Ashtavakra Gita 2.20 - Self-Realization and the Nature of Consciousness

This is another restatement and confirmation of the truly non-existential nature of the whole creation, including one’s own body. Body is a product before the senses. Heaven and hell are imagined by the mind. So too bondage and liberation. Fear also is a mental creation. Sensory things, well studied, become mind-products and mind-assessments alone.

Mind being inner, not matter and energy, which constitute the whole world, cannot be any ground for giving undue credibility to any perception. Everything mind brings and supports falls as a mere imagination. It has form and is an object, resting upon the Subject ‘I’. ‘I’, the Subject, is Consciousness in nature. For the Consciousness, of what use is any object or imagination?

It has no hunger, hence no food is needed. Shapeless, formless, and hence having no personality either, why should it need a residence to dwell? It already reigns, like space, within the body, without any house or room.

What then about bondage? Can Consciousness be bound by the senses, their perceptions, or by the mind and intelligence and their products? They all pose, if at all, as objects, away and different from Consciousness. Everything is imaginary too. Can such things ever cause any kind of bondage to Consciousness?

There being no bondage, where is the question of liberation?