Background:

During my 11th, 12th I read quite a lot of books on various subjects & watched a variety of youtube channels alongside my JEE preparations (which was more of a side-project!).

It was during this time that I came across an awesome series of videos on youtube by Vivekananda Samiti. The amazing thing about these videos was they were teaching religion/philosophy but in a very logical way, similar to the way you teach physics i.e. from first principles.

Here, I’ll write about a small piece which I found interesting & which answers the question :

Who Am I?

STORY :

There was once a king : Raja Janaka, one day he was lying on the bed when the minister of state came & exclaimed : “King the enemy has attacked!” Raja Janaka woke up to his glorious surrounding in his room with his beautiful wife sitting on the other end.

He got ready & prepared his troops for the war. In the war, he was heavily defeated with almost all his men either getting killed or captured. The enemy king didn’t kill Raja Janaka but ordered him to go to exile.

Defeated & exhausted, Janaka started walking away from the kingdom, no one offered him any help as everyone was scared of the repercussions by the new king.

On reaching the boundary of his kingdom, Janaka saw poor people standing in a queue waiting for food to be served to the them.

Till the time it was Janaka’s turn to get served, the food had finished, there was only little bit of starch left & he was given that to eat. But as fate would have it, as he started eating, a bird came & splashed into his food.

Janaka fell down to the ground in a thumping manner as he was unable to believe his fate.

That’s when he woke up & realised that this was a freaking dream! Amazed at the ‘realness’ of the dream, Janaka started pondering whether his current state with all its magnificence is true or his dreaming state with all the misery is true.

Days passed & the king kept on repeating only one question — is this true or that true (‘यह सच, या वह सच’ ‘).

This got all the ministers super-worried as all the important work of the kingdom was getting stalled. Soon, this news spread throughout the kingdom & people started gossiping (in a bad/funny way) about the king’s condition.

During the same time a sage, Ashtavakra was passing through the city & since he was a sage, he knew everything! Therefore, he decided to visit Janaka & help him resolve his issue so that the normal functioning of the kingdom can resume.

He went to Janaka & told him he knew everything about his dream & his confusion. Ashtavakra told Janaka this:

Neither THIS (present state) nor THAT (dreaming state) is true, only YOU are true! (‘न यह सच, न वह सच’, बस तुम ही सच’)

GOLD!

Consider a case in which we have a gold bangle, a gold ring & a gold necklace. We can melt the bangle to form a ring, melt the ring to form a necklace & melt the necklace again to form the bangle.

Hence, neither of these states represents the REALITY. The base & all pervasive reality of all three is gold.

Gold exists in all of them but is apart from all of them, we can only see gold in one of it’s forms.The form itself is not the base reality, gold is.

HUMAN STATES

Now, let’s forget the above three cases for some time & concentrate on the three states (& mutually exhaustive) of a human:

THE WAKER : The state you are in currently (hopefully!).
THE DEEP SLEEPER : The state when you are in deep sleep & have no thought in your head.
THE DREAMER : The state you experience when you are sleeping + have thoughts in your head i.e. dreams.

Now, if one asks WHO AM I?, then we can’t say he is a waker or a sleeper or a dreamer because these three states change from one to another just like the gold example.

THEN, WHO AM I?

We define a fourth state called TURIYA (‘तुरिया’). Whenever one says that ‘I’ had this dream, ‘I’ had this experience or ‘I’ was in deep sleep, that ‘I’ is what is your true state.

YOU are the consciousness that witnesses & pervades all three states but is apart from it. So you are apart from all the miseries, happiness, sadness of the waking world, well you are just… YOU.

Who Am I? - Understanding Yourself!