Ashtavakra Gita 9.7 -

The Sage presents a very important finding here. We see a gross material world around us, basically made up of pañca-bhūtas. Everything and all in the world are getting modified regularly. Though the objects and their modifications appear to be outer, in terms of our actual experience, their source is solely our own senses and mind.

Pañca-bhūtas as such are never sensed. We can only sense tan-mātras related to the objects around. Tan-mātras are not physical, external or gross. So, our perception involves tan-mātras alone, not pañca-bhūtas. Each of the pañca-bhūtas has its quality, which is what the senses perceive. Thus earth has smell, water has taste, air has touch, fire has brilliance and space has sound. It is our senses that discover and identify these. All these prevail only when we are awake.

Even without external objects, in dream, our mind produces the same objects as well as tan-mātras. Without senses, the objects cannot be perceived. But without objects, the mind can still produce and interact with them, as it does in dream.

So, we can safely state that all the changes in the world are not gross and external, but subtle, subjective, sourced by our own mind and senses. All are tan-mātras, created by our senses.

On this basis, as the objects and tan-mātras inhere in us alone, the bondage they cause is also inhering in us, in our own mind.

Everything, including bondage, vanishes in sleep. But their witness does not. So discard all thoughts of fictitious existence and effects. And be seated in your own Self, their sole witness.

Be ātma-stha, Self-seated. For this, the seeker has to get rid of the obsession objects and tan-mātras cause, by identifying them as sourced by the Self alone.

At the end of every day, does not the mind withdraw completely from wakefulness, wipe off all its imprints and go to sleep, unconscious of the body and the world alike? Next morning it arouses wakefulness again, only to rub it off at the end of the day.

So, understand that Consciousness, acting as the mind, has the capacity to instil as well as withdraw the wakeful state. Bondage is only in wakeful state. Wipe it off and be seated on the Self, the source of all the three states, firmly, wholesomely.

Be ātma-sthitaḥ, Self-seated!