Canto – 7

Brahma’s Penance and his securing the Lord’s grace

The Canto is about the creation or manifestation of the universe from the mind of the creator.  The beauty of the Canto is that it relates the manifestation of the universe to the state of consciousness.  Initially, the Slokam says, it was just pure consciousness.  Consciousness could only perceive water all around and nothing else.  Consciousness neither has a purpose, nor is it driven by and motivations to act in a particular manner.  Its three Gunas are in perfect balance.  Pure consciousness is not object dependent. It is not survival oriented because there are no threats to its existence. It lives in a dimension where there are no objects and no there is no sense of time. There is only pure awareness of itself, which keeps it in an infinite extension of peace and tranquility. This aspect manifests as the infinite stretch of water that Brahma perceives on his birth.  He is then prompted by the Paramathma to perform Tapas. Tapas is the process by which the mind is formed and in turn creates the objects of this universe.

Fast forwarding to present times, the mind has been fully formed, and so have the objects of this world.  We are now required to perform Tapas to eliminate the activity of the mind completely, and go back the state of pure consciousness, by discarding the mind and the body.  This process is repeated infinite times, till the three Gunas are in perfect balance and consciousness is not attracted by objects of this world.

Any of us who attains complete liberation from this process, becomes one with the Paramathma and never has to return again to the cycles ofbirth and death.