When Everyone Agrees and It Is Still Maya

Gadhi was a brahmana and a devotee of Lord Vishnu, and he had one question he could not put down. The scriptures kept saying maya, maya, maya. So what is maya? He set the highest goal aside for later and asked to be shown the extent of it, and Lord Vishnu granted the boon.

What followed, in the previous section, was a whole lifetime lived inside a vision. Gadhi went under the water for a ritual and came out the other side as an infant born to a candala family, an outcast. He grew, he had sons, he lost them to famine. He wandered into the Kira country, where a ceremonial elephant garlanded him and made him king. He ruled well for years, until his origin was discovered, and the horror of what the people believed they had done drove them into the fire. He went in after them, and woke.

He came back satisfied. He had seen maya and he had understood it. And then the story turns, which is why this section exists.

Travelers arrived from the Kira country carrying the story of King Gavala, and it was his story. Amazed, Gadhi crossed rivers and mountains and forests to see for himself. He found the city. He found the royal palace, the animals, the inhabitants, every detail exactly as he had seen it. He asked the people about the candala who had ruled them, and they told him what he had lived. Nothing contradicted anything.

This is the section where a philosophical claim meets a person’s actual experience and loses, at least for a while. Gadhi does not doubt his vision anymore. He doubts the teaching. If a dream can be corroborated by an entire country, in what sense was it a dream? He goes back to austerity, and when Lord Vishnu appears again his request is not for liberation. It is for more maya.

Swami Jyotirmayananda spends this lecture on Vishnu’s answer, and on the two or three ways the mind refuses to accept it.

Passages in this lecture

The question the mind actually asks

Gadhi’s objection is worth stating in its strongest form, because Swamiji does. For six months he wandered the forest of the candalas and the country of Kira, and heard the same account from everyone he asked. There was no discrepancy. An illusion, he points out, is supposed to break. A dream is contradicted the moment you wake. These happenings were never contradicted at all.

Lord Vishnu’s answer is one sentence: “sometimes many people may experience similar dreams. And yet those dreams remain unreal.”

That will not satisfy anybody the first time they hear it, and Swamiji does not pretend otherwise. He points out something the story quietly demonstrates: in a dream, an effort to wake is itself part of the dream. “The dream itself has manipulated your effort.” The mind cannot audit itself with its own instruments. Whatever test it designs will be built out of the same material as the thing being tested.

Why agreement is not evidence

Swamiji broadens the argument until it stops being about Gadhi.

Take the widest possible consensus. All humanity experiences the same world. Say Australia, say the Himalayas, and people understand you anywhere on earth. Millions of witnesses agree the sky is blue and rainbows have colors. Does the number make it real?

Then he moves outside the human community, and the argument changes shape. Ask a dog about the nature of the world. Ask a bird. A bird has a world: the identity of the branch, the identity of the fruit, the identity of the work it has to do that day, a mate, a house. All of our politics and history mean nothing in it. And it goes finer still. A hundred birds together are not sharing one world. Every bird is living a different life. A thousand people in a similar situation each experience it differently.

He gives the same point domestically. A hundred guests fall asleep on one floor after a party. From outside, one scene: everyone is sound asleep. Inside, a hundred separate worlds, each running on its own vasanas. Two or three may have similar dreams. Thousands may. Similar is never the same, and no amount of similarity converts a dream into a fact.

Underneath all of it: “The mind is not enlightened, it’s conditioned.” Recognition, familiarity, the shock of finding the palace exactly as you remembered it, all of this is the mind’s limitation performing itself. Gadhi took his own recognition as proof. Recognition is the one faculty least qualified to give it.

Karma runs the waking state the way it runs the dream

The structural claim is simpler than the story makes it look. A dream is assembled by the subconscious, and dreams keep changing. The waking world is assembled by karma, and the greater part of karma works itself out precisely here, in the waking state, not in the subconscious.

Which means the same process produces both. And since the karmic process is not itself reality, only a definition written by past action, neither the dream nor the waking state can claim to be real on the strength of the process that made it.

Swamiji notes that this is why the Upanishads never stop pushing. “Uttiṣṭhata, jāgrata, get up. That is realization.” Not get up into a better dream. Get up.

Strip away name and form

Here the lecture turns from argument to method, and it becomes unusually concrete.

Take anything you can see. Swamiji offers a house you have just bought. There is the form in front of you, and there is the concept behind it, the silent word this is mine. Names arrive through the tongue. Forms arrive through the mind’s ideas. Between them they manufacture the whole appearance of multiplicity.

Now strip an object of its name and its form. What is left?

“Every object is existence in itself plus name and form.” For students of mathematics, he says, this is easy. “But names and forms are variables.” And: “And variables are negated in mathematics.” Delete the variables and what remains is what was never variable: sat, existence in itself. Existence, understood more closely, is cit, pure awareness, because existence without awareness would be a contradiction. And awareness that is full, complete and absolute has no option but to be joy. Saccidananda, therefore, is the reality.

Swamiji is careful about the status of this. Even this understanding is a projection of the mind. It is simply a good one. It occupies the mind honestly enough that the purified intellect can carry it, and intuitional experience begins where the intellect leaves off. Not a conclusion to be won in argument. A place to let the mind rest while it is still a mind.

Avidya, vasana, and the three fisherwomen

Delusion has a root and an expression. The root is avidya, ignorance, and Swamiji makes a precise observation about it: ignorance has no substance. Misunderstand a person and there is a great deal of trouble. Understand them and the trouble goes. Now go looking for the misunderstanding that caused it, and there is nothing there to find. You cannot beat down what was never a thing.

The expression is vasana, subtle desire, and here he tells the story people remember.

Three fisherwomen walking home are caught in a storm, and a gardener takes them in. He gives them his best room and fills it with the most fragrant flowers in his garden. They cannot sleep. Such a nasty place, they say, all this smell. One of them, considering herself the wise one, has the idea: cut pieces from the fishing net, wet them, tie them over our noses, breathe deeply. That will shut out all the fragrance.

“Every human being led by vāsanās is one of those fish women.” And the line that lands: “And the world that is filled with the fragrance of God, that world is shut out by the swab of your vāsanās.”

The joke is affectionate and the diagnosis is not flattering. Nobody in the story is being denied anything. They are lying in the middle of the fragrance, working hard to keep it out, and calling their ingenuity wisdom.

The aspirant who lives on an old vision

The lecture opens on this and returns to it, and it is the most immediately useful passage in the section.

A sincere practitioner has a vision in a dream. A deity comes and blesses them. It is wonderful. Ten years later the dream has captured the mind, and every session of practice is now measured against it. Why is that not happening anymore? For ten years I have been out of touch with it.

Swamiji’s image for this is deliberately undignified. Ten years ago you had a dream and got a wonderful pumpkin pudding, and now you say you have been waiting ten years for that pudding. “Try to understand the ridiculous way of mind working.”

He is not against memory. If a memory holds a mathematical formula, keep it. If it holds a lesson, keep the lesson. But why all the details? The point is not the dream’s content. It is what holding the details does to the present: “As if the present has no mouth to open.”

This is the same error Gadhi is making at scale. Gadhi will not release the vividness of what he experienced, so he returns to Kira again and again, checking. The aspirant will not release the vividness of what they experienced, so they return to it every time they sit. In both cases something real is being spent to keep something unreal alive.

Abhyasa: what the mind repeats, it becomes

Gadhi keeps going back to the forest of the candalas and to Kira, remembering people, recognizing places, telling no one what he is doing. Swamiji reads this as a description of the mind’s basic habit rather than a failure of Gadhi’s character. “Human mind has a habit of abhyāsa.” You fall into trouble, and the mind rehearses it, again and again, long after the trouble has gone. The rehearsal keeps the risk alive.

Then comes the turn, which is the practical heart of the lecture. “Therefore, if you were to allow the positive in you to be repeated again and again.” And: “You are now moving away from ignorance to enlightenment.” The faculty is not the enemy. Repetition is what the mind does. The only question is what it is given to repeat.

So when confusion darkens the reason, as it does to Gadhi three separate times, the instruction is not to argue the confusion down. It is sustained practice: prayer, satsanga, surrender, upasana, repeated. In the story God appears and you identify him by counting four arms. In practice, Swamiji says, you do not wait for that. Your own conscience speaks, and that is the same Lord Vishnu, within.

The relative explanation, offered anyway

Gadhi still cannot hold it, and what Vishnu does next is worth noticing as pedagogy. He shifts registers. From the absolute point of view all names and forms are illusory, he says, but let me explain your identity as a candala from a relative point of view.

There really was a candala of Bhuta-mandala who became king of Kira. It really happened, to another soul, led by that soul’s karmic process. Because Gadhi asked to understand maya, maya produced a momentary identity with that soul, and he experienced from inside a life that had already passed into history.

Swamiji names the principle: adhikari-bheda, the difference in fitness of the listener. One state of mind can take a higher explanation; another needs the ladder. And he defends the concession with a plain observation. When a person is eating something and enjoying it and another person tells them it is an illusion, who can handle that? The relative account is given so that Gadhi’s mind is not broken open before it can bear the opening.

None of which retracts the absolute claim. “When you rise above māyā, you will discover yourself as the Supreme Reality.”

The cloud that glorifies the sun

The most beautiful image in the lecture describes what discrimination actually feels like from inside.

Begin by distancing yourself from the mind. Mind, intellect and the rest are not-Self. I am the Self. This is done, note, with the mind itself, the same instrument, turned to distinguish Self from not-Self.

“The same cloud that was restricting the sun now is glorifying the sun.” And: “And while doing so, melting away.”

Nothing is destroyed and nothing is renounced. The cloud that obscured is the cloud that now displays, and the displaying is what dissolves it. Swamiji says plainly that this state of mind is the goal, and tells us to try to figure it out. The alternative he names in four words: otherwise your mind is a fishy mind, still working hard on the swab.

He adds an observation most of us can verify tonight. You sit down determined to worry about something for a full hour, and then you forget what you were worried about. A crack opened between the vrittis. Enlightenment, he suggests, is not the absence of vrittis. It is the deeper awareness, while they continue, that I am the screen and these are the projections cast across it.

The sage as a ship

The lecture closes on the difference between the deluded and the enlightened, and the difference is not in how much either one knows.

The ignorant are deluded by I am the body, this property is mine, these possessions are mine. The sage possesses a different vision, and Swamiji gives it in two forms he insists are one: aham brahmasmi, I am Brahman, and aham evedam sarvam, I alone am, in all names and forms. Nothing is real, and I am all of this. Same statement.

Then the final image. “Such a sage is like a ship in the ocean of the world, unaffected by the currents of pleasure and pain.”

And Swamiji will not leave it as a picture of invulnerability. He asks his own question of the verse: but why is he in a ship? “Because he can help others to cross over the ocean.”

That is where a section arguing that nothing is real chooses to end. Not on the far shore. On the water, in a vessel, with room for passengers.

Terms in this lecture

Maya: the power by which the one appears as many; the conditioning under which every human experience, dream and waking alike, takes place.
Avidya: ignorance, the root cause of delusion; without substance, and undiscoverable once understanding arrives.
Vasana: subtle desire, the residue of past experience through which ignorance expresses itself and shapes what each soul perceives.
Sat, cit, ananda: existence, pure awareness, absolute joy. Saccidananda names the reality that remains when name and form are deleted.
Abhyasa: repeated practice. Also the mind’s untrained habit of rehearsing its troubles.
Adhikari-bheda: the difference in a listener’s fitness, which decides what level of explanation can be received.
Vritti: a modification or wave of the mind; the projections cast on the screen of awareness.
Upasama Prakarana: the section of the Yoga Vasistha on quiescence, in which this story sits.

For reflection

What is the ten-year-old pudding in your own practice, the experience you are still measuring the present against?
Where are you treating agreement as evidence, because everyone around you sees a situation the same way you do?
Name one thing your mind rehearses without being asked. What would it mean to give it something else to repeat?
The cloud glorifies the sun and melts. Is your discrimination currently obscuring, or displaying?

Provenance

Yoga Vasistha, Upasama Prakarana, Section 47. Lecture 186 by Swami Jyotirmayananda, Yoga Research Foundation, founded 1969 in Miami.

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