Ashtavakra:
3.1 How can you claim to be Realized—most assured of your Absolute and indestructible Self—when you still yearn for great stores of wealth?
Janaka is being put to the test. Ashtavakra drills it into his head in these passages that he’s not yet Self-Realized when the demons of wealth, greed and lust are still at large.
3.2 O’ see how greed arises when you still cling to the silver-lining found in the mother of pearls, just as much as the arousal of all illusory attachments prevent the True Self from shedding all objects of limiting perceptions.
Ashtavakra informs Janaka that his attachments to worldly ways is due to his blinding ignorance concerning their true position as being self-empty since nothing but the Self is Real.
3.3 Knowing that “I AM THAT”, why this lingering persistence in running-about like [someone] needing some-thing other?
One is complete in the Source—why run-about searching for something that is less than your Actual-Self?
3.4 Knowing that your True Self is alone magnificent—indescribably beautiful like a rare diamond—why do you not turn-about from feelings of lust and sexual satisfaction?
The demon of lust is the worst of all, keeping one captive within their own loins that are far and away removed from the freeing beauty of the Absolute.
3.5 Strange—that one who claims sagehood and Self-realizing that All is in the Unborn—should still claim a separate ownership over things.
This arises out of the disease of duality—blinded to the completeness within the Self’s domain over all and still desiring possession in the domain of separate and inadequate otherness.
3.6 It is strange how one who claims to be aware of the freedom found in Self-realization, should one still lustfully yearn after the bondage of destructive and self-draining sexual activity.
Make no mistake about it—total immersion in and obsession with all things sexual drains the spirit of its rightful resolve to rise above and keep the Self far and removed from such sexual addictive behavior.
3.7 Also strange to realize that even in advanced age the purported sage with Right Knowledge, should still fall victim to such slithering sexual snares, even as death itself advances.
Age is no guarantee for wisdom; even the advanced aged can remain transfixed and possessed by such sensually sexual demons.
3.8 Strange to know how one who claims to be unattached to the affairs of this world or the next, should still fear being emancipated from such matters.
Freedom is one at a cost—never again fearing those things that prevent one from true emancipation. This includes the fear of being set-free itself. (To finally having to let-go of all those attachments that prevent freedom from occurring).
3.9 The celebrated Selfhood forever wins satisfaction in being absolved from tormenting fears of the mind and even from thoughts of self-gratification.
The Self is far and away removed from the terrors of the mind and all that brings false fulfilment.
3.10 The highly-spirited one observes all actions being those of someone else. What need of praise or blame?
The Self never identifies with all sense of otherness and thus self-limiting ovations.
3.11 Realizing that the created order of things is transient—what fear of even the apparent finality of death?
Neither the transience of existence nor the finality of death itself are enough to quell the Self’s acclamation—I Am solely sufficient Unto Myself.
3.12 Whom can compare with the great Mahatma who is forever content with Self Alone, who is desireless even in moments of disappointment?
The worldlings cannot give up their useless desires—even in the face of supreme disappointment. Not so the Great Soul who never experiences disappointment because he has dropped all illusory cravings.
3.13 The strong-willed one in Selfhood neither grasps nor rejects since everything is as nothing apart from the Unborn.
Only the Self Alone Is—all otherness is mere illusory superimpositions.
3.14 The one who has dropped all attachments, whether physical, mental or spiritual, knows the joys of the Liberated Mind. Neither joy nor unhappiness affects him.
One who is neither attracted nor repulsed by phenomena can be positively or negatively affected by it.
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