As the Prashnottari Ratna Malika draws to a close with just one more verse to go, Sri Adi Sankaracharyaji gives us the essence of all actions that needs to be done throughout the day. Ahar Nisham Kim Parichintaneeyam? Day and night, what should I constantly contemplate upon from all quarters and directions? The only thought that needs to run in my mind is that this whole experience of moving names and forms called samsara is an illusion.
Samyak Sarati Iti Samsarah—that which keeps moving constantly is samsara. Every sound, sight, touch, smell and taste produces a corresponding image in our mind. These images, which are complete with sound, qualities and meaning, are called thoughts. These thoughts constantly keep changing. Even if you look right ahead of you in this moment, you will notice a flood of images—this newspaper, the space around it, the chair or floor that you are seated on, the building around you, the pictures on the wall, windows, doors, the world outside, the sky, the trees, the earth, the different colours, etc. The capacity of the mind is limitless.
Everything is experienced by you in the form of thoughts. The sky may be wide and blue outside, but you experience it in its essential way as just a word called ‘sky’. If you put a word for everything that you experience around you, it boils down to a word. What you experience as this world is nothing but words. These words and their corresponding meaning are termed an illusion in Vedanta, as they are constantly changing, constantly divided and the source for all
disturbances, too.
Adi Sankaracharyaji exhorts us to constantly contemplate on the illusory nature of this world, and eventually negate it as of no avail. Another word of advice is to constantly contemplate on the fact that the auspiciousness of existence called life is none other than myself. Life or auspiciousness is me alone.
What is the action that I should do all the time? Those actions that give joy to the enemy of Mura within me—Sri Krishna or the consciousness that is the very existence of my personality—are the only actions that I need to do. Where should I not contemplate on existing or returning to at any point of time? The indication here is that it is good to spend the rest of my life from now on, contemplating on the supreme reality as my own self, not giving too much importance to the moving words in the mind which is called samsara or thoughts, doing only those actions that help me to realise the divine in me and never wishing to really come back again into this ocean of existence.
(www.vignanabhairavatantra.blogspot.in)