Tale 18 · The Vāsiṣṭha Atlas
Upaśama · Dissolution · Mitra V.19–21 · 3,926 words
One loss, seen among thousands, loosens its grip.
On Mount Mahendra beside the Ganges the aged sage Dīrghatapas leaves his body, and his wife, long practised in yoga, leaves hers to follow him. The elder son, Puṇya, performs the funeral rites; the younger, Pāvana, ‘half awakened’, wanders the woods weeping. Puṇya finds him and widens the frame. Neither is she your mother nor he your father; you have had thousands of each, as many as streams in a forest. Then, by his ‘clear and all-viewing sight’, he recounts his brother’s former lives — stag, gander, tree, lion, fish, monkey, elephant, ant, millipede, a hill-woman’s suckling — and his own — parrot, frog, tiger, vulture, shark, prince. For whom shall one lament among so many? Friend and foe are made by thinking; rub out the vestiges of remembrance and witness like a lamp. Pāvana brightens ‘as the landscape at the dawn of day’; the brothers live on in the forest and in time reach nirvāṇa.
Grief fastens on a single frame; widening it to the many parents and kin of countless lives loosens this one loss without pretending it did not happen (V.19.30–35; V.20.31–33).
Puṇya acts before he speaks: he completes the funeral rites, then goes to find his brother; ritual care comes before reframing (V.19.23–25).
‘The thought of one as a friend, makes him a friend’: relationships are partly made of the mind’s labels, and labels can be revised (V.20.3).
Remembering many lives is offered not as spectacle but as relief: the point of seeing so much is to be able to let it all go (V.20.24–34; V.20.43).
Equanimity is modelled as a lamp that lights the room without being disturbed by what it lights (V.20.41).
The Vāsiṣṭha Atlas
Pāvana’s grief for his parents shrinks the world to one lost bond, the Separation wound at its rawest; Puṇya first completes the rites, then widens the frame: ‘thousands of fathers and mothers in thy by-gone births’ (V.19.31). Care is that double gesture, and Pāvana discovers the gift folded inside his grief, a sight wide enough to hold every bond without clinging to one (V.20.23; V.21.1).
Grief is neither suppressed nor allowed to flood: it is held inside a frame wide enough for thousands of lives, so the one loss and the larger view can stand together (V.19.35).
Kṛṣṇa tells Arjuna that both have passed through many births, which he knows and Arjuna does not; Puṇya stands to Pāvana in the same relation, the one who remembers lending his sight to the one who weeps (V.20.23), and asks, like BG 2.28, what room is left for lament.
The Anamatagga-saṃyutta teaches that the round of births has no discoverable beginning, that the tears shed across it exceed the oceans, and that it is hard to find a being who has not been one’s mother or father; like Puṇya’s streams in a forest (V.19.31), it widens grief in order to release it, not to deny it.
Patañjali states that direct perception of latent impressions yields knowledge of former births; Puṇya’s recall is likewise a seeing, ‘my clear and all-viewing sight’ (V.20.23), and its purpose, as in the Sūtra, is freedom rather than spectacle.
IEAF: Integrative Emotional Alchemy Framework (Gallardo, Frontiers in Psychology, 2026). FP20: the Fundamental Peace Scale. ITM: the Integrative Transformation Model. Parallels in other yogas are contemplative correspondences, not claims of influence.
Vasiṣṭha offers the story as an example of how friend and foe are distinguished. In Jambudvīpa rises Mount Mahendra, its peaks touching the sky, its caverns ringing with the Sāma hymns of sages and the roar of waterfalls. On a tableland near its summit flows the heavenly Ganges, and on its bank, in a grove of fruit trees, lived the sage Dīrghatapas with his wife and their two sons, Puṇya and Pāvana, ‘the meritorious and the holy’, as bright as the sons of Bṛhaspati. As they grew, the elder, Puṇya, surpassed the younger in every merit. Pāvana was half awakened, like a lotus half open at dawn, and uncertain in his understanding.
When Dīrghatapas had completed a century of years, he bade farewell to his desires and left his body in a grotto of the mountain, as a bird leaves its old nest, and his spirit passed like a flower’s fragrance into the tranquil void of pure intellect. His wife found the body, fell upon it and lay still; and having long practised yoga as he had taught her, she left her own undecayed body and followed him, unseen, as starlight vanishes at dawn.
Puṇya set about the funeral rites. Pāvana, overwhelmed, wandered the woods weeping. When the rites were done, Puṇya went to find him. Why, he asks, do you shed tears enough to blind yourself? Our father and mother have gone to the final blissful state, reunited with their own nature; why mourn what is not to be mourned? Neither is she your mother nor he your father, nor are you their only son. You have had thousands of fathers and mothers in past births, as many as the streams in every forest. If we lament for these two, why not for all those we have lost in all our past lives? Losses appear and disappear like water in a desert mirage; notions and desires paint them before us.
Who is father, who mother, who friend, Puṇya continues, but our notion of them? Thinking one a friend makes him a friend; thinking him an enemy makes him one. Think what you are: not the bones and flesh; there is no ‘I’ as Puṇya and ‘you’ as Pāvana. And if you have passed through many births, why not mourn your old companions too? You were a stag among deer in flowering plains, a gander among swans in a lotus pool, a tree among trees, a lion among lions on mountain crags, a fish in clear lakes. You were a monkey in Daśārṇa, a prince in the land of frost, a raven in Puṇḍra, an elephant, an ass, a dog, a pīpal tree on the Vindhyas, an insect in a banyan, a Brahmin in Kosala, an ant for six months under the bark of a Himalayan tree, a millipede in a dunghill for a year and a half, a hill-woman’s suckling at her breast — and now you are my younger brother. ‘I see all this by my nice discernment, and my clear and all-viewing sight.’
He remembers his own lives too: a parrot in Trigarta, a frog by a river, a hunter in the Vindhyas, a camel, a tiger in the forests of the Sahya hills, a vulture for ten years, a shark for five months, a lion for a century, a ruler in the snowy regions. In all of them he had fathers and mothers, brothers and friends by the hundred and the thousand. For whom shall he lament, and whom forget? These too will be buried in oblivion. So, he says, lay all pleasures and pains aside; know that you have no birth or death, no father or mother, no friend or foe; the world is a stage, and those who know the One remain to witness it, as lamps light a room without being touched by it. Rub out your wishes and the vestiges of remembrance, and see the serene spirit within.
Pāvana, so admonished, became as enlightened as a landscape at daybreak. The brothers lived on in that forest, perfected in knowledge, wandering as they pleased, and after a long time both reached nirvāṇa, like lamps whose oil is spent.
Passages from Mitra’s translation (1891–99), cited by book, chapter and verse.
“Thou hadst also thousands of fathers and mothers in thy by-gone births, in as much as there are the streams of running waters in every forest.”“If we are to lament over the loss of our parents and children, that are dead and gone; then why not lament also for those, that we have lost and left behind in all our past lives?”“The thought of one as a friend, makes him a friend, and thinking one as an enemy makes him an enemy; the knowledge of a thing as honey and of another as poison, is owing to our opinion of it.”“Thus I see the post states of thy existence, caused by the antecedent desires of thy soul; I see all this by my nice discernment, and my clear and all-viewing sight.”“For whom shall I lament and whom forget among this number; shall I wail for them only that I lose in this life? But these also are to be buried in oblivion like the rest, and such is the course of the world.”“The knowers of God do their acts, without thinking themselves their actors; just as the lamps of night witness the objects around, without their consciousness of the same.”“Pávana being admonished by Punya in the said manner, became as enlightened in his intellect, as the landscape at the dawn of day.”In the textPāvana ‘was deeply absorbed in grief’ and wanders the woods wailing; Puṇya, after the rites, seeks him out and asks why he mourns ‘for what is not to be mourned for at all’.
In the clinicGrief intervention by perspective-broadening and decentring; it runs against the continuing-bonds model (Klass, Silverman & Nickman 1996), which a modern therapist would hold alongside it.
In the textPuṇya lists Pāvana’s former births by form and place, from stag and gander to ant and millipede to a Pulinda woman’s suckling, and then his own.
In the clinicPast-life regression material (cf. Newton 1994, Journey of Souls), here delivered by the guide as a narrated sequence the listener follows in imagination, rather than as recall the subject produces.
In the text‘I also remember the several births that I had to undergo’; ‘I remember the various customs and pursuits of different peoples on earth, that I had to observe and follow in my repeated transmigrations.’
In the clinicHypermnesia, with the caution that hypnotically enhanced recall raises confidence and false memories as well as true ones (Dywan & Bowers 1983).
In the textParents as many as ‘the streams of running waters in every forest’ and kin as the ‘fruits and flowers of a large tree’; the rhetorical ‘why not lament also’ for deer, swans and lions; ‘The world is a stage’.
In the clinicReframing (Watzlawick, Weakland & Fisch 1974, Change): the facts are kept and the frame that gives them their meaning is changed, here by repeated questions that make the narrow frame untenable.
In the text‘Those that have known the True One, remain only to witness the course of nature’; they act ‘just as the lamps of night witness the objects around’ and as a mirror receives images.
In the clinicObserving-self position (Deikman 1982), offered as a place to stand once the frame has widened, so that feeling can be held without being swept away.
In the text‘Let us remain unmindful of all existence (whether past, present or future)’; ‘rub out all thy wishes and the vestiges of thy remembrance from thy mind’.
In the clinicSuggested amnesia; in grief work the safer modern form is attenuating intrusive images and rumination, not erasing memory of the dead.
Read upward — stage 1 at the bottom, stage 7 at the top
Integration zone
Pure-awareness trance and silent presence — not another state to enter but the ground recognised in every state. Jīvanmukti; Fundamental Peace.
Integration zone
Perceptual shift — the boundaries of things soften; consciousness expands past its usual partitions.
Integration zone
Post-trance integration — sustained non-reactivity carried into behaviour; what was seen in depth becomes how one lives.
Integration zone
Hypnotic absorption meets direct knowing — identity deconstruction at full depth. This is YVH's primary therapeutic zone, and the model's central testable hypothesis.
Integration zone
Progressive relaxation and deepening — the habitual self loosens enough for new pattern to take.
Integration zone
Self-inquiry joined to guided suggestion — narrative reframing and Socratic dialogue inside a gently focused state.
Integration zone
Therapeutic motivation — disillusionment with suffering becomes readiness for change. The first honest wish to be free is itself the induction.
A note on what this map claims. The alignment between stages of knowledge and trance depths is a clinical map — a heuristic correspondence proposed for research, not a claim of identity between contemplative attainment and hypnotic depth.
Bhūmikā 3 · Tanumānasā
Puṇya’s work thins the mind’s attachments, to these parents and to the labels of friend and foe (V.20.2–4), and chapter V.21 closes on the suppression of desires (V.21.5, 21.28–29). Pāvana moves from ‘half awakened’ to enlightened, but his later stages are only summarised.
Zone · Medium
Pāvana listens, reflects and is persuaded; the many lives are narrated to him, not re-entered by him. Puṇya’s own recall implies a deeper capacity, but it is not described as a trance.
In Calcutta in the 1890s, the translator chose the vocabulary of hypnotism to name these states. More →
The wife of the sage finding his body lying lifeless on the ground, fell down upon it, and remained motionless like a lotus flower nipt from its stalk.V.19.20Having been long accustomed to the practice of yoga, according to the instruction of her husband; she quitted her undecayed body, as a bee flits from an unfaded flower to the empty air.V.19.21Thus I see the post states of thy existence, caused by the antecedent desires of thy soul; I see all this by my nice discernment, and my clear and all-viewing sight.V.20.23There are no bounds, my boy, of our pleasures and pains in this sublunary world; lay them all aside, and let us remain unmindful of all existence (whether past, present or future)!V.20.34Indications. Bereavement for parents, especially when siblings grieve differently, one functioning and one collapsing. Clients who seek past-life or Life Between Lives work and need a frame of meaning rather than spectacle. Rigid friend/enemy splitting in families or workplaces (V.20.3). Anticipatory grief in elderly couples.
How to use it. Follow the text's order. Honour the rite before the reframe: ask what has been done for the dead, and what still needs doing (V.19.23–25). Then widen the frame gently, with images from the client's own surroundings, as Puṇya used the forest's streams. Offer the lives as images to be followed, not memories to be believed. End with the lamp.
Cautions. In acute grief, "neither is she thy mother" (V.19.30) can feel invalidating; pace the loss and acknowledge it first. Past-life narratives must never be presented as verified memories, and the client's own beliefs about rebirth must be respected. Do not suggest forgetting the dead; adapt "rub out … remembrance" (V.20.43) to the loosening of rumination. The mother's yogic departure to follow her husband (V.19.21) is suicide-adjacent material: never frame it as a model, and screen for suicidal thoughts in any recently bereaved client, above all an elderly widow or widower, before using this tale.
Practise with a qualified professional if you have a history of dissociation, trauma or psychosis.
A Thousand Mothers: the Widened Frame
Twenty minutes. Best with a guide; it can be read aloud to oneself.
Before you begin. This practice is for grief that has been felt and is now stuck, not for the first raw weeks. If you have thoughts of ending your life, or of following the person you have lost, stop here and speak to a clinician or a crisis line today. If you have a dissociative disorder or a history of psychosis, use it only with a clinician. The lives that may appear are images, not claims about the past. Never practise while driving.
How to return at any moment. Open your eyes, put both hands flat on your thighs, say the date aloud.
Before anything else, name the one you have lost. Name one thing you have done for them since they died. And one thing still to do. Let that be the rite. It is honoured.
Sit, and breathe. Let the grief be here, as it is. You are walking in a wood. You do not have to stop crying.
Someone comes to sit beside you. An elder, unhurried. They do not tell you to stop. They sit.
Now look at the wood. See the streams running through it, more than you can count. Each stream is a father, a mother. As many as the streams in every forest. Let them run behind you, line after line.
If images come of other lives, a stag in a flowering plain, a swan diving in a lotus pool, a tree among trees, let them come. You need not believe them or judge them. Watch them, as one watches clouds.
And ask, softly: for whom shall I lament, among so many? Let this one loss rest among the many. It is not smaller. It is held.
Now take the lamp's place. A lamp in a room at night lights everything, the chair, the photograph, the tears, and is not shaken by what it lights. Be warm. Be still. Witness.
(Silence: two minutes.)
Now let the light come up, as a landscape comes up at dawn.
Feel the ground under your feet. Feel the weight of your body. Breathe in fully.
I will count from one to five. One: the breath. Two: hands and feet. Three: the sounds of the room. Four: a deep breath, shoulders rolling. Five: eyes open, awake, here.
Say your name, the date and the place. Name the person you have lost, once more, in an ordinary voice. Drink some water. If grief comes back strongly later, that is not failure; it is grief.
Meta Pets World · Your ally · Meta Pet 17
I see clearly with the eye of truth.
Pāvana’s grief has shrunk the world to a single frame and fixed its labels, mother, father, friend, foe: that is the Shadow of The Eye, Opinion. Puṇya lends him Far-sightedness, thousands of lives and parents seen at once, and the brothers arrive at an all-viewing awareness that witnesses like a lamp: Omniscience, not as knowing everything, but as seeing without narrowing.
Opinion is the frame that makes the world: ‘The thought of one as a friend, makes him a friend… the knowledge of a thing as honey and of another as poison, is owing to our opinion of it’ (V.20.3). Pāvana weeps in the woods, held inside one picture.
Far-sightedness is Puṇya widening the frame: ‘Thou hadst also thousands of fathers and mothers in thy by-gone births, in as much as there are the streams of running waters in every forest’ (V.19.31). One loss, seen among thousands, loosens its grip.
Omniscience is the ‘clear and all-viewing sight’ (V.20.23) that rests as the lamp that witnesses a room without being touched by it (V.20.41); Pāvana becomes ‘as enlightened… as the landscape at the dawn of day’ (V.21.1).
Here, take the card and the tale together. Your sorrow is real, and it is also standing in a forest full of streams. Let your eye step back one pace. Just one.
The eye sees all: in the one loss or quarrel that fills your frame today, what is your opinion choosing not to see?
Tonight, write one honest sentence about someone you labelled friend or foe today, and what the label left out.
Light trance, eyes open if you prefer. For the full, deeper script, see “The practice” above and its cautions.
The eye sees all, as Puṇya saw a forest of lives: today, what is your grief or your grudge choosing not to see?
Sami · Inari, Sápmi (Lapland) · Eatnu, Eatnu
Visit Áile, the Sami yoik-singer and reindeer-herder of Inari, whose mantra ‘Eatnu, Eatnu’ calls the river, and let her far-seeing song sit beside Puṇya’s streams of running water.
Guided Meditation
#17 · The Eye
Aim. To honour a loss or a rigid friend/foe split first, and then widen the frame until the client can hold it with warmth and less grip.
ITM 3 Gift Discovery. The tale is Gift Discovery in action: Pāvana already knows his pain; what he discovers is the far-seeing frame that changes his relation to it (V.19.31; V.20.32).
In a circle, begin by letting each person, if they wish, say the name of someone they have lost or someone they are at odds with, and nothing more. Tell the tale, then guide the widened-frame practice at light depth for everyone, keeping images of other lives optional and symbolic. Afterwards, invite small groups of three to share what the lamp’s view showed them, with the rule that no one interprets another’s images. Close with the affirmation together and a slow reorientation, and stay available afterwards for anyone the grief has touched strongly.
Training and certification in the Meta Pets Method: metapetsworld.org/facilitators ↗
The correspondence between tales and Meta Pets is contemplative: the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha does not contain the Meta Pets; each tale enacts its ally’s arc. Felicia is an artificial-intelligence companion; her words are contemplative reflections, not clinical advice.
From the cycle The Sixty-Four Tales
Title: A Thousand Mothers Título: Mil madres
Figure: Puṇya and Pāvana, the two brothers, sons of the sage Dīrghatapas on the bank of the Ganges
Where in the text: Book V (Upaśama), Mitra chapters 19–21
Hypnotic phenomenon the song enacts: GRIEF (grief work) carried by AR (regression to multiplicity), held by the witness (WIT) — the single lost frame is widened until it holds thousands of mothers, and that widening is what lets the mourner stand up.
Mantra: Oṃ Śāntiḥ Śāntiḥ Śāntiḥ Source: the traditional closing of the Upanishadic śānti-pāṭha (peace invocations), e.g. Īśā and Taittirīya Upaniṣads. Meaning: "Peace, peace, peace" — spoken three times for the three places pain can come from: within oneself, from other beings, from what is beyond us.
Verse 1 — Pāvana, the younger He set his body down in the cave of the mountain like a bearer laying his load beside the road. She fell across him, a lotus cut from its stalk, and followed, as the stars go out at dawn.
Verse 2 — Pāvana, then Puṇya I've walked these woods for days. I can't find home. My eyes are rain, brother. I am going blind. — I washed them. I burned them. I said the words. Then I came for you. Lift your face. Look.
Chorus — Puṇya You have had a thousand mothers, as many as the streams in any wood. A thousand fathers fell like autumn leaves, and not one of them is lost. Look how wide the forest is.
Verse 3 — Puṇya, the window of lives You were a stag in the flowering plain, running with the deer, a gander in the lotus pool, diving with the swans, a tree among the trees, an ant in the bark of a birch, a child at a hill-woman's breast, and now my younger brother. I was a parrot, a frog, a lion for a hundred years. Who shall I weep for, little one? Whom forget?
Chorus — both voices We have had a thousand mothers, as many as the streams in any wood. A thousand fathers fell like autumn leaves, and not one of them is lost. Look how wide the forest is.
Bridge — mantra, two voices in unison Oṃ Śāntiḥ Śāntiḥ Śāntiḥ (peace in me, between us, above us) Oṃ Śāntiḥ Śāntiḥ Śāntiḥ (for the stag, the swan, the ant)
Outro — both Light came back to him like dawn across the land. Two brothers stood up from the grass and walked into the fruit trees by the river, to their hearts' content.
Verso 1 — Pāvana, el menor Dejó su cuerpo en la cueva de la montaña como un porteador que deja su carga en el camino. Ella cayó sobre él, un loto cortado del tallo, y se fue, como se van las estrellas al alba.
Verso 2 — Pāvana, luego Puṇya Llevo días en el bosque. No encuentro casa. Mis ojos son lluvia, hermano. Me estoy quedando ciego. — Los lavé. Los quemé. Dije las palabras. Y vine por ti. Levanta la cara. Mira.
Estribillo — Puṇya Has tenido mil madres, tantas como arroyos hay en un bosque. Mil padres cayeron como hojas en otoño, y ninguno se ha perdido. Mira qué ancho es el bosque.
Verso 3 — Puṇya, la ventana de las vidas Fuiste ciervo en la llanura en flor, corriendo con los ciervos, ganso en el estanque de lotos, buceando con los cisnes, un árbol entre los árboles, hormiga en la corteza de un abedul, un niño al pecho de una mujer de la sierra, y ahora mi hermano menor. Yo fui loro, rana, león cien años. ¿Por quién voy a llorar, pequeño? ¿A quién olvidar?
Estribillo — las dos voces Hemos tenido mil madres, tantas como arroyos hay en un bosque. Mil padres cayeron como hojas en otoño, y ninguno se ha perdido. Mira qué ancho es el bosque.
Puente — mantra, dos voces al unísono Oṃ Śāntiḥ Śāntiḥ Śāntiḥ (paz en mí, entre nosotros, sobre nosotros) Oṃ Śāntiḥ Śāntiḥ Śāntiḥ (por el ciervo, el cisne, la hormiga)
Final — los dos Volvió la luz a él como el alba sobre la tierra. Dos hermanos se levantaron de la hierba y entraron en los frutales junto al río, a su entero contento.
EN: You have had a thousand mothers. Not one of them is lost. ES: Has tenido mil madres. Ninguna de ellas se ha perdido.
Two brothers on the bank of the Ganges, two deaths in one morning: the father sets his body down in the grotto like a bearer laying down his load; the mother follows him as stars go out at dawn. Puṇya does what must be done, then goes into the woods to find Pāvana, weeping himself blind. He offers not consolation but a wider room: you were a stag, a gander among swans, an ant in the bark of a birch, a child at a hill-woman's breast. Grief is the clinging of a single frame; widened, it releases. Two voices, one weeping, one steady; strings swelling as the lives open; and both brothers standing up, walking back into the fruit trees.
Source: Vihari-Lala Mitra, The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana of Valmiki (1891–99), public domain.
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Educational and scholarly content. Hypnotherapy and regression material is complementary and not a substitute for medical or psychiatric care.
