Chapter XCI - Contemplation of Hari

Suta said:—The Manus, such as Svayambhuvas, etc, observe the rules of penance, worship, contemplation, and prayer, etc., recite the Mantras sacred to the God Hari, and meditate upon His eternal Self, which is shorn of body, senses, mind, intellect, vitality and the sense of egoism. The sky does not constitute His Self, not does heat (light) enter into its composition. Water does not enter into the composition of His Supreme Self, nor do the attributes which characterise that material element, affect that eternal entity. Similarly, it is above all the fundamental principles of the earth matter, and is necessarily beyond the operative zone of virtues which specifically belong to that essential substance. Controller of all beings and becomings, he is the ever enlightened, ever wakeful One, the director and lord of all, the final receptacle of all force and energy, shorn of all illusion, and identical with pure consciousness. He is One, and without a second or Companion, the supreme God, represented by light though void of fundamental quality of illumination (Sattva) and is hence beyond the necessity of practising any austerity, He is shorn of the quality of Rajas, and the three fundamental qualities of Sattva, Rajas and Tamas, do not affect his Supreme Self. He has no shape, is devoid of all action and desire, and is pure and incapable of sin and evil. Hankerings cannot assail him, nor griefs and ignorance can disturb the infinite serenity of His eternal Self. He knows no old age, death or decay. Without end or origin, he lies inherent in all,—the eternal witness to the process of phenomenal evolution and from whose vision nothing lies hidden or veiled and which nescience itself cannot clouden. He is the perfect and absolute truth, the Supreme God, one and indivisible, beyond all rules of ethics, nameless, and knows no sleep, nor dream, nor wakening. He is the only real factor in individual consciousness that makes the states of wakening, etc., possible. He is the personified peace, the lord of the gods and the celestials. He is real, and, as such, underlies the states of wakening, etc., void of the necessary categories of cause and effect. He is imaged in the phenomenal universe, and is accordingly seen by all. He is the most invisible of all invisible entities, and, as such, can be only perceived by means of pure knowledge, or through scriptural learning. He is the highest felicity, beyond all material process of creation or construction. He is shorn of intellect, and is beyond the process of intellection, and is identical with the fourth stage of pure consciousness (Turiya). He is the protector and destroyer of all. Beyond all virtues and attributes, he is the soul of all created beings. Without any receptacle to hold him in, he directs the universe in the path of light and benediction. He is Shiva (the blissful one, the highest bliss). He is Hari, the remover of all sin and misery. He suffers no change, nor knows any modification. He is known only through the teachings of the Vedanta philosophy. He is personified knowledge, the real substantial substratum whose attributes the senses inform us of. He is without the faculties of hearing, taste, touch, vision and smelling. He is without any origin, and lies inherent in the topmost cavity of the human brain, dawning upon the individual consciousness only to establish its identity with his eternal Self, a fact which the human mind interprets in its experience of “I am He”

O thou, the supreme god, having realised this experience in mind, and having cast his whole self in the thought-mould of “I am He,” a man should meditate upon the self of the supreme Brahman. He, who does this, is no other than the supreme One. I have disclosed to you the mode of contemplating the self of the supreme God. Now tell me, Rudra, whatever else you want me to speak about.