The sage Vashishtha exhorts his disciple Sri Rama to listen carefully as he was going to give an important piece of information about the true nature of bondage and liberation. Vashishthaji says that the reality given to the two notions of “I am the seer,” and “This is the seen,” is alone called bondage. The seer is bound by the objects, situations and persons seen and when the three are not there, the seer is liberated.
It is an interesting titbit of knowledge that can liberate our mind in an instant, here and now. When the two things seer and seen are mentioned here, it means the seer of a thought, that is yourself and the seen is nothing but a thought or a group of thoughts. If I see a person, he springs up as a thought in my mind. I may think that I am talking to the person, but indeed I am talking to my own thought. If the conversation is normal, happy or congenial, I have no problem with the person and I don’t get bound. Just in case I happen to love or hate the person... err...thought, then I am bound by it. How many times indeed we think about a person we hate? It can be our neighbour, long-time friend or even a passerby.
We also think intensely about a person we love. However, when it comes to constant remembrance, the ones we hate take the first place in our feelings. This is what Vashishtha maharshi is trying to tell Rama that this disparity between the seer and the seen is the cause of bondage.
Actually if we think a little deeper, even this disparity is a non-existing thing or rather its existence itself is only a thought in our head. I see a flower. The flower is nothing but an image in my understanding. I, the seer of the flower, am also a thought only in my understanding. So what I am referring to as myself and the flower as two different things, are in fact only one. They are two thoughts in the same consciousness. This experience is more clear in a dream. If I am seeing a flower in the dream, on waking I realise that the seer of the dream and the flower in the dream are one and the same person—appearing as though separate from each other.
Without realising that this duality is just notional, we constantly enter into zones of desire, anger, greed, delusion, arrogance and jealousy in pursuit of objects, people and situations in the world, which are nothing other than thoughts in our mind. This is what causes bondage, says sage Vashishtha. When there are no objects, emotions, thoughts or situations to be seen, there is nothing other than the seer and hence that
is liberation.
Brahmacharini Sharanya Chaitanya (www.sharanyachaitanya.blogspot.in)