# The Essence of the Ashtavakra Gita  ## Metadata - Author: [[Ramesh S Balsekar]] - Full Title: The Essence of the Ashtavakra Gita - Category: #books ## Highlights - This is because any intentional deed is based on the superstition that an individual exists. Enlightenment is the name given to the noumenal state. How can a phenomenal object be enlightened?! ([Location 205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=205)) - Non-objective relationship brings about, through its very nature, two developments: a)  conceptualization ceases b)  life is lived spontaneously without volition. ([Location 217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=217)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - “Whether he is feted and feasted, or pestered and annoyed, the serene one, with the perception of the Self, is neither gratified nor upset.” (54)   “The wise one witnesses the actions of his own body as if he is witnessing those of another body. How then can he be affected by praise or blame?” (55)   “He who has ceased to conceptualize and is, therefore, free from attachment to sense objects, beyond the interrelated pairs of opposites, and free from volition, accepts with equanimity whatever comes his way in the normal course.” (59) ([Location 247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=247)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - In other words, the split-mind of relative duality has been healed into the wholeness of absolute noumenality. ([Location 257](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=257)) - Effort contained the illusory desire on the part of an illusory individual to achieve an illusory goal! All that was necessary was to turn his gaze inward whereas all his effort was necessarily directed outward. Mind when turned inward ceases to conceptualize, and the ceasing of conceptualizing is tantamount to liberation because the conceptualizing itself was the creation of bondage. ([Location 312](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=312)) - Note: Self spine feeling medulla introspection - worse. All that can be done is to witness those thoughts and desires as they arise and not get involved in them. ([Location 368](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=368)) - Enlightenment is the inevitable result of the absence of purposeful intentions. The absence of purposeful intentions means the absence of conceptualization. But thoughts as such are totally spontaneous and involuntary. ([Location 438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=438)) - “Without any attachment to words and sense objects, and as the Self is not an object of perception, my mind has been freed from distraction and become one-pointed. And so do I abide in my natural state.”(108)   “Having realized that efforts such as meditation are prescribed only for those whose mind is distracted, I abide in my natural state” (109) ([Location 453](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=453)) - “One who has an aversion for sense objects is considered a renunciate, and one who covets them is considered sensual. But one who neither rejects nor covets is unconcerned with them.” (151) ([Location 574](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=574)) - The sage tells us that enlightenment or Self abidance is our natural state. It does not need to be acquired. Any personal, volitional effort means only strengthening the ego, the “me”, which is itself the obstruction which covers and hides our original state. ([Location 581](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=581)) - You become a master-idler when all sense of personal doership is totally lost. Give up action, give up doing, and you become an idler. Give up the sense of personal doership and let action happen and you become the master-idler. ([Location 609](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=609)) - In this attitude, man forgets that he is not separate from nature, that the endowment of intellect in human beings is itself a gift from Nature. It so happens though that this gift is a dubious one with a double-edged sharpness. It is intellect (conceptualizing) which is the root cause of man’s unhappiness. Intellect is responsible for the creation of separation between opposites which are in fact inseparable, in the sense that one cannot exist by itself without the other. ([Location 632](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=632)) - The sage begins this series of verses by averring that desire is at the root of ignorance (and unhappiness). Desire creates opposites of acceptable and unacceptable. The acquiring of what seems acceptable has within itself the seed of the unacceptable because of the fear of losing what has been acquired. ([Location 693](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=693)) - Enlightenment means the annihilation of individuality. Seeking begins with the individual but ends with the annihilation of the individual. Enlightenment can never be a personal achievement. Enlightenment is an impersonal event in phenomenality. ([Location 718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=718)) - clear that there is indeed a single cause of human unhappiness. It is the “me”-concept, the notion of a separate individual as the subject with the rest of the world as its object. ([Location 722](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=722)) - The result is a patchwork of personal philosophy, armed with which, the seeker gets more and more anxious to reform the world. It is this “knowledge” which the sage says must be “forgotten”, which must drop off before anything worthwhile can happen. ([Location 732](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=732)) - Anything that was seen as acceptable or unacceptable, pleasant or unpleasant, better or worse, was a judgement dictated by the split-mind of the me concept. Whenever such judging was eliminated, the me-concept was absent, and what remained would be the whole-mind, the original face. ([Location 749](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=749)) - Freedom is the relief from the worry over consequences of choices and decisions. Such total freedom is the result of unequivocally accepting “Not my will but Thine, O Lord”, the basis of all the teachings of all the Masters of all the schools of liberation.   Acceptance is not total if the “me” continues to make deliberate, personal efforts to “achieve” anything, including enlightenment. Acceptance is indeed total when all actions that take place through all body-mind organisms (including one’s own) are accepted as the functioning of Totality, the expression of “Thy will”. ([Location 772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=772)) - “He who perceives the Brahman as something separate from himself may have to meditate on the principle ‘I am Brahman’. But he who has transcended all conceptualization and thus sees nothing as other than himself, has nothing to meditate upon.” (192) ([Location 787](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=787)) - The sage has realized that there is a body but it is not his body, nor is he the body; there are thoughts, but they are not his thoughts, nor is he the thoughts; there are desires, but they are not his desires, nor is he the desires; there are emotions, but they are not his emotions, nor is he the emotions. ([Location 794](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=794)) - As Ashtavakra says, he who perceives the Brahman as something separate from himself may have to meditate on the principle “I am Brahman”, but he who has transcended all conceptualization and thus sees nothing as other than himself, has nothing to meditate upon. ([Location 799](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=799)) - the manifest and the unmanifest, samsara and nirvana, are the One. ([Location 817](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=817)) - The joke, of course, is that the seeker still thinks in terms of himself as an individual subjective entity and seeks his real nature (enlightenment) as an object! It is for this reason that every Master of advaita (non-duality) keeps reiterating that enlightenment means nothing other than the realization that enlightenment is not some thing to be attained. ([Location 841](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=841)) - Looking within, it must be clearly understood, you will not see the subject, because if you did, the subject you see will only be another object. ([Location 857](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=857)) - What you will perhaps see is the absence of yourself as an object. This absence is often described as the “void”. ([Location 860](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=860)) - The ultimate realization happens only when the negator of this negation is himself negated. That is to say, when the seeking itself ceases. Ashtavakra continues to describe the spontaneous, non-volitional living of the awakened being: “The man-of-wisdom is devoid of thought even when he is thinking; he is devoid of sense organs even when he is using them; he is devoid of intellect even though he is endowed with it. He is devoid of the ego, even though he possess it.” (271) ([Location 863](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=863)) - All the functions that take place though the body are merely witnessed not as his personal actions but as part of the functioning of Totality. This is what Ashtavakra means when he says that the man-of-wisdom is devoid of thought even when he is thinking (because he does not regard the thinking that takes place spontaneously as “his” thought); ([Location 881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B007X5HG20&location=881))