Yoga Vasistha 197: The Gunas, the Long Dream and Nirvana Without Nihilism

Lecture 197 of the Yoga Vasistha series stays with Sage Uddalaka in Section 53 of the Upasama Prakarana. Uddalaka is still reflecting, and his reflection keeps returning to one question: who am I? Swami Jyotirmayananda presents that inquiry as a sample, offered so that the listener may follow the same process. The lecture opens, before the invocation, with a distinction Swamiji returns to near its center. There are two kinds of misery. In one a person is diving but is no longer really diving, only sinking. In the other the person is diving and enjoying the dive more and more, until it has become play. His point is plain: do not confuse a negative, depressed mind with a sign of spiritual progress. From there the lecture moves through a series of images that each describe the same situation from a different side. The individual soul is a sun reflected in a jar of water, always shaking, with a history that has no end. The three gunas are clouds, bright and dark, moving through a sky they never touch. An old style lamp shows the gunas at work in a single person: oil, its flow through the wick, and the flame. The world is a long dream, and waking from it is gradual, with confusion at every stage. Nirvana is the dream moving away, not a doctrine that nothing exists. And at the close the mind is a mirror that must be wiped, steadied and finally seen through. The distinction the lecture turns on is between misery that sinks a person and misery that frees one. A seeker who breaks an illusion will feel confusion, and the world may suddenly seem empty. Swamiji does not deny that experience. He asks the seeker to read it rightly, with patience, as the movement from the reflected sun toward the sun itself.

Passages

Who Am I and the Reflected Sun

The first thing that enters Uddalaka’s mind is the question who am I, and the answer that comes with it: I am. Swamiji observes that the mind deals with mortality constantly. Its greatest calamity is to face transience. Everything works so well, everything is wonderful, and yet all of it will pass. The remedy he offers is short. “Look for I am and mortality is gone.” When a person does not look for the I am, mortality haunts that person forever. And in that search one must also see that the ego is not the real I am. Here Swamiji gives the image that governs the whole lecture. “Every soul is like a reflected sun in a jar of water.” The jar is the personality; the water is the mental process. Through that process a person deals with the I am, but takes the reflection for the sun, because the reflection is easier to see. The reflected sun is constantly shaking, constantly in a problem, and it has a big history. One can stay trapped with the history of the reflected self forever. Or one can awaken. “I don’t belong to the jar, I don’t belong to the water, and all the reflections I am not.” And then: “I am the sun.” The journey from the shaking reflection to that revelation, Swamiji says, is the whole story of spiritual progress.

Reflection and Affirmation

Uddalaka’s practice has two sides. “Reflection is vicāra”, inquiry. Affirmation is creating a conviction, a nischaya, deep within, so that the mind captures a glimpse and becomes secure about it. Affirmations play a great part as a person advances on the spiritual path, and in simple language, Swamiji says, affirmation is positive thinking. He gives it a homely picture. “No matter how negative situation, there is a little hole through which you can see the positive meaning.” And then the instruction: “So don’t lose that hole over the big giant cloud.” That opening, he adds, is in one’s own heart, the cave of the heart.

Senses, Mind and the Ego

Swamiji then describes the ordinary personality. The senses are ever interested in the fulfillment of their appetites, and they make up the major part of how a person is known and knows himself. The body follows them like a slave. The mind does not know how to please the senses, the senses do not know how to relate to the mind, and the senses often deceive the mind. Neither knows the real purpose. All of them, he says, work for the ego. The ego shouts at mind and senses to keep busy, to look at it, to do whatever pleases it. A person lives in a personality with such chaos, and that is called the world process. Yet Swamiji insists this be understood with humor, not in a way that dumps the mind into despair. All this tension and stress has been built up for the sake of the ego, and when one looks for the ego, it is nowhere to be found. In sleep it is not there at all. “He’s waiting there like your sandals under your bed.” Through satsanga and a little integral yoga in daily life, one gains the ability to see all of this with detachment, the witness attitude called sakshi bhavana. That vision is progressive, but whatever degree of it a person has helps him recognize an error and correct it.

The Gunas and the Sky

Even the gunas of nature continue to perform their functions. Sattva shows light, rajas creates confusion, tamas spreads darkness, and the I is not seen in any of them. Swamiji cites the Gita: guna guneshu vartante, the gunas move among the gunas, and knowing this, one is not attached. With the witness attitude, a person sees what is happening. The same gunas that created mind, intellect and ego have created the senses and the world around them, so one set of gunas is always going after another. In that realm there is no reality. Guna based vision is like images projected on a cinema screen. “The reality, the screen remains untouched.” Swamiji puts it in a play of words: “Matter doesn’t matter.” Then the image of the sky. One set of gunas creates wonderful clouds, lightning and rainbows. Another creates dark clouds, thunder and storm. None of it touches the sky. “The I am is the sky.” How, then, does one lead oneself out of the clutches of the conditioned mind? First by understanding that one is not really clutched, not really fettered. “It is illusion that you have to break.” In a dream a person may lose everything while lying comfortably in his own bed, having lost nothing at all.

The Lamp of the Three Gunas

The gunas work both ways. They lead the soul into increasing bondage and misery, and the same operation can allow the soul to discover its essential nature. Swamiji’s allegory is the old style oil lamp. The oil is tamas. “If you stay oily, apparently you have no problem, but you have nothing to gain either. You are stuck in inertia.” When the oil flows through the wick it is rajas, a better state, because it is moving toward the flame. When it burns and gives light, it is sattva. The lamp can be used for worldly attainment or for discovering the light of lights, liberation, but it is always being used. The difficulty is the wick. The flame is constantly challenged by the wick that is dying away, and in an old style lamp one must keep cutting it. That cutting is handling the ego in a positive way. “Your sādhanā allows you to practice surrender to God.” It highlights God’s presence within rather than the ego, removes the obstruction, and lets the flame keep flowing, until the intellect becomes clear and culminates in intuitive intellect, the revelation of the Self. The same gunas, Swamiji warns, go into turmoil when the personality is not integrated. Charity grows sattva, but sattva can be directed by ego rather than humility. He names the demon Bali and Karna, both very charitable and both carrying that ego. When the gunas are not attuned to integral movement, each one creates its own trouble.

Maya, Avidya and the Magician

For deeper understanding Swamiji reiterates a teaching he gives again and again. The entire Prakriti is the magical power of Brahman. “Magical power and magician are one and the same.” Only to a mind deluded by that power do the two appear different. Prakriti goes into three modes. Sattva predominating Prakriti is called Maya, through which Brahman expresses as Creator Brahma, Sustainer Vishnu and Destroyer Shiva. Rajas predominating Prakriti is called Avidya, ignorance, which turns the same Brahman into countless souls. “Same Sun becomes countless reflected suns”, Swamiji says, so that looking at the jivas evolving through the world is looking at the same Brahman led by Avidya. Tamas predominating Prakriti does the rest: mind, intellect, ego, the physical body, atoms and electrons, all that is broadly called matter. And matter, he repeats, does not matter.

Suffering on False News

The text of the Yoga Vasistha gives its own illustration. “Oh mind, just as a person who mistakenly hears a false report that his son is dead.” “Even though his son is actually alive, suffers in vain.” Swamiji extends it with humor: a rich man returns from an enjoyable trip, well drunk, and a servant who is also drunk tells him sad news, that his wife has become a widow. The man begins to grieve for her without seeing what the words could possibly mean. That, Swamiji says, is how the mind works, and why the mind must be allowed, with great patience, to go through spiritual discipline and purification. “You continue to suffer on the basis of false news from the world.” Here he speaks in the voice of the text itself: it is not the soul’s fault, it is the I that has imposed ego sense upon it. When a person releases that I, what remains is the I am, Brahman, which is not the cause of the world’s negativity. God as Creator, Swamiji explains, has not created anything ugly; the more one understands the world as divine, the more one sees that God alone is shining in it, as the sun alone is behind every illumination.

The World as a Long Dream

In a dream a person does surprising things. He flies, he travels to distant lands in a minute without proper tickets, and good and bad unfold. “But nothing really is happening when you wake up.” The dream subject, the dream world and the dream experiences of gain and loss have no reality. Now stretch that to another level. All that a person experiences in the world is a long dream, and until liberation one passes through dream after dream. “Therefore it’s called Dīrgha Svapna.” Ordinary dream is svapna; the world process is the long dream. Swamiji is careful about how one wakes. Coming from illusion to reality is a progressive movement, and information alone does not break an illusion. “Don’t become sunk in confusion.” “Because every illusion you break hurls you into a confusion.” The seeker wonders whether he did wrong to give up his pleasures for satsanga. And sensitivity grows. Just as the eye is troubled by a speck of dust that the body would never notice, “So as you begin to move away from layers of illusion, your sensitivity grows.” Things once ignored now cannot be. This is where the opening distinction returns. As viveka develops, the world appears as a source of misery: sarvam duhkham vivekinah. In the worldly sense, saying the world is misery darkens the face and shakes the nervous system. But with the movement of jnana it is different. “Your soul laughs. It emerges bright.” One kind of misery is sinking; the other is a dive that has become play. The challenge is not to confuse mental depression with spiritual progress, and if the intellect turns the teaching into a negative state, that mistake has to be corrected. “Patience and persistence in your sādhanā enables you to get out of that predicament.”

Nirvana Is Not Nihilism

When the mind has ascertained the falsity of all objects and is free of all mentations, the text says, there arises the supreme state of nirvana. Swamiji describes it through the sun again: when one sees all illuminations from the eye of the sun, they are not the sun, and in truth the sun alone is. People often describe nirvana as nothingness, and those who are not advanced take it as nihilism, the view that the ultimate truth is nothing, so one need not believe in God or in anything. “That’s not the meaning behind Nirvana.” There is a profound fact in it: the definition of a thing in the mind is defective, and in realization all the things of the mind go the other way. The meaning is that “the entire world moves away, dream moves away.” It leaves a person completely relaxed. The text adds another image. When the mind is convinced that all objects are unreal, the subtle desires of the heart begin to wither, “much like the blossoms of trees struck by a hailstorm during winter.” Brahma satyam jagan mithya: Brahman alone is truth, the world is unreal. To a deluded mind the world is a wonderful forest of blossoms, full of monkeys and foxes and countless things going on. Then comes the hailstorm, and the world has no meaning, and nothing is lost.

Desire, the Present and the Ever Present

When the mind is freed of worldly desires, it can reflect upon the Self and become established in its essential nature as pure consciousness. Swamiji calls this mystic psychology. The deepest challenge is to bring attention from the world of desires to the reality of the Self. All desire, he explains, is based on love for oneself, atmanas tu kamaya sarvam priyam bhavati. Why desire wonderful ice cream? “Because you love yourself, not the ice cream.” As long as desire is in the mind, the mind is trapped by a threefold illusion of past, future and present. It is trapped in a history. “But history itself is kind of a form of hysteria.” As desire subsides, the present becomes so engrossing that one dives into it and becomes free even of the illusion of the present, because the shifting present is not the true present. “Real present is what underlies the time.” First bring the mind to the present, then to the ever present reality. None of this requires strain. “But allow all this to happen like the tree growing.” Then the truth shines in the mind, which has developed viveka buddhi, intuitive intellect. “I am not the body mind. I am Brahman.” This is liberation, and it is like waking from a dream: nothing of the dream remains, one does not feel miserable about it, and nothing has been lost.

The Mirror: Mala, Vikshepa and Avarana

To summarize, Swamiji names the three obstacles that keep a person from realizing who am I. Mala is gross impurity, anger, greed and hate, and also the mistaken thinking that jumps to a negative conclusion, so that an opportunity to be inspired becomes an occasion to perspire. Vikshepa is distraction: as mala is sublimated, the mind gains a larger field, and now it has many heads, like the ten headed Ravana, each pulling in a different direction. Avarana is ignorance, the veil. His example is the mirror. Seeing one’s face in the mirror means realizing who am I. “Mirror is your mind.” At first it is covered with dirt, and the reflection is so distorted that one does not want to look. That dirt is removed by karma yoga, actions done as worship of God. Then, in the excitement of early revelation, the hand shakes and the same mirror shows many faces; that is steadied by upasana, meditation and devotion. Last, a person becomes so wonderstruck that his hair falls over his eyes and shuts out the vision. That is ignorance, and it is not removed by great effort. “It’s to be handled by shaking your head.” One shakes it by turning attention to who am I, aham brahmasmi. The lecture ends with a play of words. The chitta, the mind stuff, is consciousness at the level of projection, and having kindled the fire of spiritual knowledge it sacrifices its chitta hood and emerges as pure cit. “And all your effort is to take this T out of chitta.” “Turn your citta into cit.” Mala is removed by karma yoga, vikshepa by bhakti yoga and dhyana yoga, avarana by jnana yoga, and all of these together are integral yoga. Swamiji’s last word is simpler still. “Be a yogi.”

Terms

guna — one of the three modes of nature: sattva, rajas and tamas.
sattva — the mode of light and harmony.
rajas — the mode of activity and confusion.
tamas — the mode of inertia and darkness.
Prakriti — nature, the magical power of Brahman.
Maya — sattva predominating Prakriti, through which Brahman creates, sustains and dissolves.
Avidya — rajas predominating Prakriti; ignorance that makes one Brahman appear as countless souls.
vichara — reflection, Vedantic inquiry.
nischaya — firm conviction, the fruit of affirmation.
sakshi bhavana — the witness attitude.
dirgha svapna — the long dream of the world process.
nirvana — the state in which the dream of the world moves away.
viveka buddhi — intuitive intellect.
mala — gross impurity of the mind.
vikshepa — distraction of the mind.
avarana — the veil of ignorance.
chitta — mind stuff, consciousness at the level of projection.
cit — pure consciousness.

Three Questions

Swamiji separates the misery that sinks a person from the misery that has become a dive: in a recent hard week, which of the two were you living?
If the gunas are clouds that never touch the sky, which clouds have you been treating as the sky itself?
Swamiji says ignorance is handled not by great effort but by shaking the head: what would it look like to turn to the question who am I in the middle of an ordinary day?

Yoga Vasistha, Upasama Prakarana, Section 53. Lecture 197 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.