Vedanta Verses 337 - 38

Just as one who is in deep sleep is completely free from the waking world and its details and the waking one is free from darkness of sleep, so also one who is obsessed with the body and material possessions does not have a clue about freedom and the one who is free has no obsession or even a memory of the objects here. A person attached to the world has no idea about liberation and the one who is liberated does not have any attachment to the body and the world. Obsession and freedom from obsession are contrary to one another.

What is an obsession? Giving a material object value and getting attached to it is an obsession. To be aware of the fact that no detail within creation has an eternal value is real detachment. What has the eternal value is the subject, and this subject can never be abandoned. I may move from form to form, from situation to situation, but I can never move away from the subject. This is the most intriguing fact about the subject. Recognizing this makes one give up the attachment to all the material details in creation.

Water as water is all inclusive. One wave might exclude another wave, one form can exclude another form, but wave cannot exclude being water. Objects are mutually exclusive, but the subject cannot be exclusive, it is like the water in all the waves. The waves stand as waves because of water. All inclusiveness is the glory of the Self, the Truth. This has to be understood as the nature of the Truth which is my conscious Being. Just as wave is rooted in water, within water, everything is rooted in me within me. Wave cannot be away from the water, so is everything rooted in me and not away from me.

One may think that things look external and tangible to me, so they must exist outside me. This is to be reflected again and again keeping in view the fact that tangibility is only a notion, with an apparent sense of reality. Consider dream objects, they look real, external and tangible, but it is just a thought that assumes a form and gives rise to a sense of externality and reality. In fact every error carries with it a sense of reality. Therefore one has to give up all limitations and all limiting adjuncts, like I am the body, I shall do this or do that, achieve this or that, but see that all thoughts originate in me and carry with them a sense of externality and reality. But entire creation is in this form of thoughts, like dream projection with an utter sense of reality attached to it.

‘I am the body’ is not in the form of an emotional attachment, but a misjudgment and it is the cause of all further misjudgments. ‘I am the body’ is unsuspected, undiscovered error that we are born with, we live with and we also die with it.
But reflection on the deep sleep experience should clinch the argument that I am not the body, because I give up the thought of body so completely that I do not even miss it. I have no memory of it. If this is the case with the body what can be said about all other material objects on which we rely?

Therefore, this verse urges us to give up all obsessions (upadhis) and understand firmly that we cannot bank/rely on any one of them for our well being.

Akhandarupa- Recognize that you are the indivisible conscious Being, like an ocean. Unfortunately we think only in terms of millions of waves, bubbles, foam etc and their innumerable forms, end up loving or hating them, we move from one form to another and never think in terms of the commonality, the essence, that is the water. We move from one form to another without ever thinking of the unmoving Subject! The glaring division within creation is irreconcilable, but the seer of many-ness, multitude is not many, the hearer of many noises is not many, the thinker of multitude thoughts is not many, that principle/the subject is just the indivisible ONE.

The liberated understands the value of Subject, the Being as indivisible fullness and has no interest of any kind with any material possession whatsoever.