10.1
Ashtavakra said:
Forsaking as an enemy
all wish and want for object things,
you must give up the narrowness
of petty, personal desire.
So also, you must give up wealth
whose store of wanted objects comes
inevitably mixed with loss.
And you will even have to go
beyond all valued principles
that cause our sense of gain or loss
and drive our personal desires.
It’s in this way that you transcend
desire, wealth, morality.
Thus you attain to your own self,
disinterested everywhere.
10.2
See wealth and property and gifts
and even friends and family
and other such good fortune as
entanglements of fantasy,
within a show that’s made by mind.
This made-up show can never last:
as mind keeps changing, all the time.
10.3
Wherever there may be desire,
there is also found a world,
made up of restless happenings
that change and pass in course of
time.
You need to know this for yourself.
Attaining to mature dispassion,
may you find that you are free
from want for objects of desire
wished by thought in restless mind.
For, in that freedom, you have come
to lasting peace and happiness.
10.4
It’s only of the mind’s desire
that all our bondage has been made.
Thus ‘freedom’ is a word that’s used
where wish and want are found
destroyed.
It’s only by detachment from
the world of change and happening
that anyone may come to joy
which somehow lasts, repeatedly,
through changing moments in our
minds.
10.5
You are the one, pure consciousness –
found always indivisible.
The world that’s seen is found inert.
It is dead matter – lacking life –
a show of blind unconsciousness
that is accordingly unreal.
This is not even ignorance.
But then, for you, what can there be
that you may somehow wish to know?
What meaning is there in this wish
that you would somehow like to know?
What’s true and real in the world,
shown made of objects seen outside?
10.6
So many kingdoms, sons and wives,
and bodies, pleasures have been lost
–
destroyed for you – although you were
attached to them, birth after birth.
10.7
Enough of riches or desires,
or even actions rightly done.
By these, mind does not come to
peace,
here in the jungle of the world.
10.8
How many births have you not done,
with body and with mind and speech,
this laboured work that brings you
grief.
It’s these encumbered acts of work
that, here and now, you need to
cease.