164

Begin with the seeker awake. The eyes are open, the senses are open, and the whole noisy market of the world comes pouring in through them: the faces we call ours, the wealth we count, the hundred small fears and wantings that follow a person from waking until they lie down again. This is the first of the three little rooms in which an unawakened soul spends its whole life. The tradition names them simply: jāgrat, waking; svapna, dream; suṣupti, deep sleep; and it says plainly that the conditioned soul can experience nothing beyond these three. We call the first of them being awake, but it is only being awake to the perishable. In this waking room the soul reaches through its senses for objects, and the mind sits forever absorbed in wife and children and wealth, taking these passing things for real, and so the stream of karma flows on, body after body, life after life, each one chasing the same dissolving pleasures. And here, into this very room, the seeker makes his prayer. O let it not be these things that fill my waking mind. Let the luster of Her lotus-feet rise here instead. When I open my eyes, let the first splendor I meet be the rosy radiance of Rādhā's feet, and let every flickering trick of this perishable world have to push past that radiance to reach me, and fail.

There is, the tradition reminds us, a fourth thing beyond these three: turīya, transcendence. And here is the ache of our condition, for the cit-kaṇa jīva, the tiny spark of spirit that we are, is itself a drop of that very transcendence, and yet cannot taste it, bound as it is by the ropes of māyā. Only those who walk a path of yoga, whether the path of knowledge or the path of discipline or, sweetest of all, the path of bhakti, climb at last to that fourth shore. So this prayer is no small thing; it is a soul reaching past the only three states it has ever known, asking that the Beloved be carried into each of them and beyond.

Then the body lies down and the senses fold shut, and the second little room opens: the room of dreams. The five senses go dark, unconscious, and the mind, no longer battered by the day's thousand impressions, grows calmer and slips inward into a subtler country. The old teaching is precise about what dreams are. They are imaginations of the mind, negatives of the photo-like thoughts of our waking hours, and while they last these negatives seem utterly real and pour out their own misery and their own joy. They are the rising-up of saṁskāra, the cultivation stored in the mind, where the subtle forms shaped in waking by the three guṇas, by sattva and rajas and tamas, take on solid shape in the night. And when we dream of things we have never once seen in this life, those, the tradition says, are impressions floating up from births long forgotten. Yet not every dream is the residue of the perishable. The transcendental forms of God, the holy places that the devotees behold in sleep, these are real and supernatural, true visitations and not the mind's invention. So the tradition lovingly remembers Raghunātha dāsa Gosvāmī, who barely slept at all, and of whom it is sung, cāri daṇḍa suti thāke, svapne rādhā-kṛṣṇa dekhe, ek tila vyartha nāhi yāy: in the few moments sleep took him, even there in the dream-country Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa would appear to him, so that not one grain of that sleep was wasted. This is the seeker's second prayer: O Rādhe, if the mind must wander into dreams, let it wander only toward You. Let the subtle forms that rise from within me be Your form, Your names, Your play. Let me dream of nothing but the grove.

And then comes the third room, the deepest and the strangest: suṣupti, dreamless sleep. Here even the inner doors close. The gross senses and the subtle coverings, the mind, the intelligence, the consciousness, the ego, all lie down together, and no thought stirs at all; the tradition fixes it in a single line, sarvasya sthūla-sūkṣmopādheḥ kāraṇopādhau līnatvaṁ suṣuptitvam, that deep sleep is the dissolving of every gross and subtle covering back into its causal ground. The Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad seals it: yatra supto na kañcana kāryaṁ kāmayate na kañcana svapnaṁ paśyati tat suṣuptam, that deep sleep is the state in which the sleeper no longer desires, nor thinks, nor even dreams a single thing. The old grandfathers of contemplation told it as a game of cards played by night. Fourteen sit playing by one lamp, ten in the outer ring, four in the inner, and a light burning in the middle that needs no one's waking to keep it lit. The ten outer players are the five senses of action and the five senses of knowing; the four within are the mind, the intelligence, the consciousness, and the ego. While all fourteen stay awake, that is waking. When the outer ten nod off and only the four play on, that is dreaming. And when even the four lay down their cards and only the central lamp burns alone, that is deep sleep. Baladeva Vidyābhūṣaṇa says it in his Govinda Bhāṣya upon the Vedānta-sūtra, suṣuptau tāvat prājñenātmanā sampariṣvakto na bāhyaṁ kiñcana veda nāntaram: in deep sleep the soul lies folded against brahman, the Self, and knows nothing, neither outer nor inner, though it does not know that it is so folded. A man rising from such sleep says only, sukham aham asvāpam, "Ah, I slept blissfully," tasting after the fact a sweetness he did not know he was tasting. And here the seeker dares the boldest prayer of all. Let Your lotus-feet stay even in my prājña-caitanya, even in that consciousness merged in the dreamless deep; let it be that when I wake from the bottom of sleep I do not say merely "I slept well," but "Aha! How wonderful is the sweetness of Rādhā's lotus-feet!" To carry Her even into that lightless place, to have Her radiance fill the one room where nothing else can enter. Even to imagine such a state is itself a flood of bliss; what then of actually dwelling in it?

So the prayer climbs through all three states a soul can know and leaves no room of the inner house unhallowed. O Rādhe, it sings, I am Your maidservant, bound to You by a tie that no waking, no dreaming, no sleeping can sever. Let me not mix with this external world. Make my mind strong, so that the outer things that have nothing to do with You cannot pry it loose. Let me remember nothing but Your names, Your forms, Your qualities, Your play. Across the whole circle of consciousness, let there be only Rādhā.

And having claimed all three states, the heart now claims all places. Vaikuṇṭhe narake'thavā. Lift me to Vaikuṇṭha, that radiant kingdom where the blessed gaze forever on the majesty of the Lord, and even there I shall want nothing but Her. The sweet Vraja-devotees never long for that splendid heaven; and should they be set down there anyway, the majestic vision of the Lord cannot obstruct their sweet thoughts for a moment. The tradition holds up Gopa Kumāra, the hero of Sanātana Gosvāmī's Bṛhad-Bhāgavatāmṛta, who walked into the very kingdom of Vaikuṇṭha and stood before the four-armed Lord of Lakṣmī in all His glory, and still his heart broke with separation from his beloved Śrīman Madana-Gopāla, the cowherd boy of Vraja. The grandeur could not heal him, because grandeur was never what he loved. So the seeker says: even in Vaikuṇṭha, sweet Rādhārāṇī will go on playing in my mind, and all that vast luxury will never be able to cover over my remembrance of Śrī Rādhikā.

And then, more astonishing still, the heart turns and faces downward. Or cast me into hell, O Rādhe, and even there I shall have no shelter but You. Now in truth one who serves never goes to that dark place. The Padma Purāṇa promises, na karma-bandhanaṁ janma vaiṣṇavānāṁ ca vidyate, that neither the bondage of action nor compelled birth binds the Lord's devotees; and if such a one is born again at all, it is only for His service or for the further ripening of love. Viśvanātha Cakravartī, commenting on the sixth canto of the Bhāgavata, explains it with great tenderness: even faultless devotees who long to relish love of God may wait a little before they attain Him, as Bharata waited through three births; and even devotees with some leftover sinful reaction, who from lack of steady bhajana still carry the residue of old sins, will not, after they leave the body, be taken down into the hells. He recalls how Yamarāja, the lord of death, seeing one of his messengers approach with the noose already in hand, murmurs into that servant's ear, parihara madhusūdana prapannān prabhur aham anya-nṛṇāṁ na vaiṣṇavānām: "Leave aside those who have taken refuge in Madhusūdana; I am lord only over other men, never over the Vaiṣṇavas." And yet, knowing all of this, knowing himself an eternal associate of the Lord, the speaker bows his head and humbles himself utterly: as for the weight of my own deeds, surely hell is where they would drag me. So if I must go down into that dark, then O Rādhe, even in that lightless cave let me not forget Your feet; let the luster of Your lotus-feet come down with me and illuminate the dark cave of my heart and make it bearable. I do not mind whether I suffer in hell, or enjoy in heaven, or dwell in the Lord's blissful Vaikuṇṭha; I mind one thing only, that my mind never, in any world, slip free of Your lotus-feet.

And so the prayer comes to rest where all this love most wants to be. The body, the heart confesses, may be anywhere at all. But let the mind go and live forever in one place: on a lovely terrace of a little bower-temple on the bank of the Kālindī, the dark and gentle Yamunā, beneath the trees, in the cool of the grove. The Hindi telling lingers there, naming it a lata-mandira, a temple woven of living creepers, and setting the longing not on some far-off heaven but in its very prāṅgaṇa, its forecourt, as if to say the resort is already here, already indwelling, needing only to be entered. There the talk is only of Rādhā's play, rādhā-keli-kathā, an endless telling and re-telling of Her pastimes, and that talk is a whole ocean of nectar, sudhāmbudhi, and across that ocean roll great rocking waves, mahā-vīcibhir āndolitam. O let my mind be the little boat upon them. Let it be lifted and swung and carried, rising on one swell of sweetness only to be lifted by the next, never reaching a far shore because there is no shore, only more and more of Her. Wherever my feet may stand, in heaven, in hell, in any of the three sleeps of the soul, let my mind ride those waves on that terrace by the river, where Rādhā and Her Beloved play without ceasing, and let it never, never come down.