Growing up near the Sierra Mountain foothills, I often encountered the remnants of the Gold Rush—those rustic towns where hopeful seekers panned for gold in the rivers, dreaming of fortune. Today, some still search the streams, sifting through rocks and dirt, their eyes sharp for a glint of gold amidst the debris. This act of separating the valuable from the worthless mirrors the deeper, spiritual pursuit that many of us embark upon—searching not for physical gold, but for something infinitely more precious: the truth of who we are.
As a spiritual seeker, you may feel a yearning for something you can’t exactly describe. Maybe you call it a thirst for God, for spiritual liberation, or a blessing from the Divine or a Guru. This yearning comes up when we notice that we feel chronically unsatisfied no matter how many nuggets of gold the world gives us in the form of material wealth, intimate relationships, or applause from the people whose opinion matters most to us.
Vedic wisdom offers us a profound and powerful path to meet this exact moment. We are shown how to begin by first separating out what we are not, before we can fully even imagine the light of who we truly are.
Just as the gold panner discards the dirt and stones to reveal precious gold, the teachings of Advaita Vedanta ask us to discard our attachments, identities, and false notions of the self. The Nirvana Shatakam, a profound hymn composed by Adi Shankaracharya, offers an all-encompassing picture of this process of spiritual sifting.
When Adi Shankaracharya was only a child meeting his Guru for the first time, he was asked, "Who are you?" Adi Shankaracharya began not by giving his parents' names, hometown, age, height, etc., but by stating all the things he was not.
Following his verses, we see beautifully captured an outline of the mental, physical, emotional, social, and dogmatic layers so many humans feel they have to nurture, justify, and live up to to ‘be somebody'. At every turn, we are also reassured that we are truly One with the ultimate Truth, pure awareness, and blissful contentment of the Divine.
These 6 verses describe the elevated mental state and razor sharp clarity of a person who has touched their inner truth. The same 6 verses can also serve as a template that we as seekers can follow to toss out the false identities and attachments that distract us, cloud our experience of our deepest Self, and keep our inner gold hidden from sight.
This is the essence of the practice found in the Nirvana Shatakam: a method of peeling away the layers of false identity that we mistake for our true nature. Each verse is a tool for casting away what we are not, just as a gold miner casts aside stones until only the pure gold of the Self remains.
Would you like to embark on a journey of inner gold mining?
Explore Acharya Shunya’s Vedic Study Circle series on the Nirvana Shatakam through this public playlist.
Join Sadhvi Ishani for a group contemplation and assimilation of these teachings in the Companion Study sessions for this text beginning September 2024. Become a member of the no-fee, donation-based Vedic Study Circle to receive the live session details.
Comments