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.

It is easy, says Ashtavakra. You are the clear space of awareness (cidakasa), pure and still, in whom there is no birth, no striving, no 'I'.

Then how do we recover our original awareness? How do we dispel the illusion of separation?

Some commentators suppose that Ashtavakra is really not concerned to answer these questions. For them, this Gita is a transcendent confession too pure to be useful. Others see it as earnestly didactic, a manual of conduct. Both are right. Ashtavakra is indeed wild, playful, utterly absorbed in the Self. Since words are of the mind, which arises only to obscure awareness, words are indeed folly. And who would teach folly?

Ashtavakra would. 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.

God help the seeker who presumes that since he is already and always fulfilled, he can give up trying.

It is all a matter of knowing. We are all indeed already perfect, but until we know it, we had better deal with our ignorance, and that can't be done just by listening to words. It requires sadhana, trying, doing what we do not wish to do. It means long, hard self-effacing work.

The heart of Ashtavakra's advice is not to give up our practice, but to abandon our strenuous indolence.

Striving is the root of sorrow, he says. But who understands this?

Look at the master, he says. Who is lazier? He has trouble even blinking! He certainly does not run around puffing himself up looking for God or liberation, busily making excuses for not finding himself.

Dealing with our ignorance also means, for almost all of us, finding someone like Ashtavakra to help us. We cannot easily break the spell ourselves. Here again, Ashtavakra is very practical. At least half of the book describes the nature of the master, the man who has found his way.

It is an austere and enchanting portrait. The master is a child, a fool, a man asleep, a leaf tumbling in the wind. Inside, he is utterly free. He does exactly as he pleases. Rules mean nothing to him. He doesn't care who makes fun of him, because he is always playing and having a wonderful time. He lives as if he had no body. He seems to walk on air. He is unsmudged, like the clear sky or the smooth and shining surface of a vast lake.

Because we are subject to the dualities which he has transcended, we glimpse his nature only through paradox. He sees but he sees nothing. He sees what cannot be seen. He knows but he knows nothing. He sleeps soundly without sleeping. He dreams without dreaming. He is busy, but he does nothing. He is not alive, nor is he dead.

His secret, and the ultimate paradox, is that he stands on his own. He is completely by himself (svasthya). Only by an absolute indepence (svatantrya) has he discovered his absolute oneness with all things.

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