Yoga Vasistha 192: Uddalaka Reasons With His Own Mind

Sage Uddalaka is not a beginner. The Yoga Vasistha is careful to say so, and Swami Jyotirmayananda is careful to repeat it, because what happens to Uddalaka in this lecture is the thing beginners assume only happens to beginners. His mind is shaken like a tree uprooted in a storm. He falls into a long, lingering inertia somewhere between the darkness of ignorance and the light of the Self. He is advanced, and he is still distracted. That is where the lecture starts, and it sets the tone for everything after it. This is lecture 192 of the Yoga Vasistha series, covering the close of Section 51 and the opening of Section 52 of the Upasama Prakarana. The story itself is simple. Uddalaka goes to a cave in the mountains, spreads a deer skin, sits facing north in siddhasana, and begins to reflect. What gives the hour its weight is that the reflection takes the form of a conversation, and the person he is talking to is his own mind. Swamiji treats every element of the setting as instruction rather than scenery. The cave is the heart. The seat is a foundation. North is a direction of consciousness, not of the compass. And the conversation that follows, which occupies most of the lecture, is presented as the actual work of sadhana: patient, frank, sometimes humorous reasoning with a mind that keeps running after what cannot satisfy it. The images arrive thick and fast. A forest of nectar abandoned for a forest of poison trees. A dream treasure that vanishes on waking. A drink that tastes wonderful until you see the worm in it. A frog in a muddy ditch, croaking happily. Five creatures, each undone by a single sense. A silkworm spinning its own trap. And at the end, a cloud dissolving in sunlight until only the sky is left, followed by a cloud that talks back.

Passages

Distraction Grows More Noticeable, Not Less

Almost everyone who sits to meditate complains that the mind runs wild. Swamiji’s first move is to take the shame out of that complaint. It is normal, he says, even for a person who has practiced a great deal of sadhana, and Uddalaka is the proof. Then he adds something less comfortable. As spirituality grows, sensitivity grows with it. Things you once considered perfectly ordinary begin to feel like thorns, or like flowers, depending on whether they are negative or positive. His illustration is the body and the eye. Dust and sand fall all over the body and the body does not complain. A single speck in the eye and the complaint begins at once. “So what is not a problem for your body will be a problem for the eye.” The point is not that practice makes you fragile. It is that practice makes you perceptive. “So that simple point, that as you become spiritually advanced, you become aware of your distractions in a more profound way.” What the mind once waved through as normal, it now notices and resists. A seeker who reads that increased awareness as failure has misread the signal entirely. Swamiji frames this with the three classical obstacles to liberation. Mala is gross impurity. Vikshepa is the distraction caused by subtler impurities. Avarana is the veil of ignorance itself. In the early stage you work on anger and hate, things that are easy to see. As you advance you go after their roots, the subtle impressions of the subconscious, which did not bother you before because you could not see them. And beneath all of it runs the thing the world process does to a mind left to itself. “There is always an internal sense of being incomplete, and your mind says that internal sense of emptiness will be fulfilled if you just get what you want.” That promise, repeated daily, is the storm Uddalaka is sitting in.

The Cave Is Found in the Heart

Uddalaka takes recourse to a cave in the mountains for intensive meditation. Swamiji’s comment is dry. Take that literally and you will get nowhere, because first you have to find the cave. The cave he means opens while you live an ordinary day. An inner space begins to open in your own heart, and at times you are within it, in deep spiritual experience, while outwardly nothing has changed. “Externally, you are just normal, doing all the normal jobs as anybody does.” If anything the ordinary work becomes exemplary, carrying a kind of radiance that no one can photograph. Finding it is the work of a teacher. Swamiji connects the cave, guha, with the one who illumines it: the preceptor who leads you and lights the inner space progressively, a little more at a time. “So in brief, that’s where the location of your cave is: in your own heart.” The text describes the cave’s surroundings lavishly: a soft breeze from the west, creepers laden with fragrant flowers, a secret dwelling of the forest goddesses. Swamiji reads the scenery as what purified feeling does to perception. When bhavana, the feeling of the heart, is purified, vision becomes clearer and more sensitive. His example is a mother looking at her baby. That feeling cuts nasty and worrisome things out of the mind, and a soft, graceful feeling rises in their place. Everything about the child inspires. Apply the same change to the whole world and your attitude to people shifts. They are human beings like yourself, and whatever you want for your own happiness you want them to have too. He traces the stages of that widening. “The early stage of feeling is, ‘May I be happy.’ That’s the first one.” Then my relatives and friends, then my country, then all human beings, then animals and birds, then all life. Sarve bhavantu sukhinah, may all be happy. None of it requires changing anything outside. It is as if you had changed your eyeglasses, and everything took on their colour.

The Seat Facing North

Section 52 opens with Uddalaka entering the cave the way a bee enters a lotus, wanting the nectar of the bliss of the Self. He spreads a deer skin and sits facing north in siddhasana. Swamiji allows the literal reading for a practitioner who needs it. A beginner does need a seat, and a certain order about it. But an advanced meditator is not dependent on it. If the meditation cannot happen without the right skin under you, something has been misplaced. The cave of the heart opens and the natural seat is simply there. North is the northern path, uttarayana, and he reads it in the traditional terms of agni, jyoti and shukla. Agni is the vairagya you develop. Jyoti is viveka, the discrimination that separates the Self from the not-Self. As these grow, the days stop being wasted. “Every day becomes a purposeful day; it doesn’t go to waste.” He extends the allegory through the seasons. Uttarayana is the half of the year in which daylight lengthens, day after day, until the day is at its longest. Read inwardly, it is consciousness steadily expanding beyond its confined circle until it becomes infinite. The southern path, dakshinayana, the path of smoke and night, belongs to worldly attainment, and he declines to linger on it. Siddhasana, finally, is read as the pose of one meant to become a siddha: a steadiness built for success. And the whole setting, he says, arrives on its own for the one who is ready. “So if you are qualified, all this comes to you automatically. Don’t worry about a cave, cave comes to you.”

Dwelling on the Self, Dwelling on Objects

With the setting in order, Uddalaka does the one thing left to do. He reflects, and he addresses his mind directly, beginning with a rebuke: O foolish mind, what have you to do with thoughts of worldly objects? This, Swamiji says, is atmachintana, dwelling on the nature of the Self. Its opposite is vishayachintana, the mind’s constant thinking about objects, which needs no teacher at all. He calls it the root disease, bhavavyadhi, the disease of the world process. “Constantly your mind is worried about the past and future.” Yesterday, today and tomorrow fill every room, and nothing else can get in. The text’s image for this is two forests. “Those who run after worldly enjoyments are like the dullards who, having renounced the nectar in the mandāra forest, runs into the forest of poisonous trees.” Swamiji enjoys the mandara forest: every tree bearing fruit of heavenly nectar, so nourishing that, as he puts it, you would be blown away. And people turn from it towards poison. He names the two paths plainly. One leads to immortality and to bhuma, infinite bliss. The other, followed instinctively out of ignorance, leads to alpam, the little. You may believe you have gained a great deal, he says, and have not gained a needle point of real value. His illustration is a dream of sudden luck. You stumble on a vast treasure and look round for someone to help you carry one more thing, and then you wake with nothing. Even while holding it you had nothing, because the one holding it in the dream was not you.

Serenity Is the Cure

Uddalaka’s reflection does not stop at diagnosis. The cure he names is shama. “Serenity is like a nectar.” It opens a channel to immortality, a channel to liberation, and it is not a worldly accomplishment but a purity of mind. Instead of chasing the taste of sense pleasure, the mind begins to taste a small glimpse of the delight of liberation. The text keeps both extremes in view. Whether the mind descends to the nether worlds or ascends to the highest world of Brahma, “Unless you are nourished by the nectar of śama, You cannot rest in the boundless bliss of the Self.” Swamiji then widens the frame to an entire life. Think of all the challenges you have faced from babyhood until now, he says, and then think of coming back again, and again. Whatever challenge you face, the mind must turn towards God-realization, the realization of Truth, which he calls the subtle teaching behind all religions. And you must understand yourself as a channel of God, not of your ego. Then comes the line that gives this lecture its centre. “Much of your Sadhana is talking to your own mind.” Uddalaka tells the mind he will not be fooled by it any more. It gave him boundless pain while it was led by desires. Now that he has renounced his expectation of worldly enjoyment, it should give rise to joy instead. It is not suppression and it is not surrender. It is reasoning, patiently and without flattery.

One Object, Two Reactions

As long as the mind is busy acquiring what pleases and escaping what pains, the text says, it cannot enjoy spiritual bliss. Swamiji names the mechanism as raga and dvesha, attraction and aversion, the daily cycle of reaching for what you love and recoiling from what feels like a thorn. His example is a drink. It tastes good, and then you see a worm in it. Until you saw the worm it was wonderful. Now it goes straight out. Nothing about the drink changed. “Same object can cause rāga, same object can cause dveṣa.” That is why the mind never quite knows what to hold on to and what to throw away, and why, left to itself, there is no end to the suffering. The solution is not to find the perfect objects. It is a mind that has nothing in the world to hold on to and nothing to fight, a mind simply relaxed, which he calls divine yoganidra. When that space opens, you are finally being led towards the question the whole life has been for: who am I?

The Frog in the Ditch

The text’s next image is unflattering and memorable. “Oh mind, you have wandered in this world like a foolish frog.” Swamiji fills in the picture. A frog in a little ditch of muddy water, putting its mouth up and croaking. All the complaints coming from all the different minds, about all the worldly things, are the croaking. He takes it further than self-deprecation. “What you think negative or positive, they didn’t happen. Your mind creates the drama.” A defective computer distorts every message passing through it, and a nervous system can do the same, so that small teeth become big teeth. In the most advanced understanding, every experience based on a vritti belongs to Maya, because projections cannot be permanent. Only the screen, the Reality behind them, remains. Stay involved in the projections and you are the frog: trapped in dirty water and very happy croaking.

Five Senses, Five Traps

Uddalaka asks his mind why it will not strive for the samadhi that gives the bliss of liberation, and then works through the senses one by one, each with a creature. The deer, drawn by the sound of bells, walks into the trap. The elephant, lured by a she-elephant, falls into a pit that a trapper has covered to look like solid ground. Swamiji notes how large a part the pleasure of touch plays in human life everywhere. The fish takes the bait for its taste. The moth, fascinated by light, flies into the flame. The black bee, intoxicated by fragrance, lingers inside a lotus and is trampled by an elephant. The conclusion is arithmetic. Each creature was undone by a single sense. A human being carries all five, and the text asks how much more disastrous it would be to let all five rule. Then the silkworm. “Just as a silk worm creates its own bondage.” The mind spins vasanas the same way, fibres so fine you do not notice them. “Your mind creates vāsanās. Vāsanās are so subtle and soft, they sit in your unconscious” and there they build the trap you are caught in. The way out is the threefold path the Vedas give: karma, upasana and jnana. Karma, taken up as a spiritual goal, becomes karma yoga. Upasana holds both devotion and meditation, which become bhakti yoga and raja yoga. Jnana becomes jnana yoga. Four movements that together purify the mind until it is sublimated, pursued through listening, reflection and meditation until the sun of wisdom rises. “This is your plan. Practice integral yoga until you are illumined.”

The Mind Has No Reality of Its Own

The reflection turns, near the end, into something close to a joke at the mind’s expense. Why should I instruct you, O mind? You have no reality of your own. How could you exist apart from the Self? The text’s image is a cloud. “Just as a cloud is nothing but vapor.” When the light of reflection acts on the cloud of the mind, the cloud dissolves into the vastness of the Self and only the sky is left. That, Swamiji says, is manonasha, the dissolution of the mind. Every instruction given to the mind is meant, finally, to make you un-minded. “They are meant to blow the mind away.” He grounds it in deep sleep. You are not operating your normal mind there and you are not missing anything; if you fail to sleep, you complain. The deeper part of you is neither body nor mind. It is the Absolute Self, one and non-dual. The mind creates the illusion of an ego self, and the whole world’s drama is the effort to make that ego look bigger and more powerful. Age, illness and loss take all of that away. “It’s restrictive like a wild monkey that you have kept on your neck.” You cannot simply shed it. But the ego can be tamed, and when it becomes sattvic it listens to reflection and understands. The lecture ends on a small comedy that holds the whole teaching. “Ray of light comes to a piece of cloud and says you are not real.” And the cloud replies: “But the cloud says, but I’m shining because of you.” Tell me more. I like your talk.

Terms

mala — gross impurity of the mind, such as anger and hate, the first obstacle a seeker works on.
vikshepa — distraction caused by subtle impressions; the obstacle that sharpens as sensitivity grows.
avarana — the veil of ignorance that hides the Self.
bhavana — the feeling of the heart; purified, it changes how the whole world is seen.
uttarayana — the northern path; inwardly, consciousness expanding day by day until it is infinite.
siddhasana — the seated pose of the siddha, read as a steadiness built for success.
atmachintana — dwelling on the nature of the Self.
vishayachintana — the mind’s constant thinking about objects, the root disease of the world process.
shama — serenity; the nectar that opens a channel to liberation.
raga dvesha — attraction and aversion, which the same object can provoke in turn.
vasana — a subtle impression spun by the mind, soft enough to go unnoticed and strong enough to bind.
karma upasana jnana — action, devotion with meditation, and knowledge; the threefold path of the Vedas.
manonasha — the dissolution of the mind in the light of reflection.
bhuma — the infinite, whose experience is boundless bliss, set against alpam, the little.

Three Questions

Where has your practice made you more sensitive to a distraction you once called normal, and have you been reading that as progress or as failure?
What does your mind keep promising you will finally be enough, and what would it sound like to reason with it the way Uddalaka does?
Which of the five senses leads you most easily, and what is your version of the bells, the bait or the flame?

Yoga Vasistha, Upasama Prakarana, Sections 51 and 52. Lecture 192 by Swami Jyotirmayananda, Yoga Research Foundation. The complete archive of Swami Jyotirmayananda’s teachings is free.

This study guide is drawn from the archived teachings of Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda.