Story of man with thousand arms
Sage Vasishta was explaining to Sri Rama, that the mind should be directed constantly towards liberation and a sustained self-effort is required to achieve that ultimate goal. Once the mind is freed from Vasanas (latent tendencies) it gains self-knowledge. He went on to add a profound statement that, since entire universe is within the mind, the concepts of bondage and liberation are also within it.
The sage said, “I will tell you a story the creator Brahma showed me, to explain this”.
Once there was a great forest, stretching itself into countless Yojanas (many miles). There was just one person living there .He had innumerable hands and limbs. In each hand he was carrying a curved, stout stick and this person was hitting himself with those sticks, very forcefully. He ran hither and thither, loudly wailing, not able to bear the pain. After resting and recovering he again continued to flog himself. When the pain became unbearable, he ran blindly dashing against many objects and fell headlong into an abandoned well. After a while and many sufferings later, he climbed out of the well and resumed the lashings. Once again, he reached a level beyond what he could not bear the agony anymore, ran blindly and this time he fell straight into a bush full of thorns. This continued repeatedly and in one of his mad runs he reached a pleasant banana grove. There he rested very peacefully, for a while enjoyed the delicious plantains with sweet aroma and a fragrant cool air. He cried out in delight and his mood swung to another extreme from his previous miserable states. He was restless in nature and so wandered out of the pleasant garden. Since he did not know anything beyond flogging himself, he resumed his old habit. Running in pain, once more into a thorny bush and from there to an abandoned well and once a while into the pleasant garden. This cycle went on many times.
A bewildered Sage Vasishta looked questioningly up to the creator Brahma. The Creator stopped that person by his will and asked him “Why are you doing like this and what is your intention?” , to which he angrily replied. “I have not been able to find any actions for me to perform in this world. I am quite pained by the varied differentiations you have set up in this world. You are my enemy. It is only because of you, that I have identified myself with the pains and pleasures”. Still in the grip of the creator, he started thinking and after a while slowly his face changed into a smile and then rapidly it changed to joy. With a, cry of pure ecstasy, he cast off his limbs one by one, freed himself from his body and vanished.
A little further, the Sage saw another person exactly like the earlier one, doing the same things of beating himself, weeping, wailing, blinded by pain running here and there, sometime falling into the well, sometime into the thorny bush and sometime relaxing in the banana grove. The Sage now saw more people behaving the very same way. He tried to counsel them. Some ignored him, some laughed at him, some shouted at him and only a few listened and like the first person found pure joy. Such is the nature of the great forest.
The Sage narrating the story asked Sri Rama “Did you recognize the great forest and those persons?”.
The great forest is nothing but this world and the person with thousand arms is nothing but our own mind which finds innumerable ways of punishing itself. The mind inflicts pain on itself relentlessly. The thorn bush refers to the life of worldly men with many thorns like family, wealth, greed, jealousy etc. The abandoned well inflicting agony and misery is Naraka (Hell) and the plantain grove with sweet aroma and delicious fruits is Swarga (Heaven). Some people are irresistibly drawn towards the thorn bush. Some are repeatedly drawn towards flogging themselves. Even when the light of wisdom shines on their deluded minds they reject it and mock it. However, the wisdom born of Self-Enquiry ends the relentless cycles of birth. Once wisdom dawns, the latent tendencies drop off one by one, just like the person’s limbs and he gets liberated, indicated by the cry of ecstasy. An uncontrolled mind is the source of sorrow, concluded the wise Sage.
Author’s note:
This story is from Utpatti Prakaranam of Yoga Vasishta.
Author’s reflections:
This is a short story but very powerful. Unlike takeaways from other stories, this one forces us to examine our own tendencies and take cognition of our own ‘arms’ with which we flog ourselves. Our general understanding is that hell or heaven happens after death. My observation is that even when we get moments of peace we don’t hold or not able to retain it for a reasonable duration, let alone thinking of retaining it permanently. We slip back into our own flogging just like the person in the story slips back from banana grove. While the stick with which the flogging happens represents our own tendencies and therefore internal to us, the thorn represents external factors hurting us, with which we have to live and deal with, on a day-to-day basis. Thus the fact that we are forced to deal with both internal and external sources of misery is perfectly picturized in this short and compelling story.
4 Comments
Self introspection.
A good story
Great to read this story! The emphasis on vasanas and Self Enquiry are very helpful at any time. The power of this story for me is it reminds us that the main task we need to do is stop hurting ourselves, and it is not so much we need something new to feel peace or joy.
Similarly, Bhagavan has said that Self-enquiry is not for attaining something new, but to recognize the invalid and rigid assumptions we make in understanding the world as we habitually comprehend it, which ends up causing misery.
As the previous comment in this thread has stated, self-introspection is what is required, and it doesn’t only mean Self-enquiry with eyes closed sitting on a mat. Let me share some reflections from Bhagavan’s teachings, that is very helpful to me to continue to internalize what this story is conveying.
I’ll start with an analogy. Whoever drives a vehicle is aware that they have blind spots, and it is well accepted that driver must make extra efforts to look over his or her shoulder to fill in gaps in perception, to drive safely. Otherwise, accidents could happen. The situation is not different with us not recognizing the limitations of our sense perceptions, as we operate in our daily life, which is said to cause misery. Bhagavan has offered guidance in so many ways about our mind’s blind spots. One such is verse 6 of Ulladu Narpadu which is a great to reflect upon:
“The world is a form of five sense-impressions, not anything else. Those five sense-impressions are impressions to the five sense organs. Since the mind alone perceives the world by way of the five sense organs, say, is there a world besides the mind?”
If this looks abstract and not practical, it helps to think about how we experience the world. Say, we hear a bird sing at a distance. Where is this sound experienced? We must admit that it is experienced “in me”. Similarly, say we look at a star. We are obviously nowhere close to it in a worldly sense. Where do we experience the light of the star? Again, the answer would be “in me”. The same applies for anything we touch. This fact of experiencing anything in the world in a “place” called “in me” is inescapable. That is what this verse is pointing out. Please note that this “experiencing” happens prior to even formation of thoughts. What we consider as “our” mind only gets to tell a story about that experience after the fact. This recognition, by itself, can be awe inspiring in that there is something vast beyond our thought-riddled mind that lets us experience the world in the first place! As much as Self-enquiry is popular, Bhagavan equally emphasized Self-Surrender and, at least to me, a lifelong remembrance of this perspective is very much needed.
The benefit of exploring this perspective is that we don’t have to argue about the unreality of the world or about nature of God. Instead, we can pay close attention how we literally experience the world, to gain proper insight. This may need further contemplation for some of us.
The pain inducing error of our ways is that we rigidly assume that experiencing everything in this so-called place of “in me” is actually contained in our physical body and belongs to “us” as an individual entity. It is this rigid assumption that Self-enquiry trains us to challenge experientially and discover for ourselves what that “in me” truly is. Bhagavan promises that what we refer as “in me” is Consciousness or the Self itself. Of course, we are skeptics, and we don’t believe this right away.
So, to train us, Bhagavan also asks us to ponder different things about our mind. One powerful reflection is when He asks us how we know we exist. The only answer we can say is we “naturally know” we exist. There is no thought or feeling involved here. This type of “automatic knowing” is always with us, although in a very subdued way. Reading Bhagavan’s teachings, we clearly see there are different types of “knowing”:
a) natural knowing, without the aid of thoughts or feelings,
b) knowing something because we “feel” it, without thinking involved – for example viscerally, like heat, cold or emotions like love, and
c) knowing something because we place our attention on it, like knowing the color of an object in our hand.
Due to our upbringing and mental conditioning, we are mainly familiar with the third type of knowledge – i.e. the knowledge (like book learning) gained by directing our attention on something, and we exclusively use as that as the yardstick to declare whether someone is “knowledgeable” or not. Not only that, but our apparent ability to place attention on anything we choose to, though only at some time instants, induces mistaken notion of “free will” in “us”.
In Self-enquiry, instead of placing that attention on an “object” out “there” somewhere, we are asked to place the attention on what we refer as “in me”. When we say, “in me”, there is implicitly an individual behind it, thought of as “I” seated somewhere within our body. Wherefrom does this “I” arise? According to Bhagavan, focusing our entire mind on this question is the direct pursuit to reduce our vasanas and stop hurting ourselves. Verse 28 of Ulladu Narpadu shows the way on how to do this as a deliberate practice:
“Like sinking or diving, and wanting to see something that has fallen in water, sinking within restraining speech and breath by a sharpened mind it is necessary to know the place where the rising ego rises. Know”
To be clear, Self-enquiry is not offered as a solution to our dilemma of misery, but it is offered as a delightful reframing of the most important problem we can place our attention on, which results in the misery dissolving direct experience!
Note: English translations of Ulladu Narpadu verses are from on an online source. Please refer to books by Sri Ramanasramam for authentic explanations. And, of course, there are plenty of other gems in Bhagavan’s teachings relevant to this story, but this comment is already way too long!
Great story with profound revelation mama.. how true. We do momentarily experience thoughtlessness.. which is a
Blissful. But are unable to hold on to it.. or just Be in it ! Our vasanas pull us back into the world. Not having anything to do seems actually very dangerous. Engaging in nishkamya paropakaram and self enquiry when the mind permits comes out as the only solution. A truky thought provoking story.. pls do share more such unique ones !