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The Upanishad in Aphorisms THE ISHA UPANISHAD
FOR the Lord all this is a habitation whatsoever is moving thing in her that moves. Why dost thou say there is a world? There is no world, only One who moves. What thou callest world is the movement of Kali; as such embrace thy world-existence. In thy all-embracing stillness of vision thou art Purusha and inhabitest; in thy outward motion and action thou art Prakriti and the builder of the habitation. Thus envisage thy being. There are many knots of this movement and each knot thy eyes look upon as an object; many currents and each current thy mind sees as force and tendency. Forces and objects are the forms of Kali. To each form of her we give a name. What is this name? It is word, it is sound, it is vibration of being, the child of infinity and the father of mental idea. Before form can be, name and idea must have existed. The half-enlightened say, "Whatever form is built, the Lord enters to inhabit"; but the Seer knows that whatever the Lord sees in His own being, becomes Idea and seeks a form and a habitation. The universe is a rhythmic vibration in infinite existence which multiplies itself into many harmonies and holds them well ordered in the original type of motion. Thou lookest upon a stone and sayest, "It is still." So it is, but to the sense-experience only. For the eye that sees, it is built out of motion and composed of motion. In the ordered repetition of the atomic movements that compose it, consists its appearance of stillness. All stability is a fixed equilibrium of rhythm. Disturb the rhythm, the stability dissolves and becomes unstable. No single rhythm can be eternally stable; therefore the universe Page – 512 is an ocean always in flow, and everything in it is mutable and transient. Each thing in Nature endures till the purpose of Kali in it is fulfilled; then it is dissolved and changed into a constituent of some other harmony. Prakriti is eternal, but every universe passes. The fact of universe endures for ever, but no particular world of things can last; for each universe is only one rhythm out of an infinite number of possible movements. Whatsoever system in Nature or of Nature is thoroughly worked out, must give place to a new harmony. Nevertheless all world and everything in world is eternal in its essential being; for all essential existence is Brahman without end or beginning. Forms and names are also Brahman and eternal; but, in world, theirs is an eternity of recurrence, not of unbroken persistence. Every form and every idea that has once been, exists still and can again recur; every form or idea that is to be, already exists and was from the beginning. Time is a convention of movement, not a condition of existence. That which inhabits the forms of Kali is Self and Lord of the Movement. Purusha is master of Prakriti, not her subject; Soul determines Form and Action and is not determined by them. Spirit reflects in its knowledge the activity of Nature, but only those activities which it has itself compelled Nature to initiate. The soul in the body is master of body and not subject to its laws or limited by its experiences. The soul is not constituted by mind and its activities, for these also are parts of Nature and movements only. Mind and body are instruments of the secret all-knowing and omnipotent Self within us. The soul in the body is not limited in space by the body or in experience by the mind; the whole universe is its habitation. There is only one Self of things, one soul in multitudinous forms. By body and mind I am separated even from my brother or my lover but by exceeding body and mind I can become one with all things in being and in experience, even with the stone and the tree. Page – 513 My universal soul need no more be limited by my individual mind and body, than my individual consciousness is limited by the experience of a single cell in my body. The walls which imprison us have been built up by Prakriti in her movement and exist only in her inferior kingdoms. As one rises higher they become conventional boundaries which we can always stride across and, on the summits, they merely mark off compartments in our universal consciousness. The soul does not move, but motion of Nature takes place in its perfect stillness. The motion of Nature is not real or material motion, but vibration of the soul's self-consciousness. Nature is Chit-Shakti, the Lord's expressive power of self-awareness, by which whatever He sees in Himself, becomes in form of consciousness. Everything in Nature is a becoming of the one Spirit who alone is Being. We and all things in Nature are God's becomings, sarva-bhutani. Although there are to world-experience multitudinous souls (Purushas) in the universe, all these are only one Purusha masked in many forms of His consciousness. Each soul in itself is God entirely, every group of souls is collectively God; the modalities of Nature's movement create their separation and outward differences. God transcends world and is not bound by any law of Nature. He uses laws, laws do not use Him. God transcends world and is not bound to any particular state of consciousness in the world. He is not unity-consciousness nor multiple consciousness, not Personality nor Impersonality, not stillness nor motion, but simultaneously includes all these self-expressions of His absolute being. God simultaneously transcends world, contains it and informs it; the soul in the body can arrive at the God-consciousness and at once transcend, contain and inform its universe. God-consciousness is not exclusive of World-consciousness; Nature is not an outcast from Spirit, but its Image, world is not a falsity contradicting Brahman, but the symbol of a divine Existence. Page – 514 God is the reverse side of Nature, Nature the obverse side of God. Since the soul in the body is eternally and inalienably free, its bondage to egoism, law of bodily nature, law of mental nature, law of pleasure and pain, law of life and death, can only be an apparent and not a real bondage. Our chains are either a play or an illusion or both play and illusion. The secret of our apparent bondage is the Spirit's play by which It consents to forget God-consciousness in the absorption of Nature's movement. The movement of Nature is a sevenfold flow, each stream subject to its own law of motion but containing latent, expressed or half-apparent in itself its six sisters or companions. Nature is composed of Being, Will or Force, Creative Bliss, Pure Idea, Mind, Life and Matter, — Sat, Chit or Tapas, Ananda, Vijnanam, Manas, Prana and Annam. The Soul, Purusha, can seat itself in any of these principles and according to its situation, its outlook changes and it sees a different world; all world is merely arranged and harmonised outlook of the Spirit. What God sees, that exists; what He sees with order and harmony, becomes a world. There are seven worlds, Satya, of pure being, Tapas, of pure will or force, Jana, of pure delight, Mahas, of pure idea, Swar, of pure mentality, Bhuvar, of pure vitality, Bhur, of pure matter. The soul in Sat is pure truth of being and perceives itself as one in the world's multiplicity. The soul in Tapas is pure force of divine will and knowledge and possesses universe omnisciently and omnipotently as its extended self. The soul in Ananda is pure delight and multiplies itself in universal self-creation and unmixed joy of being. The soul in Mahas is pure idea, perceives itself in order and arrangement of comprehensive unity in multiplicity, all things in their unity and each thing in its right place, time and circumstance. It is not subject to the tyranny of impressions, but contains and comprehends the objects it knows. The soul in Manas is pure mentality and receives the pure Page – 515 impression of separate objects and from their sum receives the impression of the whole. It is Manas that measures, limits and divides. The soul in Prana is pure vitality and pours itself out in various life-energy. The soul in Annam is pure matter and forgets force of consciousness in the form of consciousness. Matter is the lowest rung of the ladder and the soul that has descended into Matter tends by its secret nature and inevitable self-impulsion to re-emerge out of form towards the freedom of pure universal being. These are the two movements that govern world-existence, adhogati, the descent towards matter or mere form and ūrdhvagati, the ascent towards Spirit and God. Man is a Mental being, Manu or Manomaya Purusha, who has entered into a vitalised material body and is seeking to make it capable of infinite mentality, infinite ideality so that it may become the perfect instrument, seat and temple of the manifest Sachchidananda. Mind in the material world is attentive to two kinds of knowledge, impacts from outside, corporeal or mental, received into the individual mentality and translated into mental values and knowledge from within, spiritual, ideal or mental similarly translated. Inert physical bodies receive all the impacts that the mind receives, but being devoid of organised mentality, retain them only in the involved mind in matter and are incapable of translating them into mental symbols. Our bodies are naturally inert physical bodies moved by life and mind. They also receive all impacts, but not all of them are translated into mental values. Of those which are translated, some are rendered imperfectly, some perfectly, some immediately, some only after a longer or shorter incubation in the involved mind in matter. There are the same variable phenomena with the internal knowledge. All the knowledge translated here into mental values forms the stuff of our waking consciousness. This waking consciousness accepted by the manomaya puruṣa as itself and organised round a central I-sense is the waking ego. The Jiva or embodied mental being is in its consciousness Page – 516 much wider than the waking ego; it has a wide range of knowledge and experience of the past, present and future, the near and the distant, this life and other lives, this world and other worlds which is not available to the waking ego. The waking ego fails to notice many things and forgets what it notices; the Jiva notices and remembers all experiences. That which goes on in our life-energy and bodies below the level of waking mind is our subconscious self in the world; that which goes on in our mind and higher principles above the level of our waking mind is our superconscious self. The waking ego often receives intimations, more or less obscure, from either source which it fails to trace to their origin. Man progresses in proportion as he widens his consciousness and renders ever wider and finer experiences available for the perception and delight of the waking consciousness and in proportion as he can ascend to higher reaches of mind and beyond mind to ideality and spirit. The swiftest and most effective means of his advance and self-fulfilment is to dissolve his waking ego into the enjoyment of an infinite consciousness, at first mental of the universal manomaya puruṣa, but afterwards ideal and spiritual of the high Vijnana and highest Sachchidananda. The transcendence and dissolution of the waking mental ego in the body is therefore the first object of all practical Vedanta. This transcendence and dissolution may result either in loss of the waking self and relapse into some sleep-bound principle, undifferentiated Prakriti, Sushupta Purusha, Shunyam Brahma (Nihil), etc., or in loss of the world self in Parabrahman or in universalisation of the waking self and the joy of God's divine being in and beyond the world, Amritam. The last is the goal proposed for man by the Isha Upanishad. The waking ego, identifying the Jiva with its body, vital and mental experiences which are part of the stream of Nature's movement and subject to Nature and the process of the movement, falsely believes the soul to be the subject of Nature and not its lord, anisa and not isa. This is the illusion of bondage which the manomaya purusa either accepts or seeks to destroy. Page – 517 Those who accept it are called baddha jīvas, soul sin bondage; those who seek to destroy it, mumukṣu jīvas, self-liberating souls; those who have destroyed it are mukta jīvas, souls free from illusion and limitation. In reality, no soul is bound and therefore none seeking liberation or liberated from bondage; these are all conditions of the waking mind and not of the self or spirit which is īśa, eternally lord and free. The essence of bondage is limitation and the chief circumstances of limitation are death, suffering and ignorance. Death, suffering and ignorance are circumstances of the mind in the vitalised body and do not touch the consciousness of the soul in Vijnana, Ananda, Chit and Sat. The combination of the three lower members, mind, life and body, is called therefore aparārdha, the lower kingdom or in Christian parlance the kingdom of death and sin, the four higher members are called parārdha, the higher kingdom, or in Christian parlance, the kingdom of heaven. To liberate man from death, suffering and ignorance and impose the all-blissful and luminous nature of the higher kingdom upon the lower is the object of the Seer in the Isha Upanishad. This liberation is to be effected by dissolving the waking ego into the Lord's divine being and experiencing entirely our unity with all other existences and with Him who is God, Atman and Brahman. All individual existences are Jagat in Jagati, object of motion in stream of motion and obey the laws and processes of that motion. Body is an object of motion in the stream of material consciousness, of which the principal law is birth and death. All bodies are subject therefore to formation and dissolution. Life is a current of motion in the stream of vital consciousness composed of eternal life-energy. Life is not itself subject to death, — death not being a law of life-energy, — but only to expulsion from the form which it occupies and therefore to the physical experience of death of its body. All matter here is filled with life-energy of a greater or less intensity of action, but the organisation of life in individual animation Page – 518 begins later in the process of the material world by the appearance first of the plant, then of the animal. This evolution of life is caused and supported by the pressure of the gods of the Bhuvar or Life-world upon Bhur. Life entering into body is dominated partly by the laws of body; it is therefore unable to impart its own full and uninterrupted energy to its form. Consequently there is no physical immortality. The organisation of individual animated life tends to hasten the period of dissolution by introducing shocks of an intensity of force alien to matter which wastes the material form by its activity. Therefore the plant dissolves while the stone and metal endure in their own equilibrium. Mind entering into the vitalised body tends still farther to hasten the period of dissolution by the higher demands of its vibrations upon the body. Mind is a knot of motion in the stream of mental consciousness. Like life, it is not itself subject to death, but only to expulsion from the vitalised body it has occupied. But because the mental ego identifies itself with the body and understands by its life only this residence in its present perishable gross corporeal body, therefore it has the mental experience of a bodily death. The experience of death is therefore combined of the apparently mortal mind's ignorance of its own true immortal nature and of the limitation of energy in the body by which the form we inhabit wears out under the shocks of vibrating life-energy and vibrating mentality. We mean by death not dissolution of life or of mind, but dissolution of the form or body. The dissolution of body is not true death for the mental being called man; it is only a change of media and of the surroundings of consciousness. Matter of body changes its constituents and groupings, mental being persists both in essence and personality and passes into other forms and environments. Page – 519 |