The Blessedness Of Self-knowledge
On The Astavarka Samhita
Astavakra sounds positively Shankarian when, in Chapter 18: “Peace,” he states,
The ignorant person does not attain liberation through repeated practice of control of the mind. The blessed one through mere knowledge becomes free and is unaffected by change. (Astavakra Samhita XVIII.36, trans. Swami Nityaswarupananda).
1. The pointing, the sloka, is almost shocking in its directness. In reality, there is no mind; what is termed “mind” is only activity, or vritti. Because there is no mind as such, there is no mind to control. Besides, it is experientially understood, there is no controller (not this ego and not any other sort of ego) in the first place. And there is no will: all actions are just spontaneous arisings anyway. There is, as there has always been, only consciousness. This is what the sage, the blessed one, knows. The blessed one knows the one thing needful—and it is not a thing.
2. Practice, inadvertently positing a separate self tasked with exerting itself to dissolve the made-up divide between it and the Self, is not the way and, as such, is a dead-end. The Self is not there; it is not here either; it is spacelessly the case. The Self is not then, not what-is-to-come, not “in” the present moment, but timelessly so. The real point of practice—if, that is, this direct pointing does not penetrate on its own—is only to investigate one’s beliefs, assumptions, superimpositions with a view to deconstructing them. When all these have fallen away, then investigation itself falls away, revealing only blessedness—as, in truth, has always been the case.
3. The ignorant one imagines liberation, an end to all his suffering. The blessed one does not attain liberation. She attains not-a-thing. Liberation is not attainable. It is. Only, she falls through a door that’s always been open. It’s that which is reading these words right now.
4. The blessed one does not become free. This is just a manner of speaking. The blessed one is free. She’s that which is reading these words right now.