Story of Lavana - A King's Dream

Rama: "Sage, I still struggle to understand how time can be so fluid. You say a lifetime can pass in a moment. Can you give me another example?"

Vasishtha: "Let me tell you of King Lavana, whose story will remove your doubts forever."

Rama: "Please tell me."

Vasishtha: "King Lavana was a just and prosperous ruler. One day, while holding court, a magician appeared before him. The magician waved a peacock feather before the king's eyes and instantly, Lavana found himself elsewhere."

Rama: "What did he experience?"

Vasishtha: "He experienced losing his kingdom, wandering destitute through forests, being taken in by a family of outcastes, marrying an outcaste woman, fathering children, suffering terrible famines, watching his family die of starvation one by one, and finally, in despair, throwing himself into a fire to end his miserable existence."

Rama: "How terrible! How long did this last?"

Vasishtha: "That is the question, Rama. To King Lavana, it lasted over sixty years. He grew old, his hair whitened, his body became bent with age and suffering. But when the flames of his suicide jolted him awake, he found himself back in his throne room. The magician had just lowered the peacock feather. Only a few moments had passed."

Rama: "Impossible! How can sixty years fit into a few moments?"

Vasishtha: "Because time does not exist in the way you think. The sixty years were not compressed into moments - they never happened in objective time at all. They happened only in the mind, where time is created fresh in each experience. The mind generates its own duration."

Rama: "But his suffering felt real to him?"

Vasishtha: "Absolutely real. Every hunger pang, every grief at his children's death, every moment of despair - all completely real within the experience. This is the terrifying and liberating truth: all experience is equally real while it is being experienced, and equally unreal from the perspective of awakening."

Rama: "What happened when he awoke?"

Vasishtha: "Lavana was shaken to his core. He sent messengers to find the outcaste village he remembered. They found it. They found people who remembered an outcaste named Lavana who had lived among them and whose family had perished in a famine."

Rama: "But how? He never left his throne!"

Vasishtha: "Because the mind creates reality, Rama. Lavana's powerful experience did not merely happen to him privately - it projected itself into the fabric of existence. Or perhaps that village and its memories were always there, waiting for Lavana's mind to find them. The boundary between dreamer and dream, between subject and object, is far more porous than you imagine."

Rama: "This is deeply unsettling. If I cannot trust my experience of time, what can I trust?"

Vasishtha: "Trust only the one who experiences. The content of experience - whether it lasts a moment or a millennium - is always the dream. But the one who knows the experience, the consciousness that is present in suffering and in joy, in dreaming and in waking, in this throne room and in that outcaste village - that is unchanging, that is reliable, that is what you truly are."

Rama: "So liberation is finding that unchanging witness?"

Vasishtha: "Liberation is recognizing that you have never been anything other than that witness. You only imagined yourself to be the suffering king, the outcaste, the prince. All of these are costumes. What wears them remains forever unaffected."