Astavakra Gita Quotes

1. Liberation is distaste for the objects of the senses.
   Bondage is love of the senses.
   This is knowledge. Now do as you please.
    
2. Realising that pleasure and pain,
   birth and death are from fate,
   and that one's desires cannot be achieved,
   one remains inactive -
   and even when acting does not get attached.
    
3. He whose thinking mind is dissolved
   achieves the indescribable state
   and is free from the mental display of delusion,
   dream and ignorance.
    
4. How many births have you not done
   hard and painful labour with body, mind and speech.
   Now at last stop!
    
5. Meditate on yourself as motionless awareness,
   free from any dualism, giving up the mistaken idea
   that you are just a derivative consciousness,
   or anything external or internal.
    
6. If only you will remain resting in consciousness,
   seeing yourself as distinct from the body,
   then even now you will become happy,
   peaceful and free from bonds.
    
7. How can there be either birth, karma or responsibility
   in that one unchanging, peaceful, unblemished
   and infinite consciousness which is you?
    
8. Just as one and the same all-pervading space
   exists within and without a jar,
   so the eternal, everlasting God
   exists in the totality of things.
    
9. Your nature is the consciousness -
   in which the whole world wells up like waves in the sea.
   That is what you are, without any doubt,
   so be free of disturbance.
    
10. Realising that misfortune and fortune
    come in their turn from fate, one is contented,
    one's senses under control -
    one does not like or dislike.
     
11. I am in all beings,
    and all beings are in me.
    To know this is knowledge -
    and then there is neither renunciation -
    acceptance or cessation of it.
     
12. All of this is really filled by you and strung out in you,
    for what you consist of is pure awareness -
    so don't be small minded.
     
13. Let his body rise or fall.
    The great souled one gives it no thought,
    having forgotten all about samsara
    in coming to rest on the ground of his true nature.
     
14. My true nature is not contained in objects,
    nor does any object exist in it,
    for it is infinite and spotless.
    So it is unattached, desireless and at peace,
    and as such I remain.