Ashtavakra & Janaka — The King Who Had Everything Except Peace, Until a Sage Told Him This...

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Imagine a billionaire CEO, bro. He seems to own everyone and everything within his huge sphere of influence, but one day he finally asks the question that his hordes of wealth can't seem to solve. Why am I still not free from suffering? Why am I still not at peace?

[00:00:17]He's tried every retreat, technique, and hack in the book, and yet he can never seem to hack his way to freedom.

[00:00:24]As it turns out, this isn't just a modern story. There's an ancient text in the Avadhuta, the CEO was a king, Janaka, and the guy who answered him was Ashtavakra.

[00:00:36]Janaka appeared to have everything that anyone could dream of and might spend their whole life chasing. Wealth, status, power, a whole damn kingdom. And yet he still felt deep down that he wasn't free.

[00:00:50]And so, he goes to Ashtavakra, like a king, humbling himself and getting on the level of his fellow man. And he asks, "How is one to acquire knowledge?

[00:01:01]How is one to attain liberation? And how is one to reach dispassion? Tell me this, sir."

[00:01:08]I mean, look at how every question is laced with the vibes of grasping.

[00:01:13]Acquire, attain, reach. The language of a guy who believes he got everything he ever wanted through acquisition and consumption, and yet he's turned up completely empty.

[00:01:27]But Ashtavakra doesn't just go straight in with any radical truth about reality.

[00:01:33]He tries to start on Janaka's level with what he expects and what he can get his teeth sunk into.

[00:01:41]He says, "If you are seeking liberation, my son, avoid the objects of the senses like poison and cultivate tolerance, sincerity, compassion, contentment, and truthfulness as the antidote.

[00:01:58]You see, he doesn't just say practice or doing anything is completely useless. He tries to turn the king towards the truth in a gentle, practical, emotionally regulated way.

[00:02:11]Although, like all the best sages, he does a total switch. He knows that even if cultivating these virtues won't lead to the ultimate peace, doing so can certainly prepare one for it.

[00:02:26]And now, Janaka is more prepared and less craving for things outside himself, Ashtavakra drops the bombshell.

[00:02:37]"You do not consist of any of the elements, earth, water, fire, air, or even ether. To be liberated, know yourself as consciousness, the witness of these."

[00:02:53]He tells the king, right to his face, that he isn't even ultimately the king.

[00:02:59]The essence of who he is isn't a body mind, isn't matter, and isn't even spirit. It's the consciousness itself, the basis of the whole appearance.

[00:03:11]And so, next he says, "If you will remain resting in consciousness, seeing yourself as distinct from the body, then even now you will become happy, peaceful, and free from bonds."

[00:03:27]"Even now," he says, "not after 10 years of practice, not after talking all of life's problems over with a therapist, now."

[00:03:37]He is talking about freedom that isn't produced by anything. It's simply recognized as the ever-present reality.

[00:03:45]So, let's take a look at how the instruction is twofold. First, he instructs us to know our self as the changeless witnessing consciousness and not as the changing appearances.

[00:04:01]But then he's directly instructing rest as that.

[00:04:06]Rest as the consciousness. Rest as the awareness.

[00:04:10]Not rest as in go to sleep.

[00:04:13]Rest as in stay relaxed, open, aware, not clinging to any particular appearance, thought, or feeling, or circumstance.

[00:04:24]But Ashtavakra keeps going.

[00:04:27]Dismantling everything that the king has built his identity on.

[00:04:31]Not [snorts] to make him miserable, but to destroy the illusion that had made him miserable.

[00:04:37]He says, "You do not belong to the Brahmin or any other caste.

[00:04:43]You are not at any stage of life.

[00:04:46]Nor are you anything that the eye can see. You are unattached, formless, the witness of everything. So be happy."

[00:04:56]He knows that Janaka can never source permanent happiness from even being at the highest of highs in the material world. He could be the king of the universe and so long as he's basing his satisfaction on something outside of himself, well, it will always be temporary. It won't ever last, right?

[00:05:17]And so Ashtavakra tells the king, "Righteousness and unrighteousness, pleasure and pain are purely of the mind and no concern of yours.

[00:05:29]You are neither the doer nor the reaper of the consequences. And so you are always free.

[00:05:40]You are the one witness of everything and are always completely free.

[00:05:45]Notice how he instructs the king to cultivate virtues to be free, but then he says he always is anyway. This is the thing about awakening from the dream of personal suffering. The absolute truth is always the absolute truth, right? I mean it has to be.

[00:06:05]As consciousness, you're already free.

[00:06:09]But to recognize it practically in this relative world of ours, sometimes it takes a bit of honest investigation, emotional releasing, calming the nervous system, and perhaps thinking a little outside ourself.

[00:06:25]Because it's reflective of the truth even if we don't necessarily bask in the warm feeling of everyone and everything is me all the time, if we're open to it intellectually, we might eventually start to feel it and be open to the deeper message and truly relax into being.

[00:06:47]Ashtavakra allows even thought to point to freedom.

[00:06:52]He says, "If one thinks of oneself as free, one is free.

[00:06:57]And if one thinks of oneself as bound, one is bound."

[00:07:02]But here's what makes this story different from almost every spiritual or mystical story that you've ever heard.

[00:07:09]There's no dark night of the soul, no years of struggle to get to the higher self.

[00:07:15]It just works immediately.

[00:07:19]Well, it must have done because in the next chapter it doesn't open up with Ashtavakra continuing to teach. It opens up with Janaka speaking, already awake in his own voice. "Truly, I am spotless and at peace, the awareness beyond causality.

[00:07:39]All this time I have been afflicted by delusion.

[00:07:44]Now conviction has dawned. A king who has everything and yet couldn't find peace, heard that there was nothing to find and that one is already that.

[00:07:55]Because in his own words, waves, foam, bubbles are no other than water.

[00:08:03]In the same way, all this which has emanated from myself is no other than myself.

[00:08:11]It's like an ocean trying to anxiously hold on to all of its waves because of the idea that if they collapse, the ocean might lose something.

[00:08:20]And then realizing that it's already the ocean.

[00:08:24]So what does this mean for us in these so-called modern times? Well, we live in a time where many of us feel powerless, right? And increasingly under control by a super wealthy, powerful elite.

[00:08:38]And some of us might take a bit of solace in the fact that some of these stories are often thousands of years old, meaning that the same truths have been out there for sometimes multiple thousands of years.

[00:08:52]No matter how much control, approval, or material security you can amass, you'll never truly free beyond it. These guys are not necessarily happy, but I think we both know that it's deeper than that. Because if you're watching or listening to this video and you got this far, well, you already probably know that it's more about yourself.

[00:09:18]The fact is, for thousands of years, the recognition has been out there.

[00:09:23]Lasting peace and happiness can never be sourced in the objects of experience.

[00:09:28]They may be able to be enjoyed, yes, but so long as they're identified with or grasped onto under the illusion that we're a separate self that needs them, then well, then they'll never truly fulfill.

[00:09:43]Instead, we must look towards our true self.

[00:09:48]The true self with a capital S.

[00:09:50]The eternal consciousness, and we must first look directly at what is changeless.

[00:09:57]At the basis of all experience.

[00:10:00]All the peace and contentment that we could ever want is right here in our being.

[00:10:06]It's just that it seems to get covered up by all these dense clouds of thoughts and feelings and identification.

[00:10:14]It's really always already there underneath. But if we don't feel it, then we're identifying with the thoughts and feelings that make us overlook it and perhaps a bit tense with a bit of bodily pressure. But that's why actively releasing the feelings allows us to embody the nature of our beingness. It allows us to actually feel and live that peace that we already are.

[00:10:43]It doesn't mean that we're not already free.

[00:10:46]As soon as we recognize our true self as consciousness, we recognize that all the forms flow through consciousness leaving what we essentially are undisturbed.

[00:10:58]Even in the face of anger, challenge, difficulty, or fear, on their base level, these are all mixture of forms, of sights, of sounds.

[00:11:11]Ashtavakra was pointing to the formless nature within us, inseparable from everything, if you take a closer look.

[00:11:20]The instruction is to rest as the basis of the experience.

[00:11:25]How? Zoom the attention out.

[00:11:29]Relax the attention. Simply be.

[00:11:33]And then to keep returning to this recognition, and if we ever appear to overlook it, we don't need to judge ourselves, because that's just another identity. We simply return and rest as our peace.

[00:11:49]I trust this video served you. More resources are in the video description.

[00:11:53]See you in the next one. Peace.