Sukra and the Dancing Girl

Rama: "Sage, you have shown me how time is created by the mind. But what creates the mind's dreams in the first place? What sets these experiences in motion?"

Vasishtha: "Desire, Rama. The first movement of wanting sets consciousness spiraling into elaborate creations. Let me tell you of Sukra, the son of Sage Bhrigu."

Rama: "I have heard he is a great sage himself."

Vasishtha: "He is now. But he was not always. Young Sukra was meditating in his father's ashram when a celestial dancer passed through the sky. In one careless moment, his eyes followed her form, and desire arose."

Rama: "What happened?"

Vasishtha: "From that single spark of desire, Sukra's mind created an entire universe. He imagined pursuing her, winning her, losing her, pursuing her again through life after life. He was born as a prince, died, was reborn as a deer, then a swan, then a king, then a beggar. He forgot he had ever been Sukra. He forgot he was sitting in his father's ashram. His body sat motionless, but his mind traveled through countless worlds."

Rama: "How long did this continue?"

Vasishtha: "Eight hundred years passed in the external world while Sukra's body sat unchanged in meditation. But in his mind, he had lived through many cycles of creation. He had experienced countless births and deaths, countless pleasures and countless sorrows. All sprung from that single moment of desire."

Rama: "Was there no escape from this cycle?"

Vasishtha: "In one of his many lives, he was reborn as a sage. Through practice and inquiry, he began to remember. Like one waking from a dream, fragments of his true nature began to surface. He remembered Bhrigu's ashram, the dancing girl, the moment of distraction. And with that remembrance, the entire elaborate structure of his many lifetimes began to dissolve."

Rama: "What did he realize?"

Vasishtha: "That none of it had happened. That he had never moved from his seat. That the dancer was merely a thought, his pursuit merely a thought, his many births merely thoughts. Eight hundred years of experience in countless forms - all empty, all insubstantial, all just the creative play of a mind ensnared by a single moment of wanting."

Rama: "This is terrifying. A single desire can create such a prison?"

Vasishtha: "Not the desire itself, but the identification with it. Desires arise and pass in the pure mind like clouds in the sky. It is only when consciousness says this is my desire, I must fulfill it, I am this wanting one - that the elaboration begins. Then that single thread is woven into an entire tapestry of experience."

Rama: "How does one avoid this trap?"

Vasishtha: "By watching desire arise without becoming it. By seeing the wanting as a phenomenon in consciousness rather than a command to be obeyed. The desire for the dancing girl arose in Sukra's pure consciousness - but he grabbed it, identified with it, and it dragged him through eight hundred years of delusion."

Rama: "And when he saw through it?"

Vasishtha: "He laughed. What else could he do? Eight hundred years of suffering, and it was all a magic trick played by his own mind upon itself. The one who suffers and the one who creates the suffering were never two different beings. When this is truly seen, the game cannot continue. Freedom dawns."