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The Upanishad in Aphorism
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 the 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 & the father of mental idea Before form can be, name & 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 To the eye that sees, it is built out of motion and composed of motion In the ordered
Page – 5351 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 & becomes unstable. No single rhythm can be eternally stable; therefore the universe is an ocean always in flow, and everything in it is mutable & 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 & 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 & Action & 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
Page – 352 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 & mind I am separated even from my brother or my lover, but by exceeding body & mind I can become one with all things in being & in experience, even with the stone & the tree. My universal soul need no more be limited by my individual mind and body, than my individual consciousness is limited by the experiences 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. Every thing in Nature is a becoming of the one Spirit who alone is Being We and all things in Nature are God’s becomings, sarvabhutani. 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
Page – 353 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. God is the reverse side of Nature, Nature the obverse side of God. Since the soul in the body is eternally & 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 & not a real bondage Our chains are either a play or an illusion or both play & 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 & 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, Bhuvah, of pure vitality, Bhuh, 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 & knowledge and possesses universe omnisciently and omnipotently as its extended self
Page – 354 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 & each thing in its right place, time and circumstance It is not subject to the tyranny of impressions, but contains & comprehends the objects it knows. The soul in Manas is pure mentality & receives the pure impression of separate objects & from their sum receives the impression of the whole It is Manas that measures, limits & divides. The soul in Prana is pure vitality & pours itself out in various life-energy. The soul in Annam is pure matter & 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 & inevitable self-impulsion to reemerge 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 urdhwagati, 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 Sacchidananda. 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 & mind They also receive all impacts, but not all of them are
Page – 355 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 purusha as itself & organised round a central I-sense is the waking ego. The Jiva or embodied mental being is in its consciousness much wider than the waking ego; it has a wide range of knowledge & experience of the past, present and future, the near & the distant, this life & other lives, this world & other worlds which is not available to the waking ego The waking ego fails to notice many things & forgets what it notices; the Jiva notices & remembers all experience. That which goes on in our life-energy & bodies below the level of waking mind is our subconscious self in the world; that which goes on in our mind & 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 & renders ever wider & finer experiences available for the perception & delight of the waking consciousness & in proportion as he can ascend to higher reaches of mind & beyond mind to ideality & spirit. The swiftest & most effective means of his advance & self-fulfilment is to dissolve his waking ego in the enjoyment of an infinite consciousness, at first mental of the universal manomaya Purusha, but afterwards ideal and spiritual of the high vijnana & highest Sacchidananda. The transcendence & dissolution of the waking mental ego in the body is therefore the first object of all practical Vedanta. This transcendence & dissolution may result either in loss of the waking self & relapse into some sleepbound principle, undifferentiated Prakriti, sushupta Purusha, Sunyam Brahma (Nihil), etc or in loss of the world self in Parabrahman or in
Page – 356 universalisation of the waking self & the joy of God’s divine being in & beyond the world, Amritam The last is the goal proposed for man by the Isha Upanishad. The waking ego, identifying the Jiva with its bodily, vital & mental experiences which are part of the stream of Nature’s movement & subject to Nature & the process of the movement, falsely believes the soul to be the subject of Nature & not its lord, anish and not Ish This is the illusion of bondage which the manomaya Purusha either accepts or seeks to destroy Those who accept it are called baddha Jivas, souls in bondage; those who seek to destroy it mumukshu Jivas, self-liberating souls,—those who have destroyed it are mukta Jivas, souls free from illusion & limitation. In reality, no soul is bound & 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 Ish, eternally lord & free. The essence of bondage is limitation & the chief circumstances of limitation are death, suffering and ignorance. Death, suffering & ignorance are circumstances of the mind in the vitalised body and do not touch the consciousness of the soul in vijnana, ananda, chit & sat The combination of the three lower members, mind, life & body, is called therefore aparardha, the lower kingdom or in Christian parlance the kingdom of death & sin, the four higher members are called parardha, the higher kingdom, or in Christian parlance, the kingdom of heaven To liberate man from death, suffering & ignorance and impose the all-blissful & 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 & with Him who is God, Atman & Brahman. All individual existences are jagat in jagati, object of motion in stream of motion & obey the laws & processes of that motion. Body is an object of motion in the stream of material
Page – 357 consciousness, of which the principal law is birth & 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 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 & supported by the pressure of the gods of the Bhuvar or life-world upon Bhu. Life entering into body is dominated partly by the laws of body; it is therefore unable to impart its own full & 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 & 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 & vibrating mentality We mean by death not dissolution of life or of mind, but dissolution of the form or body
Page – 358 The dissolution of body is not true death for the mental being called man; it is only a change of media & 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 & environments
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