Yajnavalkya Kanda. Adhyaya 4, Brahmana 3. The self-luminous Self: waking, dream, and the light of man
New to these pages?
Each mantra is given four ways: the Sanskrit in its Devanagari script, the same sounds in Roman letters, an English translation set in our own voice, and then the line once more in plain words, for a first and unhurried reading.
Not every passage is opened to the same depth. A few central mantras carry the full cross-school commentary, where the schools are set side by side. The rest are kept here whole and faithful, set in their place but not expounded, so the book stays entire and nothing is dropped for being thought minor.
Where the schools read a line differently, the difference is kept open. None is crowned and none is corrected. Each is met on its own terms, and where they contradict, the contradiction is left standing for you to sit with.
I alone am all this
Now these channels of his, called hita, are as fine as a hair split a thousandfold, and they stand filled with white, blue, brown, green, and red. Now when they seem to strike him, to overpower him, when an elephant seems to crush him, when he seems to fall into a pit, he is imagining through ignorance the very fear he sees while awake. But when, like a god, like a king, he thinks, "I alone am all this," that is his highest world.
In the body run subtle channels called hita, each as fine as a hair divided into a thousand strands, filled with fluids of white, blue, brown, green, and red; these hold the impressions that feed dream. When in dream he seems to be attacked, overwhelmed, trampled by an elephant, or falling into a pit, he is only conjuring, through ignorance (avidya), the same fears he met while awake. But when, like a god or a king, he feels "I alone am all this," that fearless state is his highest world.
In the commentaries
Sankara distinguishes two sides of these states: the terrifying dream-figures are projections of ignorance and so are unreal, while the deep-sleep sense "I alone am all this" approaches the self's true, fearless nature; the contrast shows that bondage is born of avidya and that the highest world is the self's own undivided being.