Non-duality: the Song of Ashtavakra
What I am calling “radical meditation” rests on the basis there is no self – that the “I” that we think we are, just does not exist. There is no-one doing our lives. But we think to ourselves “Of course ‘I’ exist.” And we dismiss it all as too remote and too niche; as esoteric and religious; as “contrary to science”; as a mad, bad idea dangerous to mental health; or simply does-not-compute.
So if you are a newcomer to meditation, then all I want to offer here is the notion that:
- Yes, there really is something to radical meditation that you really don’t understand yet, and
- It is really is something that is not presented in Westernised neo-mindfulness, and
- It’s totally OK that you don’t understand it but keep an open mind
- If you explore radical meditation, then you will by and by find your own understanding via your own lived experiences, not via verbal explanations.
- Maybe, just maybe, that missing something you don’t yet understand is of very great value indeed.
You can’t understand something new until you have physical life experience to relate it to. And you don’t search out those life experiences experiences until you know there is something new and different to explore.
But I’m not going to try to explain what the unknown thing is for the excellent reason that I can’t: I don’t know myself. Instead I’m going to play a kind of a joke, and invite you to read one of the most incomprehensible scriptures in existence, the Ashtavakra Gita, via the link below. And to think to yourself: could this amazing nonsense really be the nature of reality and the key to the most profound transformation? Sometimes it’s better to be confronted by everything all at once.
Though fear not, I’ll also cite a really good modern commentary on Ashtavakra which is easy to understand for Westerners.
A completely different reason for this post is, I just love the little gem of a book I am going to present. Called the Ashtavakra Gita, the Song of Ashtavakra, it’s short, nine pages. Yet when I hold it, I feel I am holding a special jewel. When I read the words I want to weep with joy. Perhaps it is a past-life connection; perhaps long ago I met Ashtavakra; who can say. In any case, this short work is the most radical introduction to radical meditation. To avoid doubt, I do not have the experiences that Ashtavakra is talking about, and without lived experience, verbal comprehension is mere philosophy and void and vacuuous. But I’ve enough stepping-stone experiences to trust that the path and the destination really exist.
Ashtavakra lived at the time of the Mahabarata. Depending on who you ask, this was any time from a few hundred years before Gautam Buddha [who himself lived around 500 BCE] to several thousand years before. Ancient sources describe him as born with eight deformities, conjecturally from childhood polio. “Ashta” is cognate with “octa” meaning “eight”, and his name means “eight bends.”
My other reason to present the Ashtavakra Gita is that times change, and in the world of meditation we can learn from the past without being bound by the past. Buddhism was a development, an expansion, a reform, a quantum step beyond, the worldviews of the Ashtavakra Gita and many other varied ancient Indian thinkers. We should not be afraid of the idea that after two and a half thousand years, the modern world can in turn improve on Buddhism.
Another lovely thing is, the Song of Ashtavakra is blessedly short! With Buddha’s teachings one is, dare I say, swamped in 40 years of Buddha’s own words and the verbiage of millennia of commentaries. With Ashatavakra, you possibly can’t understand a single word he says. But at least the words he is saying can be plainly seen.
That’s all I have to say. The next step is that I invite you to read at least a little of the original. You can find the full text of the Song of Ashtavakra (the Ashtavakra Gita) here at John Richards labour-of-love translation. For a modern explanation aimed at Western readers, I suggest Discourses on the Great Mystic Ashtavakra: Enlightenment The Only Revolution by Osho. This is the helpful commentary I mentioned earlier. It’s a purchase item, but I recommend it.