Observations placeholder

16: Special Instruction

Ashtavakra said:

16.1 You can recite and discuss scripture all you want, but until you drop everything you will never know Truth.

16.2 You can enjoy and work and meditate, but you will still yearn for That which is beyond all experience, and in which all desires are extinguished.

16.3 Everyone is miserable because they exert constant effort. But no one understands this. A ripe mind can become unshackled upon hearing this one instruction.

16.4 The master idler, to whom even blinking is a bother, is happy. But he is the only one.

16.5 When the mind is free of opposites like “This is done,” and “This is yet undone,” one becomes indifferent to merit, wealth, pleasure and liberation.

16.6 One who abhors sense objects avoids them. One who desires them becomes ensnared. One who neither abhors nor desires is neither detached nor attached.

16.7 As long as there is desire-- which is the absence of discrimination-- there will be attachment and non-attachment. This is the cause of the world.

16.8 Indulgence creates attachment. Aversion creates abstinence. Like a child, the sage is free of both and thus lives on as a child.

16.9 One who is attached to the world thinks renouncing it will relieve his misery. One who is attached to nothing is free and does not feel miserable even in the world.

16.10 He who claims liberation as his own, as an attainment of a person, is neither enlightened nor a seeker. He suffers his own misery.

16.11 Though Hara, Hari or the lotus-born Brahma himself instruct you, until you know nothing you will never know