Thomas Byrom on Ashtavakra (Tonysan)

[Guest guest]

I don't ordinarily put very long tracts from scriptured pieces on the

group, but in this instance and in lieu of the one-sided dialogue

with you, it felt, yes, it feels right to do so now. So here goes,

part of Thomas Byrom's essay on Ashtavakra and the Gita of same name,

and, I'm fairly certain that you and others might enjoy this as much

as I am enjoying it for its utter clarity, at least as it appears and

is to my eyes.

Translator's Introduction: The Mystery of Awareness

"I remember the moment clearly.

I had escaped from my sisters, over the rocks and around the point. I

was barely seven. Above me, a rough escarpment of boulders singing in

the midday heat, at my feet a rock pool of perfect, inviolable

stillness, and beyond, the blue vastness of the South Pacific.

There was no other living creature. I was by myself, barefooted, between the cliff and the ocean.

As I squatted there, watching the reflection of the wind in the

unrippled pool, hearing its exhilaration high above me in the bright

emptiness of the sky, I became aware for the first time of awareness

itself.

I had no name for it, but I could almost feel it, as if it had

substance, like the water in the rock pool, or breath, like the

shouting wind.

I saw that I was entirely by myself in a boundless ocean of awareness.

In the same instant I understood that awareness is the single mystery

of life, that it enfolds all other mysteries, even the secret of the

separate self.

>From that moment I was indelibly astonished, and I knew that all my

life I would be pinching myself and asking, What is awareness?

Nothing else would ever command my attention so completely. How could

it? For nothing else mattered next to the constant pressure, the

single compulsion of this mystery.

A quarter of a century went by, and one day my teacher placed in my

hands a copy of Mukerjee's edition of the Ashtavakra Gita. I had by

then, in the ordinary course of my seeking, read a great deal of

scripture, enough to know the truth of Ashtavakra's admonition,

halfway through his own Song:

My child, you can talk about holy books all you like. But until you

forget everything, you will never find yourself.

Understanding the vanity of scripture, I hardly expected Ashtavakra to

solve in a single epiphany the mystery of awareness.

And yet, as I read his spare and simple verses, I felt that here at

last were words which in some measure consumed my astonishment. They

spoke so directly, and so modestly. They seemed so austere, and yet

so generous. I found myself once more a child of seven, tipped

between the sea and the sky, but hearing now in the wind's exuberance

a clearer music, touching the heart of the mystery.

What is the rising or the vanishing of thought? What is the visible

world, or the invisible? What is the little soul, or God Himself?

Awareness. Pure awareness. The clear space, the sky, the heart of awareness.

Ashtavakra's words begin after almost everything else has been said.

They barely touch the page. They are often on the point of vanishing.

They are the first melting of the snow, high in the mountains, a clear

stream flowing over smooth and shining pebbles. Theirs is the radiance

of the winter sky above Trishul, Kailash, Annapurna. My satguru, Neem

Karoli Baba, called the Ashtavakra Gita 'the purest of scriptures'.

All its beauty is in the transparency, its enraptured and flawless

purity.

It is written as a dialogue between King Janaka, the father of Sita,

and his guru, Ashtavakra. But this is just a literary device,

unsupported by any internal drama, and I have done away with it in my

version. The Gita has only one voice, Ashtavakra's, a voice of

singular compassion and uncompromised clarity.

He is not concerned to argue. This is not speculative philosophy. It

is a kind of knowledge. Ashtavakra speaks as a man who has already

found his way and now wishes to share it. His song is a direct and

practical transcript of experience, a radical account of ineffable

truths.

He speaks, moreover, in a language that is for all its modesty

physical and direct. He is not abstract, though some translations,

laboring to render his special terms faithfully, make him sound

difficult, even abstruse.

On the contrary, Ashtavakra is very simple.

We are all one Self. The Self is pure awareness. This Self, this

flawless awareness is God. There is only God.

Everything else is an illusion: the little self, the world, the

universe. All these things arise with the thought 'I', that is, with

the idea of separate identity. The little 'I' invents the material

world, which in our ignorance we strive hard to sustain. Forgetting

our original oneness, bound tightly in our imaginary separateness, we

spend our lives mastered by a specious sense of purpose and value.

Endlessly constrained by our habit of individuation, the creature of

preference and desire, we continually set one thing against another,

until the mischief and misery of choice consume us.

But our true nature is pure and choiceless awareness. We are already and always fulfilled."

~ Thomas Byrom on the Ashtabakra-Gita

And more from the link: so hard to pass up and away from right now...

"His is an eminently compassionate and practical madness. Even while

cutting the ground from under our feet, he shows us at every turn

what to do. With a crazy solicitude, he tells us how to end our

Self-estrangement.

Be happy. Love yourself. Don't judge others. Forgive. Always be

simple. Don't make distinctions. Give up the habit of choice. Let the

mind dissolve. Give up preferring and desiring. Desire only your own

awareness. Give up identifying with the body and the senses. Give up

your attachment to meditation and service. Give up your attachment to

detachment.

Give up giving up! Reject nothing, accept nothing. Be still. But above

all, be happy. In the end, you will find yourself just by knowing how

things are.

It would be perverse and humorless to suppose that just because

Ashtavakra, with his irreducible nondualism, considers meditation

merely a distracting habit, he means us to abandon our practice. Of

course, from the perspective of unconditional freedom, where nothing

makes any difference, meditation seems a comically self-important

waste of time. But Ashtavakra makes it plain.

The moment a fool gives up his spiritual practices, he falls prey to fancies and desires."

http://www.swcp.com/%7Erobicks/gitaintro.htm

Loving You So, Tonysan,

Mazie