Balsekar (DO:1) – Ashtavakra 11-12

Ashtavakra continua:

In these two verses, Ashtavakra summarizes the position and brings the disciple’s attention to the basic truth: all there is is Consciousness  —universal   Consciousness in which appears the total universe, but which identifies itself with each individual phenomenal object as personal consciousness and thereby comes into conceptual bondage. Atman   or Consciousness, being the only reality, must necessarily be all-pervading and therefore there cannot possibly be any personal, individual entity. But in the duality of the phenomenal appearance, the split mind   creates the illusion of “me” and the “other” and thereby also, at the same time, creates the notion of bondage. Therefore liberation is only liberation from the concept of bondage, liberation from the operation of the split-mind, liberation from conceptualizing. Let the split-mind stop its conceptualizing and there is no bondage, because in the absence of any mental   activity, the split-mind regains its wholeness, its holiness.

What Ashtavakra wants the disciple to understand very clearly is that the entire manifestation—and every object therein that has been given a name, and has some specific significance—is all very much in the mind. Therefore, they do not exist in deep sleep when the mind ceases its conceptualizing. Phenomenal objects including the sky and the sun   and the moon  , up there or down here or anywhere, simply do not exist except as concepts in the mind, except as illusory appearances in Consciousness, observed and cognized by Consciousness.

Again and again, in these twenty verses, Ashtavakra does his best to put into words what truly cannot be put into words. He does this for only one reason, and that is that he hopes that there will be perhaps a single word or a single sentence that may reveal the truth and remove the obfuscation that has appeared on the disciple’s real nature. He repeatedly avers that all there is is Consciousness and that therefore the disciple, like the guru cannot possibly be anything but Consciousness; further that all phenomenal objects—including the guru and the disciple—are nothing but the subjective noumenon in its objective expression as the manifestation. But the realization of this truth at the intellectual level is just not sufficient because at the root   of the intellectual comprehension the culprit is still there as the individual comprehender! The individual outside crust has to be shattered before the intellectual comprehension can be transformed into intuitive apprehension or apperception. And this individual crust can be shattered only be the disidentifying of the pseudo-subjectivity through a subjective experience of the sheer absence of a separate individual entity.