{"id":662,"date":"2013-07-13T01:29:33","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:29:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=662"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:29:33","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:29:33","slug":"03-the-discovery-of-the-absolute-brahman-vol-12-the-upanishad-volume-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/12-the-upanishad-volume-12\/03-the-discovery-of-the-absolute-brahman-vol-12-the-upanishad-volume-12","title":{"rendered":"-03_The Discovery of the Absolute Brahman.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n

\nPHILOSOPHY OF THE UPANISHADS<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

\n


\nONE<\/font><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n


\nThe Discovery of the
\nAbsolute Brahman<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n


\n <\/span><\/b><\/p>\n


\nT<\/span>HE
\n<\/span><\/b>idea of transcendental Unity, Oneness, and
\nStability behind all the flux and variety of phenomenal life is the basal idea
\nof the Upanishads: this is the pivot of all Indian metaphysics, the sum and goal
\nof our spiritual experience. To the phenomenal world around us stability and
\nsingleness seem at first to be utterly alien; nothing but passes and changes,
\nnothing but has its counterparts, contrasts, harmonised and dissident parts; and
\nall are perpetually shifting and rearranging their relative positions and
\naffections. Yet if one thing is certain, it is that the sum of all this change
\nand motion is absolutely stable, fixed and unvarying, that all this
\nheterogeneous multitude of animate and inanimate things are fundamentally
\nhomogeneous and one. Otherwise nothing could endure, nor could there be any
\ncertainty in existence. And this unity, stability, unvarying fixity which reason
\ndemands, and ordinary experience points to is being ascertained slowly but
\nsurely by the investigations of Science. We can no longer escape from the
\ngrowing conviction that however the parts may change and shift and appear to
\nperish, yet the sum and the whole remains unchanged, undiminished and
\nimperishable; however multitudinous, mutable and mutually irreconcilable forms
\nand compounds may be, yet the grand substratum is one, simple and enduring;
\ndeath itself is not a reality but a seeming, for what appears to be destruction,
\nis merely transformation and a preparation for rebirth. Science may not have
\nappreciated the full import of her own discoveries; she may shrink from an
\nunflinching acceptance of the logical results to which they lead; and certainly
\nshe is as yet far from advancing towards the great converse truths which they
\nfor the present conceal, \u2014 for instance the wonderful fact that not only is
\ndeath a seeming, but life itself is a seeming, and beyond life and death there
\nlies a condition which is truer and<\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 1<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n

\ntherefore more permanent than either. But though Science
\ndreams not as yet of her goal her feet are on the road from which there is no
\nturning back, \u2014 the road which Vedanta on a different plane has already trod
\nbefore it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\nHere then is a great fundamental fact which demands from
\nphilosophy an adequate explanation of itself, \u2014 that all variations resolve
\nthemselves into an unity; that within the flux of things and concealed by it is
\nan indefinable, immutable Something, at once the substratum and sum of all,
\nwhich Time cannot touch, motion perturb, nor variation increase or diminish, and
\nthat this substratum and sum has been from all eternity and will be for all
\neternity. A fundamental fact to which all thought moves, and yet is it not, when
\nnarrowly considered, an acute paradox? For how can the sum of infinite
\nvariations be a sempiternally fixed amount which has never augmented or
\ndecreased and can never augment or decrease? How can that whole be fixed and
\neternal of which every smallest part is eternally varying and perishing? Given a
\nbewildering whirl of motion, how does the result come to be not merely now or as
\na result, but from beginning to end a perfect fixity? Impossible, unless either
\nthere be a guiding Power, for which at first sight there seems to be no room in
\nthe sempiternal chain of causation; or unless that sum and substratum be the one
\nreality, imperishable because not conditioned by Time, indivisible because not
\nconditioned by Space, immutable because not conditioned by causality, \u2014 in a
\nword absolute and transcendent and therefore <\/i>eternal, unalterable and
\nundecaying. Motion and change and death and division would then be merely
\ntransitory phenomena, marks and seemings of the One and Absolute, the as yet
\nundefined and perhaps indefinable It which alone is.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\nTo such a conclusion Indian speculation had turned at a very
\nearly period of its conscious strivings \u2014 uncertainly at first and with many
\ngropings and blunders. The existence of some Oneness which gives order and
\nstability to the multitudinous stir of the visible world, the Aryan thinkers
\nwere from the first disposed to envisage and they sought painfully to arrive at
\nthe knowledge of that Oneness in its nature or its essentiality. The living
\nForces of the Cosmos which they had long worshipped,<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 2<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n

\nyet always with a floating but persistent perception of an
\nUnity in their multitude, melted on closer analysis into a single concept, a
\nsingle Force or Presence, one and universal. The question then arose, was that
\nForce or Presence intelligent or non-intelligent? God or Nature? "He alone,"
\nhazarded the Rig-veda, "knoweth, or perhaps He knoweth not." Or might it not be
\nthat the Oneness which ties together and governs phenomena and rolls out the
\nevolution of the worlds, is really the thing we call Time,<\/i> since of the
\nthree original conditions of phenomenal existence. Time, Space and Causality,
\nTime is a necessary part of the conception of Causality and can hardly be
\nabstracted from the conception of Space, but neither Space nor Causality seems
\nnecessary to the conception of Time? Or if it be not Time, might it not be
\nsvabhāva,<\/i> the essential nature of things taking various conditions and
\nforms? Or perhaps Chance,<\/i> some blind principle working out an unity and
\nlaw in things by infinite experiment, \u2014 this too might be possible. <\/b>Or
\nsince from eternal uncertainty eternal certainty cannot come, might it not be
\nFate,<\/i> a fixed and unalterable law in things in subjection to which this
\nworld evolves itself in a preordained procession of phenomena from which it
\ncannot deviate? <\/b>Or perhaps in the original atomic fountain of things
\ncertain Elements<\/i> might be discovered which by perpetual and infinite
\ncombinations and permutations keep the universe to its workings? But if so,
\nthese elements must themselves proceed from something which imposes on them the
\nlaw of their being, and what could that be but the Womb,<\/i> the matrix of
\noriginal and indestructible matter, the plasm which moulds the universe and out
\nof which it is moulded? And yet in whatever scheme of things the mind might
\nultimately rest, some room surely must be made for these conscious, thinking and
\nknowing Egos<\/i> of living beings, of whom knowledge and thought seem to be
\nthe essential selves and without whom this world of perceivable and knowable
\nthings could not be perceived and known; \u2014 and if not perceived and known, might
\nit not be that without them it could not even exist?<\/span><\/p>\n

\nSuch were the gurges of endless speculation in which the old
\nAryan thinkers tossed and, perplexed, sought for some firm standing-ground, some
\ndefinite clue which might save them from <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 3<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n

\nbeing beaten about like stumbling blind men led by a guide as
\nblind. They sought at first to liberate themselves from the tyranny of
\nappearances by the method which Kapila, the ancient prehistoric Master of
\nThought, had laid down for mankind, the method called Sankhya or the law of
\nEnumeration. The method of Kapila consisted in guidance by pure discriminative
\nreason and it took its name from one of its principal rules, the law of
\nenumeration and generalisation. They enumerated first the immediate
\nTruths-in-Things which they could distinguish or deduce from things obviously
\nphenomenal, and from these by generalisation they arrived at a much smaller
\nnumber of ulterior Truths-in-Things of which the immediate were merely aspects.
\nAnd then having enumerated these ulterior Truths-in-Things, they were able by
\ngeneralisation to reduce them to a very small number of ultimate
\nTruths-in-Things, the Tattwas (literally That-nesses) of the developed Sankhya
\nphilosophy. And these Tattwas once enumerated with some approach to certainty,
\nwas it not possible to generalise yet one step farther? The Sankhya did so
\ngeneralise and by this supreme and final generalisation arrived at the very last
\nstep on which, in its own unaided strength, it could take safe footing. This was
\nthe great principle of Prakriti, the single eternal indestructible principle and
\norigin of Matter which by perpetual evolution rolls out through aeons and aeons
\nthe unending panorama of things.1<\/sup> And for whose benefit? Surely for
\nthose conscious knowing and perceiving Egos, the army of witnesses, who, each in
\nhis private space of reasoning and perceiving Mind partitioned off by an
\nenveloping medium of gross matter, sit for ever as spectators in the theatre of
\nthe Universe! For ever, thought the Sankhyas, since the Egos, though their
\npartitions are being continually broken down and built anew and the spaces
\noccupied never remain permanently identical, yet seem themselves to be no less
\neternal and indestructible than Prakriti.<\/span><\/p>\n

\nThis then was the wide fixed lake of ascertained
\nphilosophical knowledge into which the method of Sankhya, pure intellectual
\n<\/span>
\n <\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n


\n <\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n


\n1<\/span><\/sup>
\nNote that Matter here not only includes gross matter with which Western Science
\nis mainly concerned, but subtle matter, the material in which thought and
\nfeeling work, and causal matter in which the fundamental operations of the
\nWill-to-live are conducted.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n Page \u2013 4<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n

\nreasoning on definite principles, led in the mind of ancient
\n. India. Branchings-off, artificial canals from the reservoir were not, indeed,
\nwanting. Some, by resolving that army of witnesses into a single Witness,
\narrived at the dual conception of God and Nature, Purusha and Prakriti, Spirit
\nand Matter, Ego and Non-ego. Others, more radical, perceived Prakriti as the
\ncreation, shadow or aspect of Purusha, so that God alone remained, the spiritual
\nor ideal factor eliminating by inclusion the material or real. Solutions were
\nalso attempted on the opposite side; for some eliminated the conscious Egos
\nthemselves as mere seemings; not a few seem to have thought that each ego is
\nonly a series of successive shocks of consciousness and the persistent sense of
\nidentity no more than an illusion due to the unbroken continuity of the shocks.
\nIf these shocks of consciousness are borne on the brain from the changes of
\nPrakriti in the multitudinous stir of evolution, then is consciousness one out
\nof the many terms of Prakriti itself, so that Prakriti alone remains as the one
\nreality, the material or real factor eliminating by inclusion the spiritual or
\nideal. But if we deny, as many did, that Prakriti is an ultimate reality apart
\nfrom the perceptions of Purushas and yet apply the theory of a false notion of
\nidentity created by successive waves of sensation, we arrive at the impossible
\nand sophistic position of the old Indian Nihilists whose reason by a singular
\nsuicide landed itself in Nothingness as the cradle and bourne, nay, the very
\nstuff and reality of all existence. And there was a third direction in which
\nthought tended and which led it to the very threshold of Vedanta; for this also
\nwas a possible speculation that Prakriti and Purusha might both be quite real
\nand yet not ultimately different aspects or sides of each other and so, after
\nall, of a Oneness higher than either. But these speculations plausible or
\nimperfect, logical or sophistic, were yet mere speculations ; they had no basis
\neither in observed fact or in reliable experience. Two certainties seemed to
\nhave been arrived at, Prakriti was testified to by a close analysis of
\nphenomenal existence; it was the basis of the phenomenal world which without a
\nsubstratum of original matter could not be accounted for and without a
\nfundamental oneness and indestructibility in that substratum could not be what
\nobservation showed it to be, subject,  <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 5<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n

\nnamely, to fixed laws and evidently invariable in its sum and
\nsubstance. On the other hand, Purushas were testified to by the eternal
\npersistence of the sense of individuality and identity whether during life or
\nafter death\u00b9<\/sup> and by the necessity of a per\u00adceiving cause for the
\nactivity of Prakriti; they were the receptive and contemplative Egos within the
\nsphere of whose consciousness Prakriti, stirred to creative activity by their
\npresence, performed her long drama of phenomenal Evolution.<\/span><\/p>\n

\nBut meanwhile the seers of ancient India had, in their
\nexperiments and efforts at spiritual training and the conquest of the body,
\nperfected a discovery which in its importance to the future of human knowledge
\ndwarfs the divinations of Newton and Galileo; even the discovery of the
\ninductive and experimental method in Science was not more momentous; for they
\ndis\u00adcovered down to its ultimate processes the method of Yoga and by the method
\nof Yoga they rose to three crowning realisations. They realised first as a fact
\nthe existence under the flux and multitudinousness of things of that supreme
\nUnity and immutable Stability which had hitherto been posited only as a
\nnecessary theory, an inevitable generalisation. They came to know that It is the
\none reality and all phenomena merely its seemings and appearances, that It is
\nthe true Self of all things and phenomena are merely its clothes and trappings.
\nThey learned that It is absolute and transcendent and, because absolute and
\ntranscendent, therefore eternal, immutable, imminuable and indivisible. And
\nlooking back on the past progress of speculation they perceived that this also
\nwas the goal to which pure intellectual reasoning would have led them. For that
\nwhich is in Time must be born and perish; but the Unity and Stability of things
\nis eternal and must therefore transcend Time. That which is in Space must
\nincrease and diminish, have parts and relations, but the Unity and Stability of
\nthings is imminuable, not augmentable, independent of the changefulness of its
\nparts and untouched by the shifting of their relations, and must therefore
\ntranscend<\/span><\/p>\n


\n <\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n


\n1<\/span><\/sup>
\nSurvival of the human personality after death has always been held in India to
\nbe a proved fact beyond all dispute; the Charvak denial of it was contemned as
\nmere irrational and wilful folly. Note however that survival after death does
\nnot necessarily to the Indian mind imply immortality; but only raises a
\npresumption in its favour.<\/span> <\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 6<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n

\nSpace; \u2014 and if it transcends Space, cannot really have
\nparts, since Space is the condition of material divisibility; divisibility
\ntherefore must be, like death, a seeming and not a reality. Finally that which
\nis subject to Causality, is necessarily subject to Change; but the Unity and
\nStability of things is immutable, the same now as it was aeons ago and will be
\naeons hereafter, and must therefore transcend Causality.<\/span><\/p>\n

\nThis then was the first realisation through Yoga,
\nnityo\u2019nityānām,<\/i> the One Eternal in many transient.<\/span><\/p>\n

\nAt the same time they realised one truth more, \u2014 a surprising
\ntruth; they found that the transcendent absolute Self of things was also the
\nSelf of living beings, the Self too of man, that highest of the beings living in
\nthe material plane on earth. The Purusha or conscious Ego in man which had
\nperplexed and baffled the Sankhyas, turned out to be precisely the same in his
\nultimate being as Prakriti the apparently non-conscious source of things; the
\nnon-consciousness of Prakriti, like so much else, was proved a seeming, and no
\nreality, since behind the inanimate form a conscious Intelligence at work is to
\nthe eyes of the Yogin luminously self-evident.<\/span><\/p>\n

\nThis then was the second realisation through Yoga,
\ncetanaścetanānām,<\/i> the One Consciousness in many Consciousnesses.<\/span><\/p>\n

\nFinally at the base of these two realisations was a third,
\nthe most important of all to our race, \u2014 that the Transcendent Self in
\nindividual man is as complete because identically the same<\/i> as the
\nTranscendent Self in the Universe; for the Transcendent is indivisible and the
\nsense of separate individuality is only one of the fundamental seemings on which
\nthe manifestation of phenomenal existence perpetually depends. In this way the
\nAbsolute which would otherwise be beyond knowledge, becomes knowable; and the
\nman who knows his whole Self knows the whole Universe. This stupendous truth is
\nenshrined to us in the two famous formulae of Vedanta, so\u2019ham.<\/i> He am I,
\nand aham brahma asmi,<\/i> I am Brahman, the Eternal.<\/span><\/p>\n

\nBased on these four grand truths, nityo\u2019nityānām,
\ncetanaścetanānām, so\u2019ham, aham brahma asmi,<\/i> as upon four mighty pillars the
\nlofty philosophy of the Upanishads raised its front among the distant stars. <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 7<\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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