Inspirational Verses from Yoga Vasistha

Yoga Vasistha

Inspirational Verses from Yoga Vasistha

[King Janaka:]

O unsteady mind! This worldly life is not conducive to your true happiness. Hence, reach the state of

equanimity. It is in such equanimity that you will experience peace, bliss, and the truth. (V:11)

Rooted in equanimity, doing whatever happens to be the appropriate action in each given

situation and not ever thinking about what has thus befallen you unsought, live non-volitionally —

doing yet not doing what has to be done. Consciousness minus conceptualization is the eternal

Brahman. (V:13)

[Bhaktha Prahlada to Lord Vishnu:]

Whatever comes, let it come; whatever goes, let it go. Let notions of diverse experiences either

arise or set in the body: I am neither in them nor they in me.

Even as steel cuts the steel beam which has been heated, I have subdued the mind with its own purified state. I have cut asunder cravings, ignorance, and foolishness by their opposites. Egolessly, my body functions with its inherent energy. The past tendencies, mental conditioning, and limitations have been completely destroyed.

I begin to wonder: how was it that for such a long time I was caught up in the trap of ego-sense! Freed from dependency, from habits of thought, from desire and cravings, from deluded belief in the existence of the ego, from the coloring of pleasure-seeking tendency, and from revelry — my mind has reached a state of utter quiescence. With this, all sorrow has come to an end and the light of supreme bliss has dawned! (V:35)

[Lord Vishnu to Bhaktha Prahlada:]

Even though you are in the body, since you do not have the body, you are bodiless. You are the observer which is immaterial intelligence: just as, though air exists in space it is not attached to space, and hence it is free from spatial limitations. 

Enlightened men, though they are constantly engaged in the activity, do nothing: it is not by means of inaction that they reach the state of non-action! This very fact of non-action frees you from experiences: for there is no harvest where there is no sowing. When thus both notions of I do and I experience have ceased, there remains only peace; when that peace is firmly grounded, there is liberation. (V:40) Without self-inquiry and the consequent inner tranquillity, neither devotion to Lord Vishnu nor self-knowledge is possible. Hence resort to self-inquiry and the practice of the End to distraction and thus adore the Self: if you are successful in this, you have attained perfection; if not, you are no more than a wild donkey. 

Lord Vishnu in fact dwells as the innermost being of all; they are surely the worst among men who, abandoning the indweller, seek Vishnu outside. (V:43)