From the Archives of Swami Jyotirmayananda
King Janaka was in his royal garden, not seeking anything in particular, when the songs of the Siddhas drifted in. Something in those words cracked the ordinary surface of his mind open. He turned inward. He began to ask: Who am I?
Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda — senior-most living direct disciple of Swami Sivananda, founder of Yoga Research Foundation in Miami — unpacks this episode from the Upaśama Prakaraṇa of the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha not as ancient biography, but as a living instruction. “You must realize,” Swamiji says, “that the storyline doesn’t have to occur exactly in your personality.” The Siddhas are not coming. The divine inspiration is already there, waiting for purity to make room for it.
The teaching opens with an image of striking simplicity. Think of the mind as a cloud that has, for a long time, been blocking the sun. One day — through satsaṅga, through practice, through some turn of Grace — the cloud allows just a narrow hole of light through.
What happens next is the whole teaching. Once the sun starts passing through, the cloud doesn’t know what is good for it. It begins to uncloud itself. It does not care that it is melting away. All it wants is to shine. And at the climax, the cloud simply is not there.
Two stages, Swamiji explains. First, transparency — the sun passes through without obstruction, even while the cloud persists. Then, dissolution — the cloud disappears entirely. The first stage is Jīvan Mukti, liberation while living: still moving through the world, but no longer obstructing the light. The second is Videha Mukti, liberation from the body itself. The goal for an aspirant in this life is the first: become transparent. Let the light through now.
Don’t Wait for Perfect Conditions
King Janaka’s turning did not happen because his kingdom was peaceful, because all his duties were done, or because conditions were ideal. It happened while he was entertaining himself in a garden. Purity draws inspiration. When the mind is refined through ethical living, through practice of Yama and Niyama, through Prāṇāyāma and meditation — divine inspiration begins to flow naturally.
“As purity develops in your mind,” Swamiji says, “divine inspiration begins to flow.” You do not need a dramatic moment. You do not need a Siddha to sing. The internal Siddha — intuition, the voice of the Self — is already present. Vicāra, the practice of Self-inquiry, is simply the act of listening.
The question Ko’ham — Who am I? — is not a puzzle to be solved. It is a direction in which to turn the mind. Every time the mind is turned away from its habitual scattering among objects of the world (what the text calls viṣaya-cintana, or object-thought) and redirected toward the source, something loosens. The cloud thins.
The Three Bodies and the One Sun
To understand what unclouds, Swamiji lays out the teaching on the three bodies: the sthūla śarīra (physical body), the sūkṣma śarīra (subtle body, containing mind, intellect, ego, and prāṇas), and the kāraṇa śarīra (causal body, the deep unconscious that holds the seeds of karma from countless lives).
All three are active in every moment of experience. In waking, the physical is highlighted. In dream, the subtle. In deep sleep, the causal. In daily life, all three are blended together. And all three, whatever their content, belong to the realm of Māyā — the cosmic creative power that causes the one undivided Reality to appear as multiplicity.
The Sun — the Self, the I AM — shines through all three, unaffected. Clouds change. Rainbows appear and dissolve. Physical light comes and goes. But the Sun remains exactly as it is. Your reality is like the Sun. The three bodies go on changing moment to moment. The witness behind them does not change at all.
I Have Nothing to Gain or to Lose
From this understanding flows King Janaka’s great declaration:
“I, who am the Self, have nothing to gain or to lose.”
Swamiji presents this not as detachment practiced through gritted teeth, but as the natural result of seeing clearly. When you know yourself as the screen and not the projected drama, the events of the drama carry a different weight.
Think of a dream, Swamiji says. In the dream, you win a lottery. You are ecstatic, you are planning how to spend the money — and then a mosquito wakes you up. Nothing to gain. Nothing to lose. The dream held real emotion but no real stakes. The advanced aspirant begins to see waking life with something of that clarity — not indifference, but freedom from compulsion.
This applies to both pleasure and pain. Pain, in this view, is a teacher: turn to God, understand what karma produced this pain, learn the lesson. Pleasure is also a teacher, but more dangerous, because it does not feel like suffering. The trap of pleasure is that it makes sādhana seem unnecessary. The advanced seeker uses pleasure differently — as a period of relative ease in which to go deeper into meditation, into Samādhi, into silence.
Ūrmi Becomes Ūrmilā
This life in the world is an ocean of waves. The six ūrmis — janma-maraṇa (birth and death), sudhā-pipāsā (hunger and thirst), harṣa-śoka (joy and sorrow) — are constant. No amount of spiritual practice removes them from the surface of life. They keep moving.
But something changes when the mind becomes devotional. The same waves — ūrmi — become ūrmilā: a name that carries the quality of lā, of playful delight. The waves continue, but the soul is no longer defined by them. It enjoys “a cosy relation with God,” as Swamiji puts it. The disturbances are there; the foundation is not shaken.
Ahamtā (egoism) and mamtā (the sense of mineness) are what the ego uses to make those waves feel personal, permanent, and threatening. The Purāṇas represent these two forces as great demons — Śumbha and Niśumbha — whose destruction requires the Grace of the Divine Mother herself. The sublimation of ego is not a matter of willpower alone. It requires surrender.
Liberation Is Revelation, Not Acquisition
Perhaps the most clarifying teaching in this class: Liberation is not something you attain. It is something that is revealed.
Swamiji uses the image of a cinema screen. While the film is running, every moment brings change — drama, conflict, resolution, emotion. But behind all of it, the screen is always the same. Nothing that happens on the screen touches the screen. The screen-like reality is your real I AM. When the projection dissolves, not by force but by the natural exhaustion of vāsanās (subtle desires), what remains is simply what was always there: pure, undivided, unaffected awareness.
You do not acquire the screen. You stop mistaking yourself for the film.
And how does this happen? Not through intellectual understanding alone, though that understanding is necessary and valuable. Swamiji gives the analogy of falling asleep. You prepare for sleep — you lie down, you close your eyes, you tell yourself “now I will sleep.” But when you actually fall asleep, you don’t know. You never catch the moment. The transition is beyond the reach of the intellect. Self-Realization is like that: arrived at through sincere practice and inquiry, but the final step is a direct revelation that no thought can produce or track.
Practice sincerely. Then let go of the need to catch the moment.
Scholar’s Corner
- Lineage: Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda (b. 1931) received initiation from Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh and has taught Integral Yoga from Yoga Research Foundation in Miami since 1969. The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha series represents one of the most sustained teachings on jñāna yoga (the path of wisdom) available in the English-speaking world, drawing from the Maha Rāmāyaṇa, a text of approximately 32,000 verses traditionally attributed to the sage Vālmīki.
- Scriptural context: The Upaśama Prakaraṇa (Section on Quiescence) is the fifth of six sections in the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha. It presents the inner states of advanced aspirants and the mark of one who has attained stillness while still engaged in the world. King Janaka is a recurring figure in Advaita Vedānta literature: a householder-king who is also a jñānī (knower of the Self), demonstrating that Liberation is not reserved for monastics.
- Key sūtra echoed: pūrṇam adaḥ pūrṇam idaṁ… (Īśāvāsya Upaniṣad): “That is full. This is full. From fullness, fullness proceeds. Taking fullness from fullness, fullness alone remains.” The invocation with which this class opens and closes.
Sanskrit Glossary
- Vicāra (विचार)
- Sustained self-inquiry; the practice of directing the intellect to investigate the nature of the Self. Not intellectual analysis for its own sake, but discrimination applied to the fundamental question: Ko’ham — Who am I?
- Upaśama (उपशम)
- Quiescence; the stilling of mental agitation. The Upaśama Prakaraṇa describes the inner state of those who have achieved deep inner quietude while continuing to act in the world.
- Jīvan Mukti (जीवन्मुक्ति)
- Liberation while living; the state in which a being has realized the Self but continues to inhabit a body, moving through the world without being bound by it.
- Ūrmi (ऊर्मि)
- Wave; specifically, the six waves of existential suffering — birth, death, hunger, thirst, joy, and sorrow — that characterize embodied life.
- Ūrmilā (ऊर्मिला)
- The same waves, transformed by devotion; a playful name suggesting that suffering, when held within a devotional relationship with the Divine, loses its suffocating quality and becomes part of a larger flow.
- Ahamtā (अहंता)
- The sense of “I”-ness; egoism as an active force that claims experiences as personal achievements or personal losses.
- Mamtā (ममता)
- The sense of “mine”-ness; the ego’s extension into the world by which objects, relationships, and outcomes are felt to be possessions of the self.
- Vāsanā (वासना)
- Subtle desire or mental impression left by past experience; the seed-like tendencies that color perception and drive behavior across lifetimes.
- Kālarātri (कालरात्रि)
- “The Night of Time”; a name of the Goddess in her aspect as the power that dissolves the illusion of time, bringing the aspirant into the timeless state of the eternal now.
Words drawn from a class by Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda on the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha, Upaśama Prakaraṇa. Study guide prepared for the Yoga Research Foundation Digital Ashram.
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