by Roopa Pai
Worried, the queen called in, by turns, the royal physician, the prime minister, the general of the army (this was not a good idea at all, as you can imagine!), the queen mother and everyone else she thought might be able to help. But to each one, the king would only ask one question – ‘Is this real, or is that real?’ And he was never satisfied with their answer – ‘This, of course, my king!’
Eventually, the great sage Ashtavakra* – literally, ‘the one with eight deformities’ – who happened to be passing through Mithila, arrived at the palace gates and asked to see the king. When the king asked him his question – ‘Is this real, or is that real?’ – Ashtavakra let out a full-throated laugh, and whispered, with a wink, ‘Neither of them is, O King!’
Instantly, Janaka lit up with happiness. ‘A-ha!’ he said. ‘That makes me feel so much better. Although, if that is true, it begs the question – “Then what is real?’’’
*Ashtavakra’s mother, Sujata, was the daughter of the sage Uddalaka. She was married to one of her father’s favourite students, Kahoda, who was also a teacher in Uddalaka’s gurukul. When she was pregnant with Ashtavakra, Sujata made sure she sat in on all the lessons taught by her father and her husband, so that her child would benefit from them. Once, when Kahoda was teaching, he mispronounced a word several times. The baby in the womb squirmed every time his father made the mistake, until, after he had done it for the eighth time, he could bear it no longer and cried out, ‘This is the eighth time you’ve mispronounced the word, Father!’ Furious at being humiliated in front of his students, Kahoda laid on his son a terrible curse, that he be born with eight deformities. Ashtavakra’s appearance made him the butt of all jokes, but he grew up to fulfil the promise he had shown in the womb and became a great Vedantin, a most revered teacher of the Vedanta.
‘It does,’ agreed Ashtavakra. ‘But first, let me ask you a question – would you say, O King, that you were present, actually present, in your nightmare?’
‘I most certainly was!’ said the king, shuddering. ‘I heard the twang of the bowstring, felt the warm, fetid breath of the boars...’
‘All right,’ said Ashtavakra. ‘And would you say you are here now, in this palace, reclining against soft pillows as you lie on these silken sheets?’
‘I guess I would.’
‘Well then,’ said Ashtavakra, ‘there’s your answer. Neither is that real, nor is this real. But you, O King, who were present there and are present here – you, and only you, are real.’
‘When you say “I” am real, do you mean my physical body, which is here now?’ said Janaka, puzzled. ‘Or do you mean my dream body, which fled the palace while my physical body still lay supine on this bed? Who am “I”?’
‘A-ha!’ said Ashtavakra. ‘Now that’s the real question, isn’t it?’
And he proceeded to deliver to the king a long discourse on many different subjects, including of course, the answer to Janaka’s real question – ‘Who am I?’ We know that discourse today as the Ashtavakra Gita.
Ohhh-kay. But what does this story have to do with the Mandukya Upanishad? Well, the core question at the heart of the Mandukya is the one that Janaka asked Ashtavakra! What’s more, the Mandukya uses the same device, of different states of consciousness – the wide-awake state, the dream state, and the deep-sleep state – to bring its message home.
At just twelve mantras, the Mandukya is the shortest Upanishad of them all, but it packs a serious punch by addressing one of the most fundamental questions – Who Am I, Really? – that human beings have grappled with since the beginning of time. No wonder Adi Shankara declared that the Mandukya contained within its (very small) nutshell the entire wisdom of the Upanishads. Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, apparently believed that too. In the Muktika Upanishad, he tells Hanuman – ‘If you had to pick just one Upanishad to master, Vayuputra, pick the Mandukya, and you will reach your goal of self-realization!’*
*Before you start celebrating – ‘Understand just one Upanishad to gain ultimate bliss? I can totally do that!’ – remember that this advice was for Hanuman, who, through the sheer power of his devotion to Rama, was well on his way to becoming a realized soul. As for other, less advanced seekers – ahem! – Rama goes on to say that depending on where they are in the hierarchy of realization, they would need to study the ten Principal Upanishads, or the thirty-two major ones, or, um, all 108 of them. Yeah, life’s tough like that.
One of the other interesting things about this particular Upanishad is that the detailed commentary on it – the Mandukya Kaarika (composed by a sage called Gaudapada, who was the guru to another teacher called Govinda Bhagavatpada, who was – yup, the guru to Adi Shankara – read more about him on page 169) – is as well known as the Upanishad itself. In fact, the text of the Upanishad has never been found independently - we only have access to it because it is the first chapter of the Mandukya Kaarika!
Now, where does the name Mandukya come from? One theory is that since the word Manduka means frog in Sanskrit, and the metamorphosis of a frog from tadpole to adult is a common metaphor for spiritual growth and enlightenment, ‘Mandukya’ is an apt name for an Upanishad that helps in this growth. Another says that the Upanishad was composed by a sage called Manduka. A third combines the two and speaks of Varuna, the god of the realms of water and sky and a venerated rishi himself, taking the form of a frog to sing the praises of the cosmic vibration Aum (which is the other subject that the Mandukya Upanishad concerns itself with). Pick your favourite!
How does the Mandukya link the question of who we are to the significance of the Pranava (another word for Aum)? Very creatively! By mapping the three states of consciousness to the three sounds that come seamlessly together to form the sacred syllable, the Mandukya explains not only who we all really are, but also how, by meditating on the Pranava, we can realize that truth about ourselves.
THE STORY
And the teacher said, ‘The whole world, everything that you can see, feel, perceive, intuit, deduce, understand, is that imperishable sound, that cosmic vibration – Aum! It is what has been, what is, and what will be, and it is beyond these three, beyond time itself, this Aum!’
The student nodded. He could believe that about the Pranava. Each day, he felt its enormous power resound through his being when he chanted it before the start of a prayer or at the end of a lesson, meditated on it, or heard it being chanted in the quiet of a forest clearing by his fellow students. It calmed him deeply, those three sounds that coalesced into the Aum – the vast, expansive ‘A’ vibrating in his abdomen before it rose into his chest as the more focused ‘U’, which radiated through his upper body before it rose even further, into his head, as the rounded, sonorous ‘M’, where it reverberated, it seemed to him, in harmony with the hum of the very universe.
But if you had asked him which his absolute favourite bit was, he would have picked without hesitation the brief pause right after the chant, when the last of the M still hung, soundless, in the air; that moment of utter peace and quiet, even blankness, between one ‘Aum’ and the next. Everything around him – mountains, trees, people, earth, sky – and his own physical body seemed to melt away in that golden moment, losing shape, form and name as they merged into each other and into the cosmos, just as the A melted into the U and the U into the M. His breath was momentarily stilled, and the universe itself seemed to be held – by him! – in suspended animation. The student shivered. Even the memory of that moment made his hair stand on end.
‘This Aum, my boy, is Brahman – it is the whole, it is all of it, there is nothing else. And this soul, ayam atma...’
The teacher paused, and the student felt his breath catch in his throat. He knew, somehow, that the teacher was about to reveal something momentous.
‘Ayam atma Brahma!’ said the teacher, and the student felt a delicious awe run through him. ‘This Atma inside you, your individual soul, that Atma... is Brahma. You, my boy, are God!’
There it was. No frills, no flourishes
, no mystical riddles. A simple fact of life, simply delivered. Ayam atma brahma. This Self is God. What was left to be said?
If only one knew how to truly feel like God, though, how to reach and claim that utterly calm, utterly compassionate, utterly non-judgmental, utterly content part of oneself!
‘Just like Aum has four parts – A, U, M and the pause after...’ The student looked up, startled – had the teacher read his mind? ‘...the Self or the Atma has four feet on which it stands, four ways in which it experiences the world and itself. These are the four states of consciousness.
‘The first is the wakeful state – jagrita (say jaag-rita) – which you and I are in now. In this state, the Self is turned outwards, conscious only of the external world – engaging with it, interacting with it, consuming it, processing it, making sense of it. It is as if the Atma is Vaishvanara himself, the Universal One of the seven limbs, who straddles the cosmos like a colossus, who is the cosmos. His head is the sky, his eyes the sun and moon, his ears all of space, his breath the wind, his speech the Vedas, his heart the world, his feet the earth – he is the doer of all actions, the thinker of all thoughts, the enjoyer* of all things.
*In the Upanishads, enjoyer just means ‘someone who experiences’. All the experiences that one ‘enjoys’ are not necessarily what we would consider joyful ones. But looking at an experience as either good or bad, scary or reassuring, pleasant or unpleasant, is human folly. If, as your true Self does, you look at an experience simply as something to be lived through and learnt from, any experience can be ‘enjoyed’. See why it makes sense to connect with your true Self?
‘As the Vaishvanara in the body, the Atma, in the wakeful state, is the doer of all the body’s actions, the thinker of all the mind’s thoughts, the consumer and enjoyer of all the material things it takes in through its nineteen mouths. Which are, of course,
-the five senses, plus
-the five organs of action (the mouth that speaks, the arms that grasp, the legs that move, the anus that eliminates waste, the organs that reproduce), plus
-the five breaths* that convert the air the body breathes and the food it eats into the fuel that sustains life, plus
-the four forms of the ‘mental body’ (antahkarana) – which are the mind (manas) that thinks thoughts and feels emotions; the intellect (buddhi) that sifts through the thoughts and emotions generated by the mind to decide the right course of action; the ego (ahamkara) that mistakes the body and mind and intellect for the Atma and calls them ‘I’; and the memory (chitta) which remembers and forgets selectively, and thus influences the mind and the intellect.’
*For a quick refresher on the five breaths, check out Sage Pippalada’s answer to Prashna 3 in the Prashna Upanishad, on page 244.
That was quite a visual, marvelled the student to himself, as he imagined himself to be Vaishvanara, consuming, consuming, consuming – sights, sounds, tastes, smells, feelings, ideas, emotions, fears, hopes, memories, both his own and other people’s. But it was true – as long as a man was awake, it was all about the body seeking to quench its hunger, and about the senses feeding the mind with stimuli, causing thoughts and emotions to erupt constantly and randomly.
‘The second state of consciousness,’ continued the teacher, ‘the second “foot” on which the Atma stands, the second way we experience things, is the dream state – swapna – that comes to us in sleep. In this state, the senses are withdrawn and the mind now has the opportunity to look inwards, to turn a light on itself. In this state, the Atma is Taijasa, the Illuminated One. In swapna, the mind constructs a dream world from all the inputs it has received from the material world in the waking state, and all the actions and desires that have left their impressions on it. In this dream world, one’s fondest hopes and deepest fears, some never acknowledged in the waking state, bubble up to the surface. Wishes are fulfilled in swapna, nightmares come true.
‘This dream world seems so real to the mind that the seven limbs and the nineteen mouths of the Self, the Atma, are still seemingly working, the limbs doing exactly what they do in jagrita, the mouths still consuming, consuming, consuming, still enjoying, even if the things it experiences are insubstantial and disappear in the clear light of day...’
It was true, thought the student to himself. When he awoke from a nightmare, it took several minutes before his heart stopped thudding or his panicked breath returned to normal. The body certainly believed in the dream world conjured up by the mind and reacted exactly as it would to a crisis in the waking state.
‘The third state of consciousness, the third foot on which the Self stands, is sushupti, the state of deep sleep. Here the mind thinks no thoughts, dreams no dreams, feels no desire. In this state, the Atma is Prajna – the Knowing One. Withdrawing everything – senses, mind, memory, imagination, all thoughts, all actions – into itself, the Atma is at last at rest, in deep repose, a mass of consciousness, the seed of everything that was, is and will be. All distinction vanishes – when the Self doesn’t see itself as “I”, it cannot see the other as different, as “You”. As “I” merges into “You”, so does subject merge into object, the seer into the seen, and This into That – until at last, there is only one. As Prajna, the Self consumes nothing, but continues to enjoy – not material things as in jagrita, not imaginary things as in swapna, but deep, deep bliss, ananda (say aa-nanda).
‘This, my boy, this Prajna, is the lord of all, the knower of all, the source of all, the true enjoyer of everything the body experiences through its seven limbs and nineteen mouths, the beginning and end of all things. The tragedy is that we are never conscious of this aspect of the Atma – we never see our own true self even though it is revealed to us every time we are in deep sleep. The tragedy is that when the sleeper returns to the waking state, he instantly returns to being Vaishvanara, fed by the senses, seeing separateness everywhere instead of oneness, and experiencing, as a result, pain, grief, anger, fear and hate.’
Ah, sighed the student. How wonderful it would be to experience the bliss one experienced in deep sleep while one was conscious! If that could happen, why would anyone ever want to return to being Vaishvanara?
‘Tell me, sir,’ he said to the teacher. ‘Is Prajna then the highest state of consciousness? If we could stay there forever, would we be liberated?’
‘Ah, but you cannot stay there forever, can you?’ smiled the teacher. ‘For Prajna is just as transient as Taijasa and Vaishvanara – when the state of deep sleep passes, so does Prajna.’
So it did, agreed the student. And anything that changed, that was transient, was not the ultimate reality, which was unchanging and immortal.
‘Don’t look so despondent,’ smiled the teacher. ‘Think about this – even though you are never conscious in the Prajna state, there is one part of you that remembers it well once you come out of it, the part which says, “I slept so well. I am so refreshed.”’
‘That is true!’ cried the student. ‘How do I remember, how can I remember, that I slept well? All my tools of remembering and recognition – my mind, my intellect, my memory and my ego – are withdrawn in sushupti, the state of deep sleep! Who, then, is the “I” that says, “I slept so well”? Who was it that experienced that state of blissful sleep, first-hand, and remembered it too?’
‘There is one,’ said the teacher, ‘which is beyond Prajna. The last “foot” of the Self, the fourth state of consciousness, is called, simply, the Fourth, or turiya, for there is no other way to describe it. It is neither an outward-looking state, like jagrita, nor an inward-looking one, like swapna. It is not a mass of consciousness, like sushupti, but it is not non-consciousness either. It is indescribable, unnameable, invisible. You cannot engage with it, or speak of it, or claim any relationship to it (because a relationship can only exist between two different things, and turiya contains everything, everything, inside itself), or think any thought about it (because it is beyond the range of thought). But it abides in you, a silent witness to your every action and
word and thought.
‘It is your Atma, in the blessed fourth state of turiya, that is the enjoyer of all that you experience in all three states of consciousness, for turiya is inside each of them and yet is none of them,* supporting them all, illuminating them all. It is the Atma, in the state of turiya, which is the real “I”, your true Self, not your body or mind or thoughts or emotions or memory.’
*The best way to explain this concept is to think of the three states of consciousness as three ornaments made of gold – a bracelet, say, and a necklace and a ring – and the turiya state as gold itself. The gold is in all the ornaments, but is itself none of the ornaments – you can’t say, for instance, that ‘gold’ is the same as a bracelet. And although a bracelet may look quite different from a necklace and a necklace from a ring, and although each of them may have unlike functions, to the goldsmith they are all just gold. In the same way, although the three states of consciousness may have distinct names, forms and functions, they are all really turiya. Just as no golden ornament would exist without gold, there would be no consciousness without turiya, which makes each state possible.
‘I can’t think of anything I want more in the world than to experience turiya, sir,’ said the student, ‘for it seems to me that it is a combination of true knowledge (sat), true consciousness (chit) and true bliss (ananda). But if I can’t even experience the Atma as Prajna, how can I ever hope to experience it as turiya, which is beyond Prajna?’
‘There is a way,’ the teacher said. ‘And I will teach it to you.’
The student sat up, delighted and expectant.
‘You see, my boy, turiya is contained in the Omkara, in the syllable ‘Aum’. Meditate on the Omkara with faith, devotion and true understanding, and you will enjoy not just the first three states of consciousness, but also what lies beyond them, while you are fully conscious.