Ashtavakra Gita

A wise man who has determined that he is neither bound nor free abides in peace, though the mind still wavers

This verse candidly admits that realization doesn't necessarily produce a permanently calm mind, only a different relationship to a mind that still wavers.

This verse makes an admission that separates the Gita's teaching from a simpler promise of untroubled serenity: even someone who has genuinely determined that bondage and freedom do not apply to their real nature may still experience a mind that wavers, worries, or reacts. What has changed is not necessarily the texture of mental activity but its weight — the wise no longer stake their sense of who they are on whether that activity is calm or agitated. "Neither bound nor free" is a deliberately paradoxical formula, since both terms presuppose a self capable of being in one state or the other, and the verse points past both categories rather than choosing between them. This is one of several places in the Gita distinguishing the settled certainty of self-knowledge from any guarantee about the ongoing content of thought or feeling.

Ashtavakra Gita

Written about in

• What the Ashtavakra Gita says about freedom

  This is the honest one. Someone who has genuinely seen that neither bondage nor freedom applies to them may still have a wavering mind; what changes is their relation to it, not its behaviour.

• What the Ashtavakra Gita says about grief

  Against all of that, the Gita makes an admission most systems avoid: the wise man's mind still wavers. What changes is not the weather but what he has staked on it — so the text never actually promised a mourner a calm mind, only that calm was never the measure.