"Advice for self-control (verse 136) & What is bondage? Its reply (verses 137-142)"

 

 

Advice for self-control (verse 136)

 

136.With a regulated mind and a purified intellect, directly realize your self as the essential Self. Identify yourself with the Self, and cross the shoreless ocean of worldy existence with its waves of births and deaths. Be fulfilled thusly by becoming firmly established in Brahman (which is your very own essence).

 

What is bondage? Its reply (verses 137-142)

 

137.Due to ignorance, a person identifies the Self with not-Self. This is the bondage and brings in its wake the miseries of birth and death. Through this, one considers the unreal body as real, identifies with it and nourishes, bathes and preserves it with the help of sense-objects. Thereby, one becomes bound like the silk-worm in its cocoon woven by its own threads.

 

138. Being deluded by ignorance, one mistakes a thing for what it is not. In the absence of discrimination, the snake is mistaken for a rope, and great danger befalls one who seizes it through this false notion. So listen, my friend, it is mistaking the not-Self for the Self (the unreal for the Real) that creates bondage.

 

139. The veiling power, whose nature is ignorance, covers the Self whose glories are infinite, which is Indivisible, Eternal, and One-without-a-second, just as Rahu* covers the sun during a solar eclipse.

*Rahu is considered as a "shadow planet" in Indian astrology. In Indian mythology, it is conceived as a demon who periodically swallows the sun or moon, causing eclipses.

 

140. When a person‘s own Self of purest splendor is hidden from direct experience, that person, due to ignorance, comes to falsely identify with the body which is the non-Self. Then the merciless persecution of rajas (projecting power), binds the person down with fetters of lust, anger etc.

 

141. A peson of deluded mind, whose knowledge of Self has been swallowed by the shark of complete ignorance, behaves as though the different states of the intellect were the attributes of the Self, and drifts up and down, now rising and now sinking, on the ocean of change, which is full of the poison of sense-pleasures. What a miserable fate, indeed!

 

142. As the formations of clouds generated by the sun‘s rays come to veil the very same sun and appear clearly manifest in the sky, so too, the ego arisen from the Self covers the reality of the Self and expresses itself in full manifestation.