This whole world reveals the true consciousness within, like the waves rising in the ocean. Knowing that you are this essence, without a doubt, be that form of consciousness without any quivering attachment to the world of movement, names and forms.
Have complete faith, my dear one, have an unshakeable faith without a trace of any confusion or delusion there. You are none other than the Lord who is the form of knowledge. That self you are, who is beyond anything that has been created so far.
This body is covered as if by pieces of cloths called the Gunas or the permutation and combination of three qualities, Satwam —purity and tranquillity, Rajas— activity, restlessness, movement and dynamism and Tamas—inertia, rest, indolence, ignorance and sleepiness. This body covering stands, comes and goes. The self which is the resident within the body, neither comes and goes. So don’t you ever worry about it, says the Sage Ashtavakra to King Janaka.
Let the body remain for millions of years until the end of creation or let it fall off even now. What is there for you to worry about? Where is the ageing or destruction for the self that expresses through this body as the form of consciousness?
You are the endless ocean of the self, where the worlds rise and fall like waves, very naturally. Let them rise and fall. You do not have any growth nor destruction because of this.
My dear one, you are the form of consciousness and you are not different from this universe. Therefore how, where and whom can you take or give up? To give an example of consciousness and accepting and rejecting, you can visualise an image of yourself carved out of beach sand. You are an image and everything else is also an image carved out of the same substance—sand. If you give something to one another, all the transaction that happens is that of sand only, which is what every individual is made up of. Without stretching the example too far, we can replace consciousness with this sand. Here there is no separate maker of idols and figures in the sand. The consciousness itself creates names and forms out of itself and when those creations get a mind of their own, they begin to think of each other and everything else as different from them.
In one indivisible, peaceful whole that you are, like the sky of consciousness which is so pure, where is birth and where is action, where is the sense of individuality? What you see everywhere around is none other than yourself. What is it that appears around you as different is nothing but your own self, just as the same gold manifests as bracelets, bangles and anklets.
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