A Potent Verse of Adi Shankaracharya - 25th December 2017

It is beautiful words from Adi Shankara which I found. It is just a verse, but it contains most of what we speak about in Satsang. That is the beauty of these great sages. He says, 'Now I shall tell you the nature of this absolute witness.' And it is your grace that we get to even hear these words. Maybe centuries down, but when the body of Shankara lived, his words still have that power. We are blessed to have this grace in our life that we can hear the Satguru in this form. So the Satguru is now telling us the nature of this absolute witness. Even before we get into the description of this, we can check this for ourselves. Isn't it the same thing what Ashtavakra is saying? 'You are the one solitary witness of all there is.' Then he says, 'If you recognize it, you will be freed from the bonds of ignorance and attain liberation.' It is so beautiful, isn't it? This, by the recognizing of it, you let go of the bonds of ignorance and come to the end of the local thing and find that which you are seeking: attaining liberation.

Therefore, it must tell you that it is just a question of recognition. It is just a misunderstanding. It is not something to be done. It is just something that you have considered yourself to be, and now you are coming to the recognition of it, and then the false consideration will go away, and this itself is freedom. So it is not a physical movement that needs to happen. If you consider yourself to be a cat, but you were reminded and you were shown and you came to the recognition yourselves that you are not a cat, then you are free from all the problems of the cat. They do not apply anymore. So as you are recognizing the truth, you will be freed from the bonds of ignorance and attain liberation.

Then he says, 'Where is the self-existent reality which is the basis of our consciousness of ego?' There is a self-existent reality which was the basis of the notion 'I am something,' 'I am limited,' 'I am my name,' 'I am my form.' What is that which is self-existent? What a beautiful term. What exists by itself? Does your identity exist by itself? Can you pose as if you are a person without picking up a notion about yourself? You can't even pick up any problem without picking up an idea. So all of this is dependent on belief, some ideas that you have about yourself. Now you are existent. Now your being, you are existing. What effort are you making to exist? What is holding this existence? Are you forcing it up? It is just here. You exist. This existence is the basis of all that comes and goes. This is the substratum of all that moves in this world.

Now what has happened is we have attached ourselves to that which is coming and going. All the things that you call 'mine'—out of all of them, how many are not going to come and go? Everything that you say is mine, how much of that will stay forever? Is it eternal? Nothing. So then this mind itself is going to be the cause of so much suffering because you attach to something which is going to be going. To say that anything in this phenomenal world is mine is like attaching yourself to a drunken dog here, because you know it is going to go away. So in this play of 'me' and 'mine,' we have forgotten the basis of all of this. What is my own existence?

Then the saint says, 'That reality is a witness of the states of ego consciousness and of the body. That reality is the constant witness of all the three states of consciousness we keep: waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep.' It is your real self. Or to put it into the pointer again, it is the same as what Ashtavakra used to share: What is that which continues even in your dreamless sleep? And here you cannot presume anything. You have to speak from your very experience. In this waking state, you have one body. In a dream state, you seem like you have another body. In dreamless sleep, which body is there? What witnesses a state of dreamless sleep where there is nothing at all phenomenal, and yet you had the experience of sleep? That which is untouched by any of the coming and going of any of these things, that you are. And if you are that, then what can come in this waking state that can, in reality, harm you or hurt you? You have remained the unchanging irrespective of what states have come and gone. This is your unchanging reality.