Asatoma Sadgamaya Meaning in English

Asatoma Sadgamaya translates to, lead me from illusion to reality... and is the first line of a very commonly recited Sanskrit prayer/mantra known from the Upanishads. In the West, it is commonly known from The Matrix Revolutions during the end title sequence. I thought it was clever of them that they chose this mantra because it bears some similarities with The Matrix. Krishna Consciousness is about the self-realization that we are not this material body. That we, and the world we are in, are temporary material illusions, and to free oneself from it, one has to give up all material desires and sense attachments. The Matrix was a system of control to enslave mankind. It was designed to fool the mind into thinking that everything the senses felt was real, when in fact, it was a computer generated construct fed directly into the brain.

The very heart of Krishna consciousness understanding is that your material body is temporary and an illusion (asatya). Since we rely on our material senses too much, then death (the end of the body -- mrityu) too appears real to us. However, your true self is the soul, and that lives forever (amritam). The self realization of this fact is true knowledge (satya), and those who are absent of this knowledge are ignorant. The Bhagavad Gita Chapter 15 mentions the term asvattha to describe the material construct as being temporary, and based on the desires of the souls.

Meaning and Context

Sat or sad from the word satya, meaning truth or reality

Asat or asato from the word asatya, meaning false or illusion

Jyoti or Jyotir approximates to light, or knowledge

Tamaso approximates to darkness to mean absence of knowledge which is ignorance

Mrityu or mrityorma means death, and mrityu-lok is a material world of death where people live in ignorance and then die

Amritam or amar, is without death, lives forever

Shanti, peace

Gamaya, approximates best as, lead me from. Or, guide me from... However since this appears at the end of the line, you can imagine that the Sanskrit sentence is back to front, which is corrected when translating to English.

In almost all civilized cultures, light represents knowledge, whilst absence of light is ignorance. Hence we can cross out light and darkness and replace it with knowledge and ignorance.

OM, Mantras often start with and end in the sacred vibration OM.

English Translation

Om,

God,

Asato maa sad-gamaya,

Lead me from -- illusion to reality,

Tamaso maa jyotir-gamaya,

Lead me from -- ignorance to knowledge

mrityorma amritam-gamaya,

Lead me from -- death to immortality,

Om shanti, shanti, shanti

God, peace...

The Secret...

The bit that will really blow your socks off, and this will interest all the Hare Krishna followers at ISKCON as well, is that in the Marix film there is this test part where Neo has to jump between two buildings. He falls, and the connection breaks, and he wakes up in his real body outside the matrix. The first thing he notices was blood pouring from his nose, and he asks Morpheus why that was so since the matrix was supposed to be an illusion. His answer was that the mind makes it real... Then Neo asks that if you die in the Matrix, then do you die for real outside the matrix? The answer was yes, because the body cannot live without the mind... I thought this bit especially resembled the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna instructs Arjun that those who die in ignorance, strongly attached to and addicted to sense enjoyment, and believing this was their only life, really do die for sure! However, those who believe that they are not just this body and the senses, and they are more than that, live on after the body dies.