The Question That Cannot Be Answered

The Question That Cannot Be Answered

Aṣṭāvakra, Janaka, Ramana, and the Last Person Left Aṣṭāvakra, Janaka, Ramana, and the Last Person Left in the Room in the Room

Sasidhar Valluru TheValluru.org THE INWARD MIRROR SERIESThe Question That Cannot Be AnsweredAṣṭāvakra, Janaka, Ramana, and the Last Person Left in the RoomSasidhar Valluru BOOKLET 1

Author's Note

The Inward Mirror SeriesFirst edition

This work is presented as a contemplative literary booklet. Author’s Note

This is not presented as a literal English translation of the Aṣṭāvakra Gītā. Aṣṭāvakra is far more compressed than I am. He can dismantle an entire spiritual career in two verses and move on. I need more words, possibly because I am slower, possibly because modern minds need someone to hold the flashlight while the furniture is being removed.

The dialogues and modern examples are interpretive. The philosophical blade belongs to the tradition; the office jokes, software metaphors, and occasional exasperation belong to me. Where I infer rather than quote, I say so. Pretending inference is śāstra would not make the booklet more sacred. It would merely make it less honest.

1. Wait for the Next Thought

2. Who Appointed the Thought Police?

3. The Witness Gets a Promotion4. Aṣṭāvakra Does Not Improve Janaka5. The Seeker Is the Final Desire6. ‘Aham Brahmāsmi’ Is Not a Hero Dialogue7. Janaka Still Returns to Court8. Ramana’s Question Has No Decorative AnswerThe GistEpilogue

Opening

I began with the ordinary question: what am I here for? Should I write, build, teach, lead, study, serve, or simply live? All reasonable questions. Then another question arose: who is asking? ‘Sasi’ is a convenient answer, but convenience is not verification.

The résumé begins. Name, body, age, parents, profession, history, relationships, memories, capabilities, grief, failure, success. Fine. Suppose the job disappears. Am I still I? Suppose the body changes, as it has been doing without consulting me. Still I? Suppose memory weakens. Something continues to say ‘I’ even while its biography is being renovated.

The purpose question had become identity verification. Unfortunately there was no Aadhaar desk for Ātman. Aṣṭāvakra’s intervention is not to supply a more impressive identity. It is to ask whether the claimant can be found at all.

Chapter 1

Wait for the Next Thought

Sit quietly and wait for the next thought. Do not choose a spiritual thought; any thought will do. Hunger. An old insult. An unpaid bill. Śiva. The sudden recollection that an email was not answered. Did you select the exact thought before it appeared? Usually not. Then why do we say, with such confidence, ‘I thought it’ instead of the more modest ‘a thought happened’?

Now try to think of nothing. Congratulations: ‘I shall think of nothing’ is another thought. Then comes ‘this is not working,’ followed by ‘I am observing my thoughts.’ The ego has survived the restructuring and found a management position. The exercise is not meant to produce blankness. It is meant to loosen the reflex by which every mental event is stamped MINE before it has even cleared customs.

Notice how quickly language reveals the habit. We say my mind as casually as my phone, then forget that the two claims are not equivalent. The phone can be placed on a table and inspected by everyone. The mind is known only as changing experience. Inquiry begins when grammar is no longer allowed to settle ontology. ‘My’ is a useful word; it is not a deed of ownership registered with the universe.

Chapter 2

Who Appointed the Thought Police?

A disturbing thought appears. A second thought says the first one is wrong and must be removed. Why is the second thought considered more ‘you’ than the first? Because it sounds respectable? Because it has read Vedānta? Because it wears vibhūti and speaks in a calmer tone? Both appeared. Neither submitted a purchase order.

This does not remove moral responsibility. A thought arising is not the same as an action being authorized. The practical instrument must discriminate. But Aṣṭāvakra asks us to notice the extra fiction: a tiny sovereign seated inside the skull, manufacturing every mental event and then heroically controlling it. Before disciplining the mind, identify the controller. Do not assume the answer. Find him.

Discrimination therefore has two levels. At the practical level, choose which thoughts receive speech and action. At the deeper level, do not manufacture a permanent sinner or saint out of what appeared. This creates neither permissiveness nor shame. It creates room. Responsibility becomes more exact because it is no longer mixed with the melodrama of an owner defending a spotless self-image.

Chapter 3

The Witness Gets a Promotion

The clever answer arrives: I am not my thoughts; I am the witness. Excellent. Now we have a spiritual identity. Very sophisticated. Very printable on a T-shirt. Thoughts, feelings, sensations, memory, fear, and the sense of being a person are witnessed. Then notice the thought ‘I am witnessing.’ That too appears in awareness.

If we manufacture another witness behind it, we can continue forever: witness behind witness behind witness, like badly nested software containers. Awareness is not a hidden object standing behind visible objects. It is the condition in which the division between subject and object appears. Language begins to fail here. That failure is not a defect. It is language finally admitting that it cannot put the sky inside a suitcase.

There is a reason the witness teaching is so powerful: it gives immediate distance from mental weather. Use that distance. But then notice the comfort of standing apart as the pure observer while the messy world remains over there. Nonduality does not create an immaculate balcony for a spiritual spectator. It questions the balcony, the spectator, and the distance together.