What you experience (see) is you yourself.

You can’t experience anything outside your own consciousness. you still need to improve your life through meditation etc.ĭetachment but the entire universe is arising in you, you’re not apart of that. 'I need to be more spiritual through prayer, meditation, good deeds, being selfless, and kind.' Or 'I'll get rid of things that I think are bad for me: restlessness.'Īshtavakra tells you that you are already pure and perfect.ĭon’t misunderstand that. We always try to improve ourselves by adding or subtracting something from ourselves. It’s not for thinking about because it’s beyond mind. You are the Pure Existence (~ Tat Tvam Asi ~ ). The Ashtavakra Gita talks to us directly, to our hearts. Self-realization is yoga or 'oneness' with truth - the direct perception or experience of truthīy the all-knowing intuitive faculty of the soul. That we are just as much a part of Him now as we ever will be.Īll we have to do is improve our knowing.' That we are not merely near it at all times,īut that God's omnipresence is our omnipresence That we do not have to pray that it come to us, That we are one with the omnipresence of God The goal of every word in the Ashtavakra Gita is to trigger Self-realization. The Ashtavakra Gita is an ancient spiritual document of great purity and power. The body is nothing, the Self is everything. The moral here is that even the ugliest form is filled with God's radiance. His name literally means ' eight bends', indicating the eight physical handicaps he was born with. Very little is definitely known about Ashtavakra. The Ashtavakra Gita elucidates the meaning of the Supreme Reality, Brahman, the self and Atman (Self, soul) and Maya ('an illusion where things appear to be present but are not what they seem'). It is written as a dialogue between King Janaka, the father of Sita, and his guru, Ashtavakra. Though some claim it was written later, either in the eighth century by a follower of Shankara, or as late as the fourteenth century during a resurgence of Shankara's teaching. It was composed before the common era, most likely between 500-400BC. The Ashtavakra Gita is a short treatise ascribed to the great sage Ashtavakra. The text is an instruction for achieving the self-realization and Oneness.

Ashtavakra Gita by Harsha Yardi