The way to liberation is very simple. The seeker has to keep the mind free from overt activity and inertia. How is that achieved? Sri Adi Sankaracharya in the Vivekachoodamani advocates a one-pointed attention towards liberation. Such a person needs to stop entertaining a love for sense objects pertaining to the eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin. When these cravings are removed from the root, the next is to give up the idea of doership of all actions. The work may keep happening, but the thought of, “I am the one who is doing this,” needs to go. That accomplished, the next is to cultivate an intelligent faith in abidance with the task of listening from the scriptures—the Upanishads and other texts—that talk of liberation. This is a sure way to blow up all the restless qualities of the intellect.
The Master concludes that the mind cannot be the supreme self as it has a beginning and an end. It keeps changing from moment to moment. Its personality is sorrowful and the cause for hunting after sense objects. The seer can never be the object which he is seeing. The individual is aware of the mind and its thoughts. One cannot be the thing that one is aware of, conscious of or simply knows something.
Having explained the sheaths of the physical body, the vital energy and the mind and negating them as not the real self, the teacher moves on to the intellectual sheath called the vignana maya kosa. The intellect is accompanied with the sense organs of perception. Its major thought wave is that of, “I am doing this”. It is this thought pattern that is the cause for modification, change and even rebirth into the wheel of change.
The intellect covering is indeed blessed with the reflection of consciousness and it is a modification of prakriti or nature. The intellect performs the task of knowing, dissecting, analysing and comprehending, and also entertains the sense of “I know”. It constantly identifies itself with the body and sense organs as if they were functioning as one whole. This nature of “I” that has got attached to the intellect is beginningless.
This is the jiva or the individual living being that carries out all transactions in the world. It does many actions owing to the thoughts and feelings caused by past actions. As a result it gathers around it, results that are divine and sinful. It, therefore, experiences birth in a variety of wombs and keeps being born and dying too, travelling to worlds that are divine and evil too. In the vignana maya kosha, the individual experiences the states of waking and dream, and it constantly keeps enjoying the pleasurable experiences and suffering the sorrowful ones.