Before you read
He walks off without a word. Vasistha tells it to Rama to show what the fourth state, turiya, looks like from the outside.
Rama’s Question About Turiya
Vasistha had just finished with Manu’s teaching to Ikshvaku, and Rama, who had been quiet through it, had a practical question. “You know more of the spirit than anyone living,” he said. “This man who is liberated while he lives, the one you have been describing: does he come into any extraordinary power? Or does he stay as he is, with his knowledge of yoga and nothing to show for it?”
“A sage who knows everything,” Vasistha said, “will still know one thing better than another, and his mind will still lean one way more than another. But the seer whose mind is content has his soul at rest in itself, and that is the whole of it. There are plenty of men who have mastered particular mantras and tantras and the virtues of certain minerals and can fly through the air. What is extraordinary about that? Birds do it all day, and so do flies. Others, by constant practice, have learned to make themselves as small as an atom or as light as air, and the seers who know the spirit pay no attention to any of it. Here is the difference between them and the crowd of idle practitioners of yoga: they are content with a mind that has no passion in it, and they put no reliance on practice. You will know such a seer, though nothing about him stands out, by this: his mind is always cool and calm, he is free of the errors of the world, and love and anger, sorrow and delusion and the accidents of life leave hardly a trace on him.”
He went on without a pause, because the question of powers had a root, and the root was how a soul comes down into a body at all. “Understand that the Lord, the divine soul, stoops to take on the nature of the living soul, the animal soul, the way a high-born man may take up a menial’s work for some small purpose and set aside the standing he was born with. At the start of each of the repeated creations, beings come into existence without any cause; no one makes them, the way a potter makes a pot with a wheel and a stick. After that, the soul that has come out of the divine passes through one body after another and becomes many kinds of being in turn, according to what it has done and what it leans toward. Its acts are the second cause, and they keep the wheel turning. A man’s own acts make his happiness and his misery, and the will behind the acts comes from his sense of himself. That will, that desire for some act or some fruit, is what binds him here, and getting rid of it is what the word moksha means: release from the bond of your own wanting, and nothing grander than that. So choose carefully between what is right and what is wrong, and shrink your wishes to the smallest scale you can. Own nothing and be owned by nothing. Stop thinking about anything except what is left when the thought of everything else has gone. Whatever the senses go back to again and again binds the soul tighter the more it enjoys it, and lets the mind go in proportion to the distaste it feels. If there is anything here that pleases your soul, Rama, that is the string tying you to the earth; if you find nothing here to your liking, you are free of all the trifles there are. Let nothing tempt your mind, living or lifeless, and look on everything from a straw to a great idol as beneath your regard. Do not think of yourself as the doer or the giver, the eater or the offerer, of anything you do or give or eat or offer to the gods; your self is immaterial, and it stands apart from everything the body does. Do not concern yourself with your past acts or your cares for the future, which you do not command. Do the duty in front of you, as it comes to hand. Every feeling and passion a man has, his appetites and his desires and the rest, is strung on his heart, and those heart strings have to be cut with the weapon of a brave, strong heart; it is only weak hearts that feed them. Break the sensing mind with the reasoning mind and stop its rush into error, as men break iron pegs with iron hammers. Intelligent men rub out one dirt with another and drive out one poison with another, and a soldier meets steel with steel.”
“Every living being has three bodies. There is the gross body, the hands and feet and the rest of the limbs, which lives in this lower world on food. There is an inner body, which comes from within and is made of all its wishes in the world; that is the mental part of it. And there is the third, the spiritual body, which takes every form and is the simple intelligent soul, without beginning or end and without any change in its nature. Take hold of that one and rely on it, and pay the other two no regard at all. That is the pure turiya, and you must stand steady in it as in your own liberation while you live, and put no trust in the other two.” Rama stopped him there. “I understand the three states you have defined for me, waking, dreaming and sound sleep,” he said. “But the fourth, turiya, you have left undefined. Explain it to me clearly.” “It is the state of the mind,” Vasistha said, “in which the feelings of I and not-I, of being and not being, are drowned under a total impassibility, and the mind settles into one unvarying, even tenor of calm and clearness. It is the state in which mine and yours are simply absent, and a man stays on as a witness and spectator of the business of life. That is turiya, and that is liberation while living. There are wishes and concerns in waking, and none in this. Sound sleep is pure insensibility, and this is the calm in which a wise man sees everything in the world going on; from outside it looks like the dullness of the ignorant, who notice no stir in the world at all. When every last trace of egotism has settled out of the mind, the way mud settles to the bottom and leaves the water clear, that evenness is turiya, the soul’s indifference.”
“Let me give you an instance,” he said. “It will throw as clear a light on your mind, which is already lit, as the all-seeing gods have.”
The Hunter’s Question
Somewhere in a forest a sage sat silent, alone. He had been sitting a long time.
A huntsman came through the trees after his prey. He had put an arrow into a stag and the stag had run, with the shaft still fixed in its back, and he was following the blood. He saw the man sitting there, saw that he did not look up, and thought it strange enough to stop. “Have you seen a wounded stag come running this way?” he asked. “With an arrow in its back?”
The sage answered him. “You ask me where your stag has fled,” he said. “Understand this about sages like me, who live in the forest. We are as cool as blocks of stone. Nothing that happens on the earth registers on us.”
Seeing, Speaking, and the Claim of “I”
“We have lost the egoism that a man needs to carry on the transactions of the world.”
“And understand that it is the mind that conducts every action of the senses.”
“My egoism dissolved in my mind a long time ago. I have no perception at all of the three states, waking, dreaming and sound sleep.”
“I rest quiet in my fourth state, where nothing touches me and where there is no seeing of things that can be seen.”
An Answer the Hunter Could Not Use
The huntsman heard the words. He heard every one of them, and he could make nothing of their meaning; the man had spoken his language and said nothing he could use.
He did not argue, and he did not ask again. He turned and went his own way without a word, and the sage sat on behind him as he had sat before.
Vasistha’s Application
“So I tell you, Rama,” Vasistha said, “there is no state beyond the fourth. Turiya is that unalterable stillness of the mind which you will not find anywhere else. Waking, dreaming and sound sleep are the three conditions of the mind that can be seen, and they are, in order, its dark state, its quiet state and its insensible state. In waking the mind shows its dark face, because it is open to every passion and every evil of life. In dreaming it shows its quiet face, because the cares and the anxieties are not there. Sound sleep is insensibility. And the state beyond those three has the look of death on it. Yet that deathlike figure has the principle of life in it, and the yogis guard that life carefully from harm and from decay. The soul that stays in its quiet rest after it has given up every desire is in what the sages call the cool calm of itself, and that is the liberated state of the holy yogi on this earth.”
“Every work on the spirit comes to the same conclusion: there is nothing except the supreme soul. There is no principle of ignorance, no avidya, and no principle of delusion, no maya, acting as a second agent under the one quiet Brahma, who has never had a second. The spirit of the Lord is always calm, with the serene brightness of the divine intellect in it; it is full of its own omnipotence, and it is called Brahman. Some determine it to be formless vacuum itself, some to be omniscience, and most people in the world call it the Lord God. Leave all of those alone, Rama. Stay quite silent in yourself and be extinguished in the divine essence, by holding back the movements of your heart and mind and by the tranquility of your soul. Keep a quiet soul, and to the outward eye be a deaf and dumb man. Look always within, and be full of the divine spirit. Do the duties of your waking state as if you were doing them in your sleep. Give up everything in your inward mind, and do whatever comes to you outwardly without taking any of it to heart.”
“The mind, as a substance, exists only for a man’s misery, and its absence is his highest happiness. So the mind has to be drowned in the intelligent soul, by putting a stop to the action of its powers altogether. Stay as cold as a stone at the sight of anything, whether it delights you or disgusts you, and by that means learn to bring everything in the world under your control. Pleasure and pain are not in the thing out there, and nothing between the two is there either. It is by diligent attention to the one in here that we come to the end of all our misery. The man who has known the supreme soul has found a delight inside himself like the cooling beams of the full moon, and knowing the essence of everything in the three worlds, he plays his parts as if he were not attending to them at all.” Rama had one more thing to ask. “Tell me the practices of the seven stages of yoga,” he said, “and what the yogis are like at every stage.”