Author: Ashtavakra
Translator: John Henry Richards
that joy, supreme joy, and awareness is what you are, so be happy.
Your real nature is as the one perfect, free, and actionless consciousness, the all-pervading witness — unattached to anything, desireless and at peace. It is from illusion that you seem to be involved in samsara.
The body, heaven and hell, bondage and liberation, and fear too, all this is pure imagination. What is there left to do for me whose very nature is consciousness?
I am not the body, nor is the body mine. I am not a living being. I am consciousness.
Who can prevent the great-souled person who has known this whole world as himself from living as he pleases?
Rare is the man who knows himself as the nondual Lord of the world, and he who knows this is not afraid of anything.
Liberation is when the mind does not long for anything, grieve about anything, reject anything, or hold on to anything, and is not pleased about anything or displeased about anything.
Is he not a guru who, endowed with dispassion and equanimity, achieves full knowledge of the nature of consciousness, and leads others out of samsara?
The essential nature of bondage is nothing other than desire, and its elimination is known as liberation. It is simply by not being attached to changing things that the everlasting joy of attainment is reached.
Just as the performance of actions is due to ignorance, so their abandonment is too. By fully recognising this truth, I am now established.
Recognising that in reality no action is ever committed, I live as I please, just doing what presents itself to be done.
Liberation is distaste for the objects of the senses. Bondage is love of the senses. This is knowledge. Now do as you wish.
You are not the body, nor is the body yours, nor are you the doer of actions or the reaper of their consequences. You are eternally pure consciousness, the witness, in need of nothing — so live happily.
Give up meditation completely but don’t let the mind hold on to anything. You are free by nature, so what will you achieve by forcing the mind?
Everyone is in pain because of their striving to achieve something, but no one realises it. By no more than this instruction, the fortunate one attains tranquillity.
Happiness belongs to no one but that supremely lazy man for whom even opening and closing his eyes is a bother.
The knower of truth is never distressed in this world, for the whole round world is full of himself alone.
Thus fulfilled through this knowledge, contented, and with the thinking mind emptied, he lives happily just seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting.
Seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting, speaking, and walking about, the great-souled man who is freed from trying to achieve or avoid anything is free indeed.
Knowing everything as just imagination, and himself as eternally free
Knowing himself to be God, and being and non-being just imagination, what should the man free from desire learn, say, or do?
The wise man, unlike the worldly man, does not see inner stillness, distraction, or fault in himself, even when living like a worldly man.
The wise man who just goes on doing what presents itself for him to do, encounters no difficulty in either activity or inactivity.
Recognising that things are just constructions of the imagination, that great soul lives as God here and now.
By inner freedom one attains happiness, by inner freedom one reaches the Supreme, by inner freedom one comes to absence of thought, by inner freedom to the Ultimate State.
When one sees oneself as neither the doer nor the reaper of the consequences, then all mind waves come to an end.
It is the feeling that there is something that needs to be achieved which is samsara.
Happy he stands, happy he sits, happy sleeps, and happy he comes and goes. Happy he speaks and happy he eats. This is the life of a man at peace.
Blessed is he who knows himself and is the same in all states, with a mind free from craving whether he is seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, or tasting.
Glorious is he who has abandoned all goals and is the incarnation of the satisfaction, which is his very nature
all this is nothing but illusion, and that nothing is.
For him who shines with the radiance of Infinity and is not subject to natural causality
