Yoga Vasistha, Lesson 1: The Three Kinds of Doubt and How Each Is Cured
The front door that was not there
For years the Yoga Vasistha class has been complete on the channel from lesson forty-five onward. Anyone who went looking for the beginning found that the beginning was missing. Thirteen of the earliest lessons, including this one, were recorded in Miami and then simply never posted. They are not outtakes and they were never lost. They were held, and now they are going up, two a week, until the series is whole.
This is the first of them, and it is an unusual lecture because it is doing two jobs at once. The first half is Swamiji opening a scripture: who wrote it, what it is called, how its six volumes are arranged, and why they are arranged that way. The second half is the scripture opening itself, through three invocatory verses and then through a story about a man who could not make up his mind.
The hinge between the two halves is doubt, and the lecture’s real argument is that doubt is structural rather than shameful. A brahmana named Sutikshna cannot decide whether liberation is real or whether he is being deluded, and that indecision is what sends him to Sage Agastya, which is what produces the thirty-two thousand verses that follow. Swamiji makes the same point about Arjuna: “And his doubts have been a blessing.” Without the doubt there is no Gita.
So the lesson divides doubt into three kinds and gives each a remedy. The first is a mind with one foot in each of two boats. The second is a mind that accepts liberation is possible and concludes it is not possible for you. The third is the difficult one, because it does not feel like doubt at all: a mind so turned around that it looks into a mirror and reports, with complete confidence, that it is seeing its face.
If you have never watched any of this class, this is the correct place to start. If you have watched two hundred lessons, this is the part you have never seen.
Passage index
- 00:00 — Not real, and yet you go through the trouble
- 01:00 — Invocation
- 02:16 — Valmiki, the Ramayana, and the many names of the text
- 05:35 — The six prakaranas, and why the teaching spirals
- 09:58 — Valmiki and the anthill
- 11:43 — First verse: adorations to the Self as Truth
- 14:25 — Second verse: Consciousness, and the three triads
- 19:38 — The cell phone, and the three planes of your reality
- 23:12 — Third verse: bliss, and the three urges of every soul
- 31:23 — The banyan tree and the invariable is
- 34:08 — Sutikshna, and the three kinds of doubt
- 46:20 — Sutikshna approaches Sage Agastya
Who wrote it, and what it is called
The author is Sage Valmiki, who wrote the Ramayana first. Swamiji spends a moment on the name Rama before moving on, hearing it inside Manorama, inside panorama, inside Ramadan, even inside Rome, and quoting the Hindi line that every pore is filled with Rama. He then stops himself, notes that Rama is the source of all mantras, and says he will not go in that direction.
Having written the Ramayana, Valmiki composed this. It travels under several names, and Swamiji gives them all: Yoga Vasistha, the yoga teachings given by Sage Vasistha; Maharamayana, the great Ramayana; Uttara Ramayana, because uttara refers to the concluding stage; and Jnana Vasistha. The name Vasistha itself, he notes, means the best, the greatest, the climax of wisdom.
It runs to roughly thirty-two thousand verses across six volumes, each with Sanskrit original and Hindi text, each one heavy enough that Swamiji remarks it takes some strength to carry them. He offers the arithmetic and then withdraws it: “If you hear only one verse a day, you need to live for 32,000 days.” A beat later: “I’m joking.”
Six volumes, built as a spiral
Swamiji walks all six sections in about four minutes, and the walk is worth having.
Vairagya Prakarana deals with dispassion, and he frames it as a question rather than a renunciation: why should you ignore a world that gives you so many things? The answer is that returning into the cycle again and again is a failure in the mission of the soul. Mumukshu Vyavahara Prakarana describes the one who has developed real aspiration. Utpatti Prakarana gives the origin of the world process. Sthiti Prakarana asks what sustains it. Upasama Prakarana is the quiescence of the mind, where the mind begins to melt. Nirvana Prakarana is the climax.
Then the structural point, which is easy to miss and shapes everything after it. The teaching is not a straight line. It is a set of interlocking spirals. You ascend into the highest knowledge, and then the whole process is described again. Swamiji reaches for the old Indian temples: you walk the entire circuit, you see every side, and without your knowing it you have stepped into a second spiral, and then a third, and only then do you arrive at the shrine.
This matters practically. A reader who expects the text to build in one direction and finish will experience the repetitions as redundancy. They are not redundancy. They are the architecture.
Valmiki and the anthill
A short aside, but a characteristic one. The word valmika means anthill, and Swamiji lines it up with two others: the Mandukya Upanishad from manduka, frog, and the Taittiriya from tittiri, a small bird. “The biggest of scriptures come from little creatures, you see.”
He then reads the anthill allegorically rather than biographically. To be eaten by termites is a picture of the state a soul is in while trapped in the world. Valmiki emerging from the anthill is not a legend about one man; it is a description of every enlightened soul.
The three verses: sat, chit, ananda
Vairagya Prakarana opens with three invocatory verses, and Swamiji takes them one at a time because they are not decorative. Each addresses one face of the same reality.
The first offers adorations to the Self in the form of the Absolute Truth: by the light of the Self all beings shine, in whom all beings exist, unto whom all beings go to find supreme rest. He glosses it with the sun. Every illumination that comes from the sun belongs to the realm of maya, and every evolving soul lives inside that realm, enjoying radiations that differ by place and hour and cloud. Millions of suns are pictured; behind them all there is one. “Satyameva Jayate. Truth alone triumphs.”
The second offers adorations to the Self in the form of Consciousness. The third offers adorations to the Self as the bliss of Brahman, described as an ocean from which droplets spray, so that wherever you see joy at all, in gods, humans, animals, birds, the source of that joy is the bliss of the Self. Sat, chit, ananda, in three verses.
The triads, and the cell phone
The second verse carries the lecture’s densest teaching. It names three triads, and Swamiji runs each one through the example of a dream.
Knower, known, knowledge. In a dream you are the subject, and the subject of the dream is not real. But, as he puts it, who cares? It is not real and you will go through the troubles of it until you wake. Seer, seen, sight. Doer, action, and the residue of action that keeps you inside karmic movement. Behind all three triads, one consciousness, in the way that the sun stands behind everything happening on the earth without participating in any of it.
Then the modern image, and it is the best thing in the lecture. Your cell phone brings you the whole world. Everything you want arrives through it, shaped by your own reality and your own karma, and none of it disturbs the energy flowing through the device. The energy knows nothing about any of it. At the level of energy, all the phones and all their contents are maya; the energy is the reality.
Bhur, bhuvar, svar
The three lokas are usually heard as places: earth, then the space between earth and sky, then the milky ways beyond. Swamiji says the simple point eludes people. They are three planes of your own reality.
Bhurloka is practical reality, what arrives through the mind and senses. Bhuvarloka is what your reality becomes when you turn attention to your feelings, which is a different world with different laws. Svarloka is the plane of understanding, called mati, the highest thing in any individual. Understanding itself has two levels: the kind that lets you grow and progress, and the intuitional revelation of the Self that is its climax.
And all three, he says, are radiations from pure consciousness. Illusory radiations. Just as in a dream, where nothing is real and you go through the trouble anyway.
Two descriptions, and one banyan tree
Brahman gets described two ways. Svarupa lakshana is the essential nature: existence, knowledge, bliss, absolute. Tatastha lakshana is the set of characteristics you reach for from outside, through a limited mind. Swamiji gives the riverbank. Sitting on the bank, watching and describing the river, is tatastha. “You are in the river. You don’t have to describe what’s happening.”
Then the banyan tree, which is the clearest thing in the lecture. There is a big banyan in front of your house and you show it to guests. A hurricane breaks it into limbs. A carpenter turns the limbs into tables and chairs. Time brings termites. At every stage you say the tree is, the branches are, the furniture is. The variables keep changing and the is does not: “Still, the ‘is’ doesn’t go away. But variables continue to change.”
That invariable is present in everything you perceive, and Swamiji turns it inward without ceremony: behind your pain, behind your sorrow, behind your joy, behind your gain and your loss, there is that absolute is. That is sat. It is realized through intuitional knowledge rather than intellectual knowledge, and your senses, mind and intellect are instruments that can be pointed either at that or at enjoyment.
Three kinds of doubt
Once upon a time there was a brahmana, Sutikshna, whose mind became overcome with doubts. A doubting mind is ordinarily not considered good. But for an aspirant, Swamiji says, the questioning has to develop: is this real, or am I being deluded, and what is the goal of life? Today, he notes, Google offers a great many goals.
Samshaya is the mind swinging between two options. The old simile is two boats and a river you must cross. Believing yourself clever, you sit in one and study the other, decide the other is better, and end with a foot in each. Nothing is accomplished. Applied spiritually it becomes: is Shiva the right chosen deity or Rama, are the Shaivites right or the Ramaites, is there really liberation, and what would it look like. The remedy is to take the doubt to someone with authority in the subject.
Asambhavana is different. You have heard about the scriptures, the law of karma, the millions of incarnations, and that liberation is the goal, and you conclude that it is impossible for you in this life. The error, Swamiji says, is arithmetic performed without grace in it. You are not bringing the power of being related to God into your calculation, so the sum comes out impossible.
Viparita bhavana is the mind blinded to reality, and the illustration is the one nobody forgets. You look in a mirror. Asked what you see, you say you see your face. “Think again, you are lying. You are seeing the mirror.” Pure consciousness is the first stage of awareness, and everything you experience through mind and senses reflects in it. Those reflections are vrittis, and they shine so brightly that they become your reality while the reality itself eludes you. The cinema version: “The reality is the screen.” The screen eludes your grasp, you go on chewing popcorn, and the show takes over until you are weeping and arguing with people who are not there.
The four remedies
Each doubt has its cure, and they run in order.
Shravana, listening, removes samshaya: the more you hear the teaching, in satsanga, the less the mind swings. Manana is assimilation, and Swamiji is blunt that theory stuck in the mind without practice is worth little: “An ounce of practice is better than tons of theory.” Nididhyasana is the movement away from illusion, when you begin to see that all of it is vritti-based and ask “Where is the screen?” — and then understand that the vritti-based reality is nothing but the screen. It completes itself in sakshatkara, direct revelation, where the projections are withdrawn and the cinema has ended. “brahma satyam jagan mithyā—that’s the ultimate goal.”
Where lesson one stops
The lecture ends exactly where the scripture starts moving. Sutikshna, well qualified, goes to the ashram of Sage Agastya, whom Swamiji identifies as the Upanishadic sage who drank the ocean in three sips. People take that literally. It is the ocean of illusion, and the three sips are waking, dream and deep sleep, physical, subtle and causal. To attain that vision is to have sipped up the whole world and transcended all three.
Then the closing invocation, and the rest waits for lesson two.
Terms
- Yoga Vasistha — the scripture being opened here; roughly thirty-two thousand verses in six volumes, also called Maharamayana, Uttara Ramayana and Jnana Vasistha
- prakarana — a section or volume of the text; there are six
- vairagya — dispassion; the subject of the first volume
- sat chit ananda — existence, consciousness, bliss; the three faces addressed by the three opening verses
- maya — the realm of appearance, illustrated as everything the sunlight falls on rather than the sun
- svarupa lakshana — description of Brahman by its essential nature, from inside the river
- tatastha lakshana — description of Brahman by its characteristics, from the bank
- vritti — a modification of the mind; the reflections that take over from the reality they appear in
- samshaya — doubt as indecision, the foot in each of two boats
- asambhavana — the conclusion that liberation is real but not possible for you
- viparita bhavana — a mind so turned around it mistakes the reflection for the thing
- shravana — listening to the teaching; the remedy for samshaya
- manana — reflection and assimilation, until the teaching is lived rather than held
- nididhyasana — sustained meditation, the movement away from illusion
- sakshatkara — direct revelation; the end of the sequence
- mati — understanding, the highest faculty in an individual, the plane called svarloka
Three questions to sit with
- Which of the three doubts is actually yours, and would you have called it doubt before hearing it named?
- The banyan becomes branches, furniture, then food for termites, and the is never leaves. What in your own life have you been calling one fixed thing while it quietly changed form?
- Swamiji says an ounce of practice outweighs tons of theory. What is one thing you already understand well and have not once put into practice?
Yoga Vasistha, Vairagya Prakarana. Lecture 1 by Swami Jyotirmayananda, Yoga Research Foundation, recorded in Miami. The complete archive of Swamiji’s lectures is free to all.
This study guide is drawn from the archived teachings of Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda.