Liberation-in-life: the destruction of karman and the nature of release

PS_51

Thus, when the thought-construct of duality has dissolved, having overleapt the deluding māyā (the Lord's self-veiling power of differentiation), one becomes dissolved into Brahman — as water into water, as milk into milk.

PS_52

Thus, when the whole assemblage of principles has, through contemplation, come to be of the nature of Śiva — for one who beholds all as Brahman, what grief, what delusion [can there be]?

PS_53

The fruit of action, good or ill, [accrues] only through contact [identification] with false knowledge; for grievous is the fault of [such] contact — like the [false] charge of thieving [falling] even upon one who is no thief [merely from his keeping company with thieves].

PS_54

Those deluded ones who here cultivate the ignorance (avidyā) fashioned by worldly convention — they go on to birth and death, bound fast by the bolt-bar of merit and demerit.

PS_55

But the karman too, consisting of merit and demerit, heaped up during the time of ājñāna / ajñāna-granthi (ignorance), perishes by the force of the blaze of [liberating] knowledge — like cotton long accumulated [consumed in an instant by fire].

PS_56

Once knowledge is attained, even what has been done [does] not [tend] toward fruit; how then [can there be any further] birth for such a one? With the bondage of birth gone, he shines as the Sun that is Śiva, with his own rays.

PS_57

Just as a seed freed from husk, hull, and beard does not [any longer] produce a sprout, so too the Self, freed from the [threefold impurity of] aṇava [atomizing], māyīya, and kārma [malas], surely produces no sprout of [further] existence.

PS_58

The knower of the Self fears nothing from any quarter, for everything is his own form; nor does he grieve, since in the highest reality (paramārtha) there is no [such thing as] destructibility.

PS_59

From the hoard of jewels of the highest reality (paramārtha), grown firm in the deeply hidden treasury of the heart — [arising as] 'I alone am' — in [such] the state of the Great Lord, what misfortune, [and] for whom?

PS_60

mokṣa / kaivalya (liberation; aloneness/isolation) has no [particular] abode whatsoever, nor [is it] any going elsewhere; liberation is the cutting of the knot of ignorance — the becoming-manifest of one's own power (śakti (the Lord's dynamic power/energy)).

PS_61

He whose knot of ignorance is cut, whose doubt is gone, whose error is dispelled, whose merit and demerit are worn away — such a one is liberated even while still joined to a body.

PS_62

Just as a seed scorched by fire becomes incapable of sprouting, so karman burnt by the fire of knowledge does not bestow [further] birth.

PS_63

Through being a limited intellect, by the [karman-bound] imagining of a future body appropriate to one's deeds, consciousness, [thus] contracted, shines forth in that very [contracted manner] upon the destruction of this [present] body.

PS_64

If, on the other hand, [one should realize] the stainless awareness — which transcends all, consisting of [pure] knower and doer, all-expansive, of the form of light that neither sets nor rises, whose every resolve is true —

PS_65

— [the awareness that is] free of the measuring-out of space and time, fixed, imperishable, the Lord, perfectly complete, the sole author of the dissolution, arising, and arrangement of the manifold host of powers (śakti) —

PS_66

— [if one] should awaken to the Self as of the nature of Śiva, the excellent Ordainer of emanation and the rest — how could such a one be a transmigrant? For one [thus] all-pervading, whence or whither [any] passage [to another body]?

PS_67

Thus by reasonings too it is established that whatever action the knower [does] bears no fruit. [And] from the firm conviction 'this is not mine, but His [the Lord's],' there is indeed, in the world, no fruit [that binds him].