Bondage is Desire for Experience

Janaka approached Ashtavakra with a troubled mind.

"Master, I understand that I am the Self, infinite and free. Yet something still binds me. I feel caught between knowing the truth and living it. What is this bondage that persists?"

Ashtavakra looked at the king with compassion.

"Tell me, Janaka, what do you want in this moment?"

Janaka paused. "I want... to be free. To be completely established in the Self."

"There it is," Ashtavakra said softly. "That wanting is your bondage. The desire for any experience—even the experience of liberation—is the chain that binds you."

"But surely the desire for freedom is noble? Is it not what brought me to your feet?"

"It brought you here, yes. And now it must be released, like the thorn used to remove another thorn and then thrown away. You cannot desire your way to desirelessness."

Janaka sat with this paradox. "Then what am I to do? How do I stop wanting?"

"See what happens when wanting arises. Does it not imply that this moment is insufficient? That something is missing? The very structure of desire is a statement: 'What is, is not enough.' But the Self is always complete."

"I see it," Janaka said slowly. "Each desire is a subtle rejection of the present. Even my spiritual seeking has been a refusal to accept what already is."

"Exactly. The seeker is the problem. Not because seeking is wrong, but because the seeker imagines himself separate from what he seeks. You are already That which you pursue. The pursuit itself creates the illusion of distance."

"So bondage is not something done to me. I create it moment by moment through wanting."

Ashtavakra nodded. "You are bound only by your own desire to be bound or unbound. Drop all preferences—for pleasure over pain, for liberation over bondage, for existence over non-existence—and see what remains."

"But how can I drop preferences? They seem to arise on their own."

"They arise in awareness, not from awareness. Watch them as you would watch clouds passing. You are the vast sky. Let preferences come, let them go. Do not fight them, do not feed them. Simply remain as the witness."

Janaka closed his eyes. For a moment, there was silence. Then he spoke.

"In this moment, I want nothing. Not because I have suppressed wanting, but because I see that I lack nothing. The Self is utterly full. Where would desire arise in something that is already complete?"

"Now you taste freedom," Ashtavakra said. "But do not make this into another experience to preserve. Freedom is not a state to achieve. It is the recognition that you were never bound—that bondage was only ever a game of wanting."

"And when wanting returns?"

"Let it return. You are not the wanting. You are that which watches wanting arise and dissolve. Whether desire is present or absent, you remain unchanged. This is the true meaning of liberation—not the absence of desire, but the absence of identification with it."

Janaka opened his eyes. "I sought liberation as if it were a treasure to find. But it was here all along, covered only by my search for it."

"The cosmic irony," Ashtavakra smiled. "What you seek is what is looking. What you want is what is wanting. The Self plays hide and seek with itself, and the game ends the moment you stop seeking."

"Then let me stop," Janaka said, his voice filled with wonder. "Let me simply be what I am—without wanting to be more, without fearing to be less."

"This is rest," Ashtavakra said. "Not the rest of exhaustion, but the rest of completion. Welcome home, Janaka. You never left."