As we near the end of 2024, all of us will probably reminiscence over the year gone by. Of people we have met, things we have done, places we have been. In that sense, my story is not very different. It is just that I am no longer content only asking the question “Who am I” and would like to now move on to “Why am I here”? How will my being here help me understand “Who am I?”

Our personal stories, spectacular as they might seem, are nowhere near as gripping as what unfolds when gurus enter into our lives and the Goddess shakes one up to get up and be. As one searches for answers, one starts observing synchronicity, magical meetings, and mysterious signposts. And so I opened the course I had signed up for a year ago on the Yogavāsiṣṭha, an ancient text which records how Shri Rama attains self-realization. Once read by every child and adult alike, today it is another book from the past falling into the minds and hands only of a lucky few.

What the Gita is to Arjuna, the Yogavāsiṣṭha is to Shri Rama. Young and dispirited, a worried Dasharatha asks Vasishta to answer his son’s restlessness. The same disquiet and deep longing one feels when one wants answers and union. The dialogue was recorded by Rishi Valmiki, who later tells us about how this very same distressed young boy, becomes a Jagadanandakaraka.

Acharya Sthaneshwar Timalsina, revered guru and intellectual of our sastras, says our philosophy has not just been one of intellectualism, it is a guide to action, to finding our truth. In his lectures on this text, he says “In the Hindu tradition, we have Śruti, e.g. the Vedas, the Smṛti, and the Purāṇas. Traditionally speaking, Yogavāsiṣṭha has a status of a Smṛti, which means memory. So this book should be about memory. But if you start the book, even the first chapter of discussion starts with forgetting. The book is also called the Mahā Rāmāyaṇa. This is the story of Rāma.”

If Sri Rama could forget that he was an Avatra, what of the rest of us. Over 22 days, Vāsiṣṭha answers Rama’s questions with stories, and story after story after story, is about the mind, the throw of imagination, the consequences, and finally a realisation.

As a writer who struggles with ideas and form, it is like entering a masterclass of the highest order. Simile follows simile and one understands by comparison. For, the text says, any description of the true splendor of creation and divinity, surely cannot compare even remotely to the real thing.

As I look back on the last few months, of the visits to Shakti peethas, the meetings with Tantrics, the almost but not quite touching of the star dust, I think oft that it must be a dream. Not unlike when Vasishta tells Rama, “To the clear mind this world appears like a fleeting dream…”

He tells Rama, “Know, o son of Raghu’s race, that this world is a display of the vast kingdom of your imagination. It will vanish into nothing when come to good understanding by the grace of your God. Then you will see the whole clearly as the light of the rising sun, and you will know this world is like a creation of your dream.”

All of Yogavāsiṣṭha is about stories within stories, and each illustrating the journey of our consciousness, its experiences and the strands of continuity over births. The people who seem familiar, the places that seem our own, the recurring patterns of our lives, our obsessions, all a shadow cast from events gone before.

One of my favourite stories is the one of a nurse telling a young boy about three princes, two of them were not created and the third was not born. They travel far and come upon three trees, two of which had not grown by themselves and the third which bore no seeds. They travel further and come upon three rivers, out of which one had dried up and two barely had any water in them. And it goes on. The nurse tells the boy that this is a story of fabrication of the mind by imaginary beings. And Vasishta tells Rama, “Repress the thickening phantoms of your fleeting fancy and obtain your tranquillity by a reliance on the certainty of the immutable soul of souls.”

Just an awareness of the falsity is not enough, sadly. In the text Avidya is equated with Ajnana. The soul, it says, has to go through 7 stages or bhumikas –bija jagrat, jagrat, maha jagrat, jagrat svapna, svapna, svapna jagrat and sushyuptaka. Each of these stages has about 100 sub-stages, each ready to trip you into thinking you have arrived.

As we swing from a non-existent past to a non-existent future, there is only the here and now to be relied upon.