20.1
Where are the five world elements,
where are the senses, where the mind?
Where blank and empty nothingness,
where hopelessness of dark despair?
No trace of them is ever present
in my own true nature, found
uncompromised by any taint
of world or personality.
20.2
What are the scriptures, and their
many
schools of analytic thought?
What is discernment of
self-knowledge?
What then mind bereft of objects?
What contentment is thus found,
in freedom from desiring?
Now that I’ve lost all sense of
opposites, what can these be to me?
20.3
What is true knowledge, and what
ignorance? What this called ‘I’ or
‘mine’?
What then is bondage, and from it
what liberation can be found?
Of my true nature, what one form
defines it in particular,
so that it’s rightly recognized?
20.4
What are these chains of causal
action
found to carry on from past,
through present, into future times?
And how can anyone be free
at heart, while yet found living in
this driven personality?
What meaning can there be in freedom
which is thought to be attained
by body’s death, into a state
where personality and all
its acts (of sensing, thinking,
feeling,
speaking) seem to be destroyed?
For one who knows no differences,
knows nothing in particular,
how can we rightly understand
that such a one has now attained
to an undying state of life
where peace shines positively free?
20.5
Where is there any doer? Where is
some personal enjoyer found
engaged in doing anything?
Where is there any ceasing of
activity? If ceasing thus,
where does activity subside?
How does it keep on sparkling out,
how found to rise in seeming show?
What is immediate knowing? What
to me are its results – from where
I’m always found to stand,
unchanged and utterly impersonal?
20.6
What is the world? Where is the one
who would be free? Where is the yogi?
Where the sage who knows correctly?
Where is someone bound or freed –
to me, who in my own true nature
am beyond duality?
20.7
Where is creation issued forth,
and where retraction back to source?
Where is achievement to be found?
Where any striving to achieve?
Where is the seeker, where success –
to me, who in my own true nature
am beyond duality?
20.8
Who is the one correcting knowledge,
where the means of such correction,
what conclusion thereby reached?
And where can there be anything
or otherwise not anything,
for me who am forever pure.
20.9
What is distraction, or what
concentration? What dull apathy,
or what enraptured fantasy?
What is excitement or despair?
What can these oppositions be,
to me who’s always actionless?
20.10
What is this world of compromise
that trades for objects of desire?
What is that true reality
which stands beyond all wish and want
found driven by mind’s fancying?
What happy or unhappy state
that pulls or pushes mind can be
more than a hollow fantasy –
to me who always am devoid
of calculations in the mind
concocted by such fantasies?
20.11
Where are the world’s illusory
appearances? Where is the ebb
and flow of driven change, in which
our personalities seem caught
as they pass through this made-up
world?
Where is affection pulling us
to get involved with changing things?
Where does dislike push us away?
Where is there any living person
seen as part of larger world?
Where any great reality
in which all things of world take
part?
What can such put together show
of partial seemings be to me,
who am unchanging purity?
20.12
Where could activity be found
to bring about some change? And where
could such activity be stopped?
Where could it end, producing thus
a state of inactivity?
Just where could there be freedom
then?
Where any sense of being bound?
What could be action or inaction,
feeling bound or feeling free –
for me who stands in self alone,
forever found unlimited
by any change or difference?
20.13
Where is there any teaching taught?
Where any scriptures, schools of
thought?
Where a disciple seeking truth?
Where any teacher showing truth
beyond all personality?
Where any purpose served by living,
in the world or free of it?
What aim or meaning can there be,
for me who stands unlimited
by any dubious compromise
of good shown always mixed with bad
in personality and world?
20.14
Where is what’s taken to exist?
Just where can be what’s found
unreal?
Where is what’s one and one alone?
Just where can there be that same one
plus something else, thus making
‘two’?
What more is there to say? For me,
there truly is no rising up
of anything at all. No sense
in fact gives rise to any sight,
or sound or smell or taste or touch.
No mind gives rise to thoughts or
dreams.
No feelings in the heart give rise
to values, meanings, purposes.
There is no show apart from self.
All show is that and that alone.
Just that is all reality,
expressed throughout all show of
world
produced by personality.