Uddalaka's Yearning, and Why It Is Not Suffering

There is a moment in tonight's class where Swami Jyotirmayananda stops the text and corrects a misreading that has probably shaped your practice without your noticing.

The Yoga Vasistha has just opened the story of Sage Uddalaka, and Uddalaka is asking questions. When will my mind become calm. When will the dark night of ignorance end. When will the elephant of ego be overpowered. Read cold on the page, these sound like the cries of a man in distress, and readers have taken them that way for a long time: as evidence that the spiritual path is an anxious business, and that if you are not tormented about your lack of progress, you are not serious.

Swamiji says plainly that this is not the real teaching, and he replaces it with an image from a kitchen. A man who is healthy and strong and very hungry, standing near a kitchen where the food is already cooking, is not suffering. He can smell it. He can feel his own appetite as pleasure. His asking "when will I get the food?" is not a complaint. That, Swamiji says, is what genuine spiritual yearning is supposed to feel like.

Around that correction the lecture builds a second and harder one. Section 51 opens with the claim that even after a person has intellectually grasped the nature of the Self, supreme peace does not follow. Not yet. You can complete the syllabus, keep good health, hold a clear intellect, and still be nowhere, because knowledge that stops at the intellect simply gives the ego something new to be proud of.

What ties the two corrections together is a single diagnostic Swamiji returns to three separate times: contentment. Not happiness, which can be counted and always demands more than last time. Contentment, which cannot be counted at all. Everything else in the section, the milky ocean and the mountain cave and the elephant and the lion and the birds nesting on a still head, is allegory in the service of that one test.

The class ends without resolving anything, and that is deliberate.

Passages

The Knife That Does Not Cut the Hand

The previous section had spent itself on images of the untrained mind: a crow, a vampire, a vulture, a snake, a dark cloud, a cobra, a trapping net. It closed by prescribing the remedy, which is that one should possess a pure mind and cut down those evils by purifying it. Swamiji notes the logic: "An impure mind is overcome by a pure mind." One weapon is met by a similar weapon. The image is allegorical and he says so, but the mechanism underneath it is not.

Then he gives the practical form of the same idea, and it is the most useful thing in the opening stretch of the class. Imagine vegetables whose skins carry something poisonous. What the kitchen needs is a knife. But it needs a particular kind of knife: one that removes the skin and does not cut your fingers. Swamiji calls it a "knife that cuts down the impurities without hurting you", and then adds the phrase that gives it away: without creating tension and injury.

This is the difference between suppression and sublimation, put in a form you can actually check yourself against. Most people, told that anger is an impurity, reach for a blade that takes the finger along with the peel. They clamp down. They build a policy against themselves. The tension that produces is not purity, it is a second problem sitting on top of the first, and it tends to arrive wearing the language of discipline.

Swamiji's alternative is a sequence he gives in three words: suppress, substitute, sublimate. Notice that suppression is in the list. It is the first move, not the forbidden one, and it is also not the last. The work is to keep travelling through it toward substitution and then toward sublimation, where the energy that was going into the impurity is redirected rather than sat upon. He is explicit that this is not yet Brahma-jnana. It is the preparation that makes Brahma-jnana possible, and it starts on the first day of study rather than waiting for realization to arrive and do the cleaning.

Two Stages, and Why They Travel Together

Section 51 begins with Sage Vasistha telling Rama that even one who has intellectually grasped the nature of the Self cannot yet attain the supreme peace of liberation. Swamiji tests the claim against a person doing everything right: a studious plan of scripture, good health, a good intellect, all of it covered. Will that give supreme peace? Not yet.

He is careful not to devalue the study. That work is not wasted, he says, and it has prepared the mind to understand what its right course should be. The danger is narrower and more specific. If you lean on theoretical knowledge as your perfection, the ego takes over the personality and inflates around it. How much do I know. Swamiji's correction is one of the sharpest lines in the class: "The knowledge is not in terms of your ego's affirmation."

He then does something more generous than a simple warning. He allows that the ego can be used on the path, even used to say that you are attaining enlightenment, provided it is a sattvika ego. And he gives the test for whether it is: it radiates humility. If you are Brahman, then you radiate humility, in the same way that a mother radiates motherliness rather than announcing it. The claim is not the problem. The texture of the person making it is.

Then comes the structural point. There are two stages, intellectual grasp and intuitional realization, and the text presents them in sequence. But Swamiji says that while you are practising, "there are two stages, intellectual grasp and then going into intuitional realization" stops being a sequence and becomes a pair that moves together. You do not sit back having learned that anger is bad and go on being angry while waiting for jnana to arrive and fix it. The purification begins during the study. The final blossoming waits on something else: a mind freed of distraction and an intellect converted into intuitive vision through unobstructed meditation.

Happiness You Can Count

The mind grows extensive, the text says, through its attachments to the objects of this world and of the heavenly world. Swamiji takes both halves seriously and treats the second with unusual patience. The concept of svarga, of an astral plane where enjoyment continues according to your own idea of it, is not dismissed. It is followed to its conclusion. In heaven there is a milky ocean and no fear of calories, because you have no physical body. Then the good karma that bought the stay runs out and you return, remembering none of it, chasing the same small things under the same illusion, having learned nothing.

As long as the mind is gripped by those two desires, Swamiji says, the mind is sick. What makes it well is turning toward moksha, and understanding that real happiness is the kind that brings contentment rather than craving.

Then he makes the argument that gives the class its spine. Worldly happiness creates a thrill when it arrives, and the thrill goes into your notes and your photographs, and then you are already asking how to get more. Craving increases. The reason is that you have been treating happiness as a quantity: "Sāttvika happiness you can't imagine. Worldly happiness you can count." If last Christmas produced ten percent, this Christmas needs twenty, and why not a hundred.

But happiness is not quantitative. "Happiness is a revelation of your essential nature." Swamiji reaches for the sun to make it land. Sunlight is quantitative and can be measured: more here, less there, reflected differently in different places. The sun itself is not. It has no desire to be illumined and does not count how much light it has given away. In the same way the inner Self is the light of lights, the embodiment of happiness, absolute bliss, and until that revelation comes, every step toward it releases some of the pressure of craving.

Which yields the diagnostic. "Contentment becomes a pointer, an indicator of your moving towards real happiness." Not the intensity of the thrill. What is left after it.

The Yearning That Is Not Suffering

Uddalaka's questions arrive in a run, and each is a picture. When will my mind, having gone beyond all agitations, become like the calm milky ocean sanctified by the presence of spiritual wisdom. When will the dark night of ignorance end, the night that has harboured the owls of worldly desires and brought the frost of dullness onto the lotus of the heart. When will the elephant of ego be overpowered by the lion of intuitional vision.

Swamiji stops and names the misreading directly. When you read it, he says, it seems like you have to be always restless: beat your head, become exceedingly concerned about why liberation has not come. Sounds like that. But that is not the real teaching.

The correction is the kitchen. A man who is very healthy and very strong and very hungry, who can digest anything and is keen in taste, stands near a kitchen where food is being prepared. His heart says when will I get the food. And during that same waiting he is smelling the fragrance, anticipating the digestion, holding a flavourable satisfaction. Swamiji's summary is exact: "Even though it appears like you're very hungry, you are suffering, you're not suffering. You are enjoying."

So the aspirant who is keenly involved in the question of liberation should not be read as a person keeping his mind in distress. Worry, negativity, sadness: if you do that, Swamiji says, you are going the other way around, and you are not really moving toward the goal. Genuine keen interest produces the opposite. It gives a higher level of spiritual health and spiritual appetite, and "That intense yearning is accompanied by intense joy."

The same correction lands on vairagya a few minutes later, because vairagya suffers from the identical misunderstanding. People put on a sad face. Swamiji jokes about not having laughed for whole months in the name of practice, and says flatly that this is not vairagya and that it injures your health besides. What vairagya actually is: "Vairāgya is your being in a position to understand the things people are running after." They are childish games. A grown adult can watch children play, can join in and be entertained, and still "you don't fall for what they are running after." The freedom is internal, and it is not solemn.

Four Allegories for One Interior

The back half of the section is dense with images, and Swamiji reads all of them as descriptions of a single interior rather than as cosmology.

The churning of the ocean is the first. Gods on one side, demons on the other, the serpent Shesha as the rope, the poison drawn off by Shiva, and what remains is a milky ocean so faultless that Vishnu makes it his resting place. Swamiji's reading: through meditation you begin to churn your own mind, and what you are after is that pure sattvic state in which God is master of the energies moving through you. The serpent that caused all the trouble ends up as the couch supporting the head.

The cave of the mountains is the second, and it is the one most often taken literally. Swamiji dismantles that briskly, pointing out that a person who actually goes to a cave and adopts a posture they must not move from will not survive three or four days. The cave is the heart, illumined, free of anger and hate and greed, with divine bhavana entering it. And then the line that makes it portable: "The world may be noisy, but it doesn't reach your cave." No matter where you are, you are in the cave of the mountains, and to experience that is the same as practising nirvikalpa samadhi.

The elephant and the lion is the third. Ego here is a wild elephant, trumpeting, intoxicated by the strange fluid running near its forehead, and Swamiji hears its voice in the human version: I will do this, I am this great person. "The sound of ego is vain, egoistic." A whole herd of elephants shrinks when one vigorous lion roars. The lion is the intuition-illumined mind, and the shrinking is progressive rather than sudden, arriving as clearer thinking that stops carrying the burden of how much has been done and how much will be.

The fourth is the strangest and the most corrective. When will the birds of the forest build their nests on my head while I am immersed in nirvikalpa samadhi. Swamiji uses it to attack the picture people carry of realization as a desert: "Don't view Nirvikalpa Samadhi as a desolate place." The Yoga Vasistha gives the opposite image. Forest birds come to the head, and the forest becomes joyous because of them. The sound they make is kalarava, and behind that sound is divine presence.

He connects it to the thousand-petalled lotus, and then declines the usual nectar image in favour of a better one: melody dripping down from the petals. "The forest of your mind is rejoicing." Spiritual attainment is not a person gone stiff and aloof. "His mind is filled with melody."

A Class That Refuses to Resolve

The last stretch is the most honest part of the section, and Swamiji lets it stay uncomfortable.

Uddalaka's practice is described exactly as practice actually goes. Sometimes he experiences the joyous state of sattva. Other times rajasic distraction scatters him. Often an effulgent sun rises within the firmament of his heart, and then he finds himself sunk in darkness. Having renounced external and internal contacts, his mind settles into a state between the darkness of ignorance and the light of the Self, and there it lingers in inertia.

Swamiji reads this as the normal terrain rather than as failure, and he attaches a practical refusal to it: there is no simple law that a set number of mantras produces success. You may barely finish and get it. You may go on and on and not. What you are doing is not wasted either way: "But what you are doing is not in vain, you're preparing your way." The variable is the obstacles already in your own personality, which is to say karma, and some attainments are simply easier than others on that account. "So don't despair, no matter how things are."

Then he sets the whole struggle against something that is not struggling. The inner Self is not controlled by your karma. You come closest to it in deep sleep, when the world moves away and you are looking for neither pleasure nor pain: "Neither bhoga nor roga". Whatever is happening in the world and in yourself, "The inner reality is like the sky, untouched."

And then the section stops, mid-effort. Like a tree uprooted by a storm and shaken by the waves of the ocean, Uddalaka's mind continues to be affected by the storms of distraction and the waves of craving. His sadhana continues, Swamiji says, and we will continue.

That is the whole teaching in its posture. The man asking the questions has not arrived. The asking, done rightly, is already the thing.

Terms

Upasama Prakarana — the section of the Yoga Vasistha on quiescence, the settling of the mind
Vairagya — dispassion; seeing clearly what others are chasing, not a joyless face
Nirvikalpa samadhi — absorption without alternatives, the mind no longer weighing this against that
Brahma-jnana — knowledge of Brahman; realization as distinct from intellectual grasp
Sattva — the pure, luminous quality of mind, figured here as the milky ocean
Sattvika — possessing that quality; used of an ego that radiates humility rather than claim
Moksha — liberation, the mind's turning point away from worldly and celestial appetite
Svarga — the heavenly plane where good karma is spent and after which one returns
Bhoga — enjoyment, appetite for experience; paired here with roga, disease
Bhavasagara — the ocean of the world process, infested with the creatures of craving
Kalarava — the sound of forest birds, heard as an expression of divine presence
Sadhana — sustained spiritual practice, which in this section is explicitly unfinished

To sit with

When something good arrives, do you find yourself calculating the next one, or does it leave you settled?
Have you been treating a lack of progress as evidence to be anxious about rather than an appetite to enjoy?
Which of your impurities have you been suppressing with a blade that also cuts your hand?

Yoga Vasistha, Upasama Prakarana, Section 51. Lecture 191 by Swami Jyotirmayananda, Yoga Research Foundation, Miami.

The complete archive of Swami Jyotirmayananda's teachings is free at yogaresearchfoundation.org.

This study guide is drawn from the archived teachings of Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda.