A story · Yoga Vasishtha · Yoga Vasishtha — Stories of Freedom

The Man Who Guarded Space

Yoga Vasishtha 6.1.112

The story · English

Vasishtha began with a young man named Kacha, the son of the divine teacher Brihaspati. His father had shown him the best kind of meditation, and Kacha sat down and began to turn it over in his mind. He thought of himself as someone already set free from being a separate person, lost in the one Being that exists by itself. Vasishtha recalled a line from the Persian poet Sadi: when I stopped seeing myself as two, I saw everything blend into one blaze of light. Kacha let go of his sense of I and mine. His mind grew still, and the ties of nature and the bonds of daily life fell away from him. Then Vasishtha turned to Rama and said, this is what I want for you.

Stay unmoved, Rama, he said, while bodies change and life rises and falls around you. Your ego has no more substance than the horns of a hare, whether you grip it or let it go. You can hold on to it all day and still have nothing in your hand. So why talk about your birth and your death, or whether you exist at all? It is like planting a tree in the sky. You will never pick a flower or a fruit from it. Do not hesitate to step out of this house of unreality. When the small ego is gone, something remains, and that is awareness itself. It is calm and wants nothing. It reaches through everything, and it is finer than the smallest atom.

The ego, Vasishtha went on, grows out of that first awareness the way a wave rises from water, or a bracelet is made from gold. It looks like something separate, but it is not. Ignorance makes the world look like a magic show, and clear knowledge shows the one Brahma in every shape. So drop your doubts about whether reality is one or many, and rest in the state that remains when both ideas are gone. Be glad in that, and do not go thinking otherwise, like the false man in the tale. A great enchantment covers the whole world, as thick as autumn mist across the sky, and good understanding is the light that scatters it. Rama was deeply refreshed. He said the words were like nectar to a thirsty swallow, and he could not hear enough. Then he asked who this false man was.

Vasishtha smiled and promised a story that was pleasant to hear and funny from start to finish. Once there lived a man who was like a puppet worked by magic. He had the simple mind of a baby and was as dull as a block. He had been born somewhere far out in the sky, and he drifted through it like a phantom, or a mirage over the desert. No one else was there. Whatever he saw was only himself or a copy of himself, and whatever he looked at, he took to be himself. When he grew into a man in that empty place, he thought, I am airy, and the air is my country. I will rule this region as mine.

The air is mine by right, he decided, and so I must guard it with care. So he built himself a house in the air, to protect his kingdom and rule it from there. He trusted that castle completely, and he lived in it contentedly for a long time. But in time it fell apart, the way autumn clouds are blown away or sea waves sink into calm. The man cried out, my house of air, why did you break and blow away so soon, and where have you gone. He wailed in his grief, and at last he said, now I see that a something made of air must come to an airy nothing. He mourned for a long while after that.

Then, being a simple fellow, he dug a cave in the emptiness of the sky and lived in the hollow, looking up at his airy realm from below. He was content there for a long time. But the cave was washed away, and he sank into sorrow as it sank. Next he made a hollow pot and moved into its belly, fitting his life to its narrow walls. The brittle pot broke too, and he learned how frail all his homes were, the way an unlucky man learns how fickle his hopes are. He got a tub, and from inside it he looked at the heavens. A wild animal broke the tub, and all his supports vanished like night dew in the sun.

After that he took shelter in an enclosed cottage with an opening in the middle, so he could still see the sky above. Time, which devours everything, scattered it as winds scatter dry leaves. He built a hut like a barn in a field and kept watch over his estate of air, the way farmers guard their grain. The driving wind blew the hovel away like a gathering cloud, and the roofless man mourned again. So he was left with nothing, in the pit and the pot, the cottage and the hut, and in the open air. He thought about the narrow homes he had chosen himself, and the pain of building and losing them, all through his own ignorance.

Rama asked Vasishtha what the parable meant and what it said about every fanciful man whose work is to guard the sky. Vasishtha answered that the man was the egoistic person, led by the magic of ego to treat the empty air of his own self as something real. The sky holds all the worlds, but it is only open space, as it was before creation. The spirit of the unseen Brahma is present in that emptiness, and it shows itself as the person of Brahma, the way sound comes out of empty air. In the same way the small soul, with its sense of I, rises from the still sky as a moving breeze rises from calm air. It grows and comes to believe it has a self of its own.

Having taken on that idea, Vasishtha said, the soul tries to keep its ego forever. It enters body after body and makes a new home each time the old one is lost. The pit, the pot, the cottage and the hut are those bodies, each one a hollow that gives the egoistic soul a temporary place. This false man goes by many names, such as living soul, mind, heart, ignorance, nature, imagination, fancy and time, but all of these are only features of the true self, which cannot be seen. So, Rama, do not trust your false personality, and do not spend your life guarding your empty soul. How could a pot hold something wider than the sky? When a pot breaks, the air inside is not destroyed, and when a body dissolves, the soul is not dissolved with it.

The soul, Vasishtha said, is pure awareness, finer than the air and smaller than the smallest atom, and it can no more be destroyed than air can be made into nothing. It is never born and never dies, at any place or time. It spreads through the whole universe as the soul of Brahma, which holds all space and shows itself in all things. See it as one whole and the only real thing, always calm, with no beginning, middle or end, and beyond yes and no. Be glad in knowing that. So pull your mind out of the false thought of ego, which is the home of every danger and depends on a short life. Let it go, and rest in the highest state of the one everlasting Deity.

कथा · हिन्दी

In this book

• Before: Kacha and Brihaspati · Yoga Vasishtha 6.1.111
• Next: Manu Teaches Ikshvaku · Yoga Vasishtha 6.1.117
• All of Yoga Vasishtha · Ask Krishna about it

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