Having spent five or ten minutes thinking of Janaka's vision as though it were your own, what have you understood from within yourself?

Hold on to that understanding as you consider the following interpretations -- and be willing to let your understanding reform itself from time to time.

THE MAJOR ISSUES

I. How could Janaka’s vision of another self have occurred?

II. What might Yajnavalkya have meant when he said that Janaka was “both -- and neither”?

III. How can the story of Janaka and the Beggar help you to exercise the greatest power available to any of us, anywhere, any time -- right action in the present?

BASIC INTERPRETATIONS

The interpretations presented for your consideration here are neither exhaustive nor altogether mutually exclusive. You may find yourself agreeing with one position now and with another later -- and synthesizing others yet later again.

Often the tension between one or more evident truths is the venue in which the clearest glimpses of truth itself are briefly revealed to those with open vision.

Janaka’s experience, Yajnavalkya’s reply, and your power to perform right action in the present may be regarded in at least four ways:

PSYCHOLOGICALLY

PHILOSOPHICALLY

RELIGIOUSLY

SPIRITUALLY

DREAM THEORY

Some dream theorists may naturally tend to regard Janaka’s experience as a spontaneous, compressed, waking dream. They believe that such phenomena are constantly active just below the level of consciousness and occasionally show up briefly in the midst of daily tasks, especially when we are tired. Others might focus even more on the fact that Janaka was tired. If he were actually sleep deprived, then this might be a very good explanation of the entire event. Nothing in the narrative indicates that degree of fatigue, however.

Psychoanalysts could easily agree that the event was a brief dream of some kind, but explain it differently. On the Freudian view it demonstrates two prime characteristics of dreams, wish fulfillment and compensation. It seems to express the king’s unconscious wish to be an ordinary man, free from the cares of rulership. As for the compensatory element, Janaka does not dream he is a scholar, soldier, or priest. He suffers the hardships of the beggar’s life instead in order to compensate for the unconscious guilt he must feel at having all the benefits of an absolute monarch.

Jungian analysts would see the beggar figure differently. He might represent the archetype of the Wise Old Man, except that Janaka himself is the beggar. His function might therefore be to remind Janaka the king of what goes on in the lives of the petitioners who come before him. Additionally, the purpose of the entire dream, or vision, might also be to make clear to Janaka how much he has in common with even the least in his kingdom.

COGNITION THEORY

Cognitive theorists might explain Janaka’s experience as an instance of “hypnagogic imagery,” the ordinary kaleidoscope of images we sometimes have at the transition from waking to sleeping. Hypnagogic imagery, however, is typically a jumbled rush of faces, landscapes, and odd figures without narrative or apparent meaning. They are forms observed from an internal distance, so to speak. Janaka’s experience was just the opposite. His vision of another self was coherent, integrated, and intimate. More than a disconnected observer, he seemed to be a living part of the phenomenon.

Interestingly, many people actually do have fleeting images which almost seem hypnagogic, but are more substantial. They seem to be a kind of consciousness or vague memory of someone else’s identity. Only rarely do they rise to the level of Janaka’s experience.

Some cognitive theorists maintain that such impressions, along with dreams and visions in general, ought to be placed in the same category in which they put hypnagogic imagery itself. In their minds all such events are no more than eruptions of a kind of “random off- line processing” which normally occurs as background data reorganization in the human biocomputer. (Note the similarity to waking dream theory.)