Vedanta Verses 267 - 68

The above two verses are to be taken as warnings rather than a mandate for knowing the Truth. The first verse warns the student of remaining complacent after hearing and understanding some bits of Vedanta. Complacency leads to indifference and sloth.

The old habits of mind are persistent and compulsive. The conclusion that “I am the body” is the strongest habit of the mind and is there since ‘time’ immemorial even though ‘time’ itself is a product of ignorance. The habits of mind arise and fall perpetually like waves in ocean, now they manifest and now un-manifest. Even after understanding the truth or the nature of the truth they rise and fall incessantly. In other words they tend to come back and conceal all that we have understood.

How and in what form does this habit manifest?
“I am the performer and I am the enjoyer of actions”. I get so caught in this action and enjoyment of results that I feel that without them I am lost and gone. Doing something at all times is another persistent habit of the mind. This conclusion that I arrive is drda stubborn. I internalize it and it starts looking real and as the truth.

This un attended habit of the mind which is stubborn and persistent is the reason behind all struggle and this habituated movement of the mind is in other words called samsara the whirlpool. We go on suffering/struggling in this samsara thus and have no ‘time’ to pause and understand the seer, the self. Instead we ask all irrelevant questions like ‘where is god’, ‘how did he create the universe’ etc. Irrelevant questions have no answers.

The most relevant of all questions is why do we all seek happiness, peace and freedom? Search for happiness is un-renunciable that which is never renounced by us our true nature. Try however much we can never give our pursuit of peace and happiness. Only the place where we seek is not correct.

Preoccupation with action and the enjoyment for the fruit of action does not allow us to look for the seer, and this is the serious flaw of action and desires to enjoy.

The verse concludes by telling us to continue to stubbornly and persistently look for the self, the seer, the knower, the one who is unnegatably present in all perceptions and cognitions at all ‘times’. One has to turn one’s sight to the pratyak, the self, the seer of all three states, the aham, the I. One has to continue to abide in the reflection about the self.

Great effort should be made to give up the persistent habit of the mind which has arrived at the conclusion that ‘I am empty without action’.

Discovering that I am by nature full and I require no action or enjoyment to sustain me and that I am the un negotiable and unnegatable reality is called moksha by the sages, the wise men.

The smartness of the wise men is in making a program or drawing a schedule which does not fall within the time/ space targets. Anything to be attained within the spatiotemporal realm causes anxiety and fear. And that has nothing to do with moksha. The knowledge of the self is beyond the realm of spatial and temporal constraints. And this corrects the age old error that ‘I am the body’. Aham I and mama, mine are not emotional statements but wrong conclusions about one self. Emotions can be replaced but these errors cannot be replaced, even if they get replaced it is only by another error. Hence to seek the nature of the self and understand the self alone can correct the error and one cannot afford to be complacent.