Tale 52 · The Vāsiṣṭha Atlas
Nirvāṇa · second half · Mitra VI.2.71–92 · 40,329 words
When desire withdraws, a world ends, and the dreamer wakes.
From inside the stone, Vasiṣṭha watches a world die. Its Brahmā fixes his mind on the silence after Om; as his desires dry up the earth sickens, the Kali age ends, and Brahmā holds his breath, so the air that bore the stars gives way. Twelve suns burn the world, Puṣkara and Āvartaka clouds drown it, and one ocean rises to Brahmā's heaven, where gods sit like painted figures and go out like lamps. From the waters rises dark Rudra, and from his shadow Kālī, the Night of Time, dances the worlds as ornaments on her body until she merges with the still Śiva 'as a river is incorporated in the ocean'. Rudra swallows earth and sky, shrinks to an atom and vanishes. Vasiṣṭha calls the terrible pair 'creatures of my mistaken fancy', then becomes earth, water, light and air in turn, and ends lost in the one subject. Dissolution, like creation, is a movement of one mind: the end of desire is the end of a world.
A world ends when the desire that sustains it is withdrawn: as Brahmā's wishes dry up, all nature fades with them (VI.2.71.3–5); a life-structure dissolves when its sustaining wish is released, not only when it is attacked.
The witness is allowed to move: when the fire makes his 'blood boil', Vasiṣṭha leaves for cooler, higher air (VI.2.75.11); titration is part of witnessing, not a failure of it.
Terror-figures are mind-made: the dancing Rudra and Kālī were 'two spectres of delusion ... creatures of my mistaken fancy' (VI.2.83.4), and Rudra is named 'the aggregate of Egoism' (VI.2.80.19); the image of destruction is the ego's own.
Agitation comes to rest by recognising its source: the dancing energy becomes still once 'conscious of herself, as one and same' with the calm (VI.2.85.18), as a river ceases to be a river in the sea.
Death can be rehearsed as waking: beings become extinct 'as the sleeping dreamers come to themselves' (VI.2.79.12), and something survives every fire, as sandalwood keeps its fragrance and gold its form (VI.2.75.53–54).
The Vāsiṣṭha Atlas
The tale is the end of a world, Separation at cosmic scale: gods go out like lamps and Vasiṣṭha's blood boils in the heat of twelve suns (VI.2.75.11). Its virtue, Care/Love as belonging to the whole, is shown when the dancing Kālī merges with the still Śiva 'as a river is incorporated in the ocean' (VI.2.85.18). The tale dramatises Embodying the Essence: the terror-figures are seen as 'creatures of my mistaken fancy' (VI.2.83.4), and Vasiṣṭha becomes earth, water, light and air before resting in the one subject.
Witnessing the dissolution of every form, and then becoming each element in turn, loosens identification with any fixed self.
Brahmā fixes his mind on the silence after Om before his world dissolves. Māṇḍūkya 12 names that measureless fourth, beyond the sounds of the syllable, where the manifold world comes to rest.
The Gītā teaches that at the coming of Brahmā's night all manifest beings dissolve into the unmanifest and return again at his day. Vasiṣṭha watches exactly such a night fall from inside the stone.
The bardo teachings ask the dying to recognise the wrathful deities who appear after death as projections of their own mind. Vasiṣṭha's naming of the dancing Rudra and Kālī as 'two spectres of delusion' (VI.2.83.4) is that recognition.
One dhāraṇā of the Vijñāna Bhairava imagines the fire of time rising from the foot and burning the whole body, and then the whole world, until only awareness remains. The twelve suns and Vasiṣṭha's boiling blood stage that contemplation.
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.
His words ended, the Brahmā of the stone-world sat in lotus posture and fixed his mind on the pause after the half-syllable of Om; his consort, Desire, sank back 'at the end of all her endless wishes'. Seeing them grow thin, Vasiṣṭha thinned himself too in meditation until he was one with the pervading intellect. As Brahmā's wishes dried, nature withered: earth and ocean shrank, the body of Virāṭ sickened, and 'the anesthesia of One' numbed all things. The Kali age ended in famine, tyranny and war; seas broke their bounds and earthquakes shook Meru. Then Brahmā compressed his breath into his heart; since the air was his breath, nothing upheld the heavens, meteors fell like flowers, and the siddhas dropped mute from the sky. Asked how a formless mind has a cosmic body, Vasiṣṭha explains Virāṭ: a particle of intellect imagines space, time, senses and limbs, and swells into a universe while remaining void.
At midday he saw a second sun, then twelve, reflections of one sun, forms of three-eyed Rudra. The world burned without flame; his own blood boiled, and he withdrew to higher air. Cities fell on their people, Meru melted like snow and Himālaya like lac. Only the Malaya mountain kept giving its fragrance: burn sandalwood and it still perfumes all; gold and space are never consumed. Then the Puṣkara and Āvartaka clouds came roaring, at first unseen, then like sable camels; winds drove off the fire, snow and rain fell, half-burnt gods and men still fought one another, and seas, skies and hells became one ocean with 'neither the sky nor the horizon'.
Still seated in the void, he saw Brahmā in a glory of light, still as carved stone, with gods, sages and the twelve suns sitting like painted figures. Then he saw them no more: they had reached nirvāṇa 'as the sleeping dreamers come to themselves'. Liberation, he tells Rāma, is 'lying dormant in holy trance, without the torpidity of insensibility'. The suns burned Brahmā's heaven and went out; the ocean flooded it.
Then a dark form filled the sky, five-faced, three-eyed, with ten arms and tridents; from the waters rose the first male, and Vasiṣṭha bowed to Rudra, 'the aggregate of Egoism', who drew the ocean into his nostrils. From Rudra rose a shadow: Kālarātri, a towering, emaciated, three-eyed black goddess hung with skulls, mountains and rivers, in whose dancing body the worlds rose and set as in a mirror. Śiva, Vasiṣṭha explains, is the calm intellect; the dancers were 'two spectres of delusion' of his fancy, and the goddess is that intellect's own vibration, its will. She took the forms of land, hills and trees, then became formless and merged into Śiva like a river into the sea. Rudra breathed earth and sky into his mouth, dwindled to a cloud, a stick, a digit, a piece of glass, an atom, and was gone.
The stone stood clear again, the body of Kālī with all worlds inscribed in it. Looking in, Vasiṣṭha saw creations past and to come, even Rāma's war with Rāvaṇa. Turning to his own body, he found the world in his heart, felt himself an atom, a spark, a body gaining eyes, ears, touch, taste and smell one desire at a time, uttered Om like a newborn, and thought himself Brahmā. He became the earth with its rivers and mountains, then the waters, then light, then the wind that carries coolness to tired labourers. Inside the stone, he says, it was like sleep with the intellect fully awake. At last, 'in that state of my hypnotism', he saw a world in every atom, and all of them uniting into one unity in which he was lost.
Passages from Mitra’s translation (1891–99), cited by book, chapter and verse.
“When I saw them growing thin for want of their desires, I also reduced myself by means of my meditation, until I found myself as one with all pervading Intellect; in the form of endless vacuity (and perceived every thing that was going on everywhere).”“My body became heated and my blood boiled as by the heat of a wild fire; and I left that place of torrid heat, and ascended to the remoter and higher regions of air.”“Burn the sandal wood, yet it will diffuse its fragrance to all living beings; because the intrinsic nature of a thing, is never lost or changed into another state.”“It is with the extinction of their desires, that they have become extinct also; as the sleeping dreamers come to themselves after they are awakened from their illusive vision.”“Lying dormant in holy trance, without the torpidity of insensibility, is termed our moksha or spiritual liberation; while our wakefulness to the outer world, is said to be the state of our bondage to it.”“I saw at the end of the kalpa cycle, the two spectres of delusion, appearing before me; the one was the furious Rudra, and the other—the ferocious Bhairava; and knew them both to be but delusion, and creatures of my mistaken fancy.”“But no sooner is this Goddess conscious of herself, as one and same with the god of self-consciousness; than she is joined with her lord Siva, and becomes one with him.”“As when a man falls into sleep with the dulness of his senses, and has yet his airy intellect fully awake in him; so was that outward insensibility filled with intellectual sensibility.”“I saw also in that state of my hypnotism, innumerable worlds rising before me in each particle of matter; as it appeared to fly before me in the hollow space of vacuum.”In the text'Seeing the end of all I still retained my seat in infinite vacuity'; he watches the terror 'from my aerial seat'.
In the clinicThe observing-self position used to view traumatic or feared material at a distance, as in the split-screen technique (D. Spiegel), where the scene is watched rather than relived.
In the textVivid figures of Rudra and Kālī are seen and simultaneously known as 'spectres of delusion ... creatures of my mistaken fancy'; whatever a term signifies is 'presented before the outward sight by the power of delusion'.
In the clinicPositive visual hallucination with preserved insight, as in hypnotic hallucination where the subject both sees the image and knows it to be suggested.
In the textTotal identification with each element in turn: 'I became amalgamated with the earth as if it were one with myself', then water, light and 'the form of the current air'.
In the clinicImaginative involvement (J. Hilgard 1970) carried to somatic identification with an image, a deep-trance form of absorption used in body-expansion and elemental imagery.
In the textThe ever-moving power is 'never different or unconnected' from the still Śiva; she 'became one with Siva' once 'conscious of herself, as one and same' with him, 'as a river is incorporated in the ocean'.
In the clinicIntegration of polarised ego states, an agitated active part and a calm core, through mutual recognition rather than suppression (Watkins & Watkins 1997).
In the textWith 'his intelligent and spiritual body' one can 'enter into the impenetrable heart of a hard stone, or to rise to heaven above or descend to the regions below'; 'In my entrance into the hard stone ... I experienced no difficulty'.
In the clinicThought-body travel imagery in deep trance, in which location follows intention: 'wishing to go in another, immediately finds himself even then and there'.
In the textAsked whether confinement in the stone was pleasure or pain, he answers that it was like sleep 'with the dulness of his senses' while the intellect stays 'fully awake'; in samādhi there is no consciousness of the body.
In the clinicHypnotic anaesthesia with a covertly aware observer, the 'hidden observer' of Hilgard (1977): sensation is absent from report while cognition remains intact.
In the textIn the conflagration the Malaya mountain 'yielded its fragrance even in that state'; 'Burn the sandal wood, yet it will diffuse its fragrance'; gold and space cannot be consumed.
In the clinicEgo-strengthening imagery (Hartland 1971) placed inside the feared scene: an image of what endures is anchored before the exposure continues.
In the textGods and sages vanish into nirvāṇa 'as the sleeping dreamers come to themselves after they are awakened'; the body 'disappearing with the privation of our fancy for it, like a dream vanishing from the sight of a waking man'.
In the clinicReframing death as awakening from a dream, a metaphor suited to existential work on death anxiety (Yalom 1980).
In the textIn the stone he sees 'the past, present, and future commotions of the world', including 'the young Ráma killing the Rákshas ... (an event which was yet to occur)'.
In the clinicAge progression or pseudo-orientation in time (Erickson 1954): future events lived as already present inside trance.
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 6 · Padārthābhāvanī
The tale enacts the melting of objects: the world is devoured, Rudra dwindles to an atom and vanishes (VI.2.86.4–10), and each element is absorbed in turn, until 'millions of worlds ... disappearing from my view and all uniting in One sole unity' (VI.2.92.60), padārthābhāvanī, opening at VI.2.92.64 onto the seventh.
Zone · Somnambulistic
Vasiṣṭha moves, feels heat, changes position and later reports in detail while immersed in fully real imagery (VI.2.75.11; 91.44–46), the somnambulistic profile; the final loss of self in unity (VI.2.92.64) is plenary. Therapeutic use should be titrated at deep, not pushed to these levels.
In Calcutta in the 1890s, the translator chose the vocabulary of hypnotism to name these states. More →
As the insensibility of our hearts, stupifies the members of our bodies; so did the anesthesia of One produce the obtuseness of all things in the world.VI.2.71.9Nor did I perceive the aerial city of my dream before me, upon my waking (from the trance of my illusion).VI.2.79.8We have no consciousness also, of either our spiritual or corporeal bodies, when we are fixed in our samádhi or intense meditation in the state of our waking (from sleep).VI.2.79.15The awakening of our consciousness of the world, is the cause of our being enslaved to it; and its hybernation in the trance of samádhi, is our highest felicity.VI.2.79.40Lying dormant in holy trance, without the torpidity of insensibility, is termed our moksha or spiritual liberation; while our wakefulness to the outer world, is said to be the state of our bondage to it.VI.2.79.41let it be a clear and continuous revery without any gap or cessation, without the scruples of unity and dualityVI.2.79.42I saw with my intellectual and clear vision (clair-voyance), that sphere of the intellect in its clear, bright and clear light (as that of Siva’s body)VI.2.83.3(called samana—quietus which means both death and the quiet, which follows the other. Samana like somnum is both extinction of life, and cessation of care and labour).VI.2.85.12(and so it was the intellectual wakefulness of Vasishtha and other inspired men, which made them sensible of outward objects, even in the trance of their meditation). (Samádhi).VI.2.87.4Hear Ráma, how I thought myself once in my meditation, as the self-born Swayambhu or the god who is born of himself, in whom subsisted the whole, and there was nothing born but by and from him; and how I believed the unreal as real in my revelry, or as an air-built-castle in my dreaming.VI.2.87.7or as the erect hairs of horripilation rising on the bodies of saints, enrapt in their reveries and sitting with their closed eyelids.VI.2.88.18With my waking soul, I thought as it were in my sleep that I was assimilated to land, and saw many groups of lands scattered this earth: I saw them in my mysterious vision, and then reflected them in my mind.VI.2.90.2Ráma! remaining in that state of my sublimated abstraction, I perceived the particulars of the world in each individual and particular particle.VI.2.90.27I saw also in that state of my hypnotism, innumerable worlds rising before me in each particle of matter; as it appeared to fly before me in the hollow space of vacuum.VI.2.92.56At the time of my coming to pure understanding, and the clair-voyance of my intellectual sight; I find the millions of worlds and all worldly things, disappearing from my view and all uniting in One sole unity.VI.2.92.60Indications. Death anxiety and fear of annihilation, by rehearsing an ending watched from a secure seat. Catastrophic fears and nightmares of fire or flood, as imagery for rescripting. Life transitions felt as "the end of a world": divorce, retirement, bereavement, a terminal diagnosis. Polarised inner conflict between agitation and stillness. Pain, using "outward insensibility filled with intellectual sensibility" (VI.2.91.45) as a model state.
How to use it. Never narrate the whole tale in trance; it is twenty-two chapters of catastrophe. Use its structure, as in the practice below, and keep the client in deep trance with a speaking channel open. Establish the seat and the resource before any fire appears.
Cautions. Survivors of fire, flood, earthquake or war may be retraumatised by the conflagration and deluge imagery; screen, titrate, or choose another tale. Statements that the trance of samādhi is "our highest felicity" (VI.2.79.40) and that extinction is release can be heard as an endorsement of death; screen for suicidal ideation before using this tale with anyone depressed, bereaved or terminally ill, and frame dissolution throughout as the end of a desire, not of a life. The text insists that the world is a delusion (VI.2.80.56; VI.2.83.8); avoid the tale in psychosis and in severe derealisation. The Kālī and Bhairava imagery is sacred to many clients; present it with respect, and never as merely monstrous.
Practise with a qualified professional if you have a history of dissociation, trauma or psychosis.
Watching the End
Read slowly, aloud; about twenty minutes. For use with a clinician, or by experienced practitioners.
Before you begin. This practice works with images of an ending. Do not use it if you are having thoughts of death or self-harm, if you have survived a fire, flood, earthquake or war and the memory is still raw, or if you have a psychotic or dissociative illness. Never practise while driving or in or near water. Sit upright.
How to return at any moment. Say "Cool air", rise in your imagination to a higher, cooler place, then press your feet down, take three full breaths, count from one to five and open your eyes.
Sit. Let the eyes close. Find a seat high up in a quiet sky, a place that is yours and cannot be moved. Whatever happens below, you keep this seat.
Breathe out. Let the breath slow. As it slows, let some wish you have carried a long time grow a little thinner, a little quieter. You do not have to give it up. Only let it rest. As it thins, you thin too, wide and quiet.
Below, there is a world that is ending. It may be an old life, an old fear, a way of being. Let it show itself from far off.
Perhaps there is heat. Watch it from your seat. If it grows too hot, rise. Rise to cooler air. That is allowed. That is wise.
Notice, somewhere in the fire, one thing that does not burn. A tree that keeps its fragrance even as it burns. Gold that stays gold. The sky that holds everything and is not consumed. Let it be clear. Keep it near.
Now let rain come. Hear it first, far off. Feel a cool air from one direction. Let the rain cover everything, until there is only water and sky, and your seat.
If a figure of fear appears, look at it from your seat. Say quietly: You are made of my own mind. Watch what happens.
Watch the agitation dance, and slow, and come to rest, as a river comes to the sea and is simply sea.
Breathe out. Rest here, like sleep, with the mind awake.
(Silence: one to three minutes.)
Now become the air. A gentle wind, moving back towards the world. Carry coolness to tired limbs: your own arms, your own legs, your own face.
Feel the breath come fuller. Feel the weight of the body on the seat, the feet on the floor.
I will count from one to five. One: the breath is full. Two: hands and feet are warm and your own. Three: the sounds of the room return. Four: a deep breath in, shoulders roll once. Five: eyes open, here, now, fully alert.
Say your name, the day and the place. Look at three things in the room and name their colours. Stand, walk a few steps, drink water. If any image stays with you, write it down and bring it to your next session.
Meta Pets World · Your ally · Meta Pet 51
The ring of fire purifies and empowers me.
The Ring of Fire walks with the final dissolution because Vasiṣṭha stands inside a ring of fire. Twelve suns burn the world and his blood boils: Agitation. He does not freeze or flee into numbness; he rises to cooler air and keeps watching: Initiative. At the end the terrible figures are seen as creatures of his own fancy and he rests awake in the one subject: Awakening.
Agitation: as the twelve suns burn the world, 'my body became heated and my blood boiled as by the heat of a wild fire' (VI.2.75.11).
Initiative: in the same breath he 'left that place of torrid heat' for higher, cooler air (VI.2.75.11), and from there finds what fire cannot change, the sandalwood that still gives its fragrance (VI.2.75.53).
Awakening: he knows furious Rudra and Bhairava as 'creatures of my mistaken fancy' (VI.2.83.4), and rests with the senses asleep and the intellect 'fully awake' (VI.2.91.45).
Things heat up in today's tale: twelve suns at once. Here's what Vasiṣṭha knew: you're allowed to step back into cooler air. Then look again. What still smells of sandalwood?
If inside the ring of fire it is cool, what in you, like the sandalwood, keeps its fragrance while everything around it burns?
Tonight, write one honest sentence about what made your blood boil today, and the step you took, or could take, toward cooler air.
Light trance, eyes open if you prefer. For the full, deeper script, see “The practice” above and its cautions.
Inside the ring of fire it is cool: each day of the Bond, find the cool point inside one hot moment.
Turkish · Istanbul, Turkey · Yā Laṭīf
Visit Khadija, the Naqshbandi Sufi sheikha of Istanbul, whose 'Yā Laṭīf', a call to the Subtle and Gentle, is cool air for anyone standing too close to the fire.
Guided Meditation
#51 · The Ring of Fire
Aim. To help the client treat agitation as a signal for self-chosen action, stepping back to a cooler vantage point, and to find what in them does not burn.
ITM 3 Gift Discovery. The tale's gift is a small, practical act, rising to cooler air when it grows too hot (VI.2.75.11): Gift Discovery, where agitation becomes the cue for initiative instead of the master of reaction.
In a circle, keep the tale short and the imagery at a distance, and say beforehand that anyone with recent experience of fire, flood or war may sit out the trance and simply listen. Lead the witness and cooler-air sections at light depth for about fifteen minutes. Then, in pairs, each person names one hot situation and one first step toward cooler air, and the partner repeats it back to them. Close with the koan spoken together and a long cooling out-breath, then check each person's orientation before dismissal.
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
Figure — Vasiṣṭha on his seat in the air, watching the stone-world's Brahmā let go of his desire, while Rudra-Bhairava and Kālī, the Night of Time, dance over the still Śiva.
Where in the text — Book VI (second half, Nirvāṇa-prakaraṇa), Mitra chapters 71–92 (the title is Mitra's heading for ch. 81, "the last night of death").
Hypnotic phenomenon the song enacts — WIT and HAL: one drone that never changes is the witness's seat; fire, flood, ocean and two terrible dancers pass over it and are known, while they are seen, as the seer's own fancy, until the dancing line falls onto the drone's note like a river into the sea.
Mantra — Yathā nadyaḥ syandamānāḥ samudre 'staṃ gacchanti nāmarūpe vihāya (यथा नद्यः स्यन्दमानाः समुद्रेऽस्तं गच्छन्ति नामरूपे विहाय). Source: Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad 3.2.8, first half (it continues tathā vidvān nāmarūpād vimuktaḥ parāt paraṃ puruṣam upaiti divyam). Meaning: "As flowing rivers go down into the sea and are lost there, leaving name and form": the Night of Time taking the forms of hills and trees, then no form, and entering the still Śiva "just as a river… enters into the immensity of the sea" (VI.2.85.10–11).
Performance: the tanpura drone is the witness and does not change pitch from first bar to last. Verse 1 is sung over it alone, and the singer audibly holds a breath after "held his breath". Fire enters as racing high strings; the clouds as thunder heard before anything is seen; the ocean as one wide chord. In Verse 3 two voices dance, one low (Rudra), one high (Kālī), in cross-rhythm. In the bridge the high voice falls, note by note, until it sings the drone's own pitch. The outro is carried by a soft wind, and the last line is an in-breath.
Verse 1 He sat in the lotus seat and set his mind on the hush after Om; she who was all his wishing lay back at the end of her wishes. I watched them thin, and thinned with them. Then he held his breath in his heart, and his breath was the air: nothing held the sky up. Stars fell like flowers, and the siddhas, mute.
Verse 2 At noon, twelve suns, burning without a flame. My blood boiled; I rose to higher air. Meru ran like snow, the Himālaya like lac. But burn sandalwood: it still smells sweet.
Chorus Twelve suns, then clouds like black camels, then one ocean, no shore, no sky, and I keep my seat in the air.
Verse 3 (two dancing voices) Out of the water, Rudra, Bhairava, dancing; out of his shadow, Kālī, the Night, the worlds rising and setting in her body, the cities dancing on her, hoping to be born again. I knew them as I watched: two shapes of my own fancy.
Chorus Twelve suns, then clouds like black camels, then one ocean, no shore, no sky, and I keep my seat in the air.
Bridge (mantra) (the high voice falls onto the drone) She turned to hills, to trees, to no shape, and went into the still one as a river goes into the sea. yathā nadyaḥ syandamānāḥ samudre 'staṃ gacchanti nāmarūpe vihāya (rivers set in the sea, nameless, formless)
Outro (the wind) Rudra breathed in the earth and sky and dwindled: a cloud, a stick, an atom, gone. The stone stood clear. And I became a breeze carrying the coolness of the rain to the tired limbs of the labourer. Breathe in.
Interpretación: el bordón de la tanpura es el testigo y no cambia de nota del primer compás al último. El Verso 1 se canta solo sobre él, y el cantante contiene el aire, audible, tras "guardó el aliento". El fuego entra como cuerdas agudas que corren; las nubes, como un trueno que se oye antes de verse nada; el océano, como un solo acorde ancho. En el Verso 3 bailan dos voces, una grave (Rudra) y una aguda (Kālī), a contratiempo. En el puente la voz aguda cae, nota a nota, hasta cantar la nota del bordón. El final lo lleva un viento suave, y el último verso es una inspiración.
Verso 1 Se sentó en la postura del loto y puso la mente en el silencio tras el Om; ella, que era todo su desear, se recostó al final de sus deseos. Los vi menguar, y mengüé con ellos. Entonces él guardó el aliento en el pecho, y su aliento era el aire: nada sostenía el cielo. Cayeron estrellas como flores, y los siddhas, mudos.
Verso 2 A mediodía, doce soles, ardiendo sin llama. Me hervía la sangre; subí a un aire más alto. El Meru se corrió como nieve, el Himālaya como laca. Pero quema el sándalo: aún huele dulce.
Estribillo Doce soles, luego nubes como camellos negros, luego un solo océano, sin orilla ni cielo, y yo sigo en mi asiento de aire.
Verso 3 (dos voces que bailan) Del agua sale Rudra, Bhairava, bailando; de su sombra, Kālī, la Noche, los mundos naciendo y poniéndose en su cuerpo, las ciudades bailando sobre ella, esperando volver a nacer. Supe quiénes eran mientras miraba: dos formas de mi propia fantasía.
Estribillo Doce soles, luego nubes como camellos negros, luego un solo océano, sin orilla ni cielo, y yo sigo en mi asiento de aire.
Puente (mantra) (la voz aguda cae en el bordón) Ella se hizo colinas, árboles, ninguna forma, y entró en el que está quieto como un río entra en el mar. yathā nadyaḥ syandamānāḥ samudre 'staṃ gacchanti nāmarūpe vihāya (los ríos pierden nombre y forma en el mar)
Final (el viento) Rudra aspiró la tierra y el cielo y fue menguando: una nube, una vara, un átomo, nada. La piedra quedó clara. Y yo me hice brisa y llevé el frescor de la lluvia a los miembros cansados del jornalero. Respira.
EN: When the wish lets go, a world ends, and the breath returns. ES: Cuando el deseo suelta, un mundo acaba, y vuelve el aliento.
The widest canvas in the cycle, watched from the smallest seat. Inside the stone, a world's Brahmā fixes his mind on the hush after Om and holds his breath; since his breath is the air, the sky comes down. Twelve suns, clouds heard before they are seen, one ocean; then Rudra and the Night of Time dance the worlds as jewels. Vasiṣṭha keeps his seat in the air, moves when his blood boils, and names the dancers as his own fancy while he watches them. This is the witness position, tested at the end of the world. One unchanging drone under fire, flood and dance; the dancer falls onto its note; then a breeze, and the listener breathes.
Source: Vihari-Lala Mitra, The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana of Valmiki (1891–99), public domain.
Researchers, clinicians and institutions are welcome to write. Replication, data-sharing and site partnerships for the trials in progress are all open conversations.
Educational and scholarly content. Hypnotherapy and regression material is complementary and not a substitute for medical or psychiatric care.
