with the being of the infinite soul, the support of the universal whole. He remained in even composure, in transcendent quietness, enjoying an even rapture with a placid face. Unruffled by the transport of his bliss, he stayed a long time in abstract meditation, his mind withdrawn from every thought and error of the world. His great body stayed as fixed as a figure in a painting and shone as bright as the autumn sky under the beams of the full moon. In the course of some days his soul gradually forgot its mortal state and found its rest in pure spiritual bliss, as the moisture of trees is drawn up into the rays of the sun when autumn ends. Free of every desire, every doubt and every levity of mind, free of every foul and every pleasurable inclination of the body, he reached, in the loss of his former joys, that supreme bliss before which the prosperity of Indra is a straw floating on the ocean: the summum bonum, unmeasurable, pervading the whole measureless void, filling the universe, felt by the enraptured yogi alone, the supreme and infinite bliss with no beginning and no end, a reality with no property that can be assigned to it.”

“Through the first six months of that devotion, while the Brahmin stood in this first state of his consummation with his understanding clear, his body was dried out by the sunbeams, and the winds of heaven whistled over his dry frame with the sound of lute strings.”

The Body After Ownership

“A long time went by that way, and then Parvati, the daughter of the mountain king, came to that spot with the Matris, the mothers, blazing like flames of fire with the gray locks on their heads, as if to confer on him the boon of his austere devotion. Among them was the goddess Chamunda, whom the gods themselves adore. She took up the living skeleton of the Brahmin and set it on her crown, and it gave a new luster to her frame in the night.”

“So the body of Uddalaka, dry as a corpse and repellent to look at, was set above all the ornaments on the body of the goddess, and she valued it above every other jewel for one reason only: the spiritual knowledge that was in it. Whoever plants this plant, the life and conduct of Uddalaka, in the garden of his heart will find it always in flower with knowledge and always in fruit with divine bliss. Whoever walks under the shade of that growing arbor is never subject to death, and reaps the fruit of his own progress on the road to liberation.”

“Go on in the same way, Rama, to know the universal soul in your own soul, and find your rest in that holy state. Weigh everything by the light of the shastras and dive for their true meaning; take what your preceptor’s lectures give you, and ponder them in your own mind; and then practice.”