The Essence of the Aitareya and Taittiriya Upanishads 7.7. - Swami Krishnananda.

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Saturday, September 04, 8:00. PM.
Chapter-7. The Secret of Sadhana - 7.
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The angels have no physical body. The angel is an ethereal existence, which can penetrate through walls and pierce through everything. It is not physicality; it is rarified angelity. That is the Spirit within us. The angel is still speaking within us; it is not dead. The Spirit within us is the angel. But the whisper which compels us to divert the attention of this angel to the body and all its external relations is the Asura, the Satan speaking. The voice of the divine is the voice of pure divine subjectivity in affiliation with God’s omnipresence; but this is not the way in which we are working in the world. We have a different way altogether. We are not in the Kingdom of God; we are in a mortal world of birth and death. The process known as transmigration is consequent upon this divine impulse, stifled by the urge for sensory contact, struggling to regain its original position but getting defeated again and again. Birth and death are processes of the struggle of the spirit to regain its original position. But in every attempt, it gets defeated. And so it is born and it dies, it is born and it dies, and there is no end to it. So the gods fight and get defeated, fight and get defeated again and again, because they have not employed the proper means in the battle with the Asuras.

After ages of struggle, we awaken ourselves to the proper means. We have to know the tactics of the enemy in order to meet the inimical forces. Already we have been told that the angels are lesser in number and the evil forces are more, and they can threaten us. The quantity of the world always surprises us. And the quality of our Spirit seems to be a little spark before this mighty magnitude of the physical world. We are awe-stricken even by looking at this world. We do not know whether we can do anything here at all. Such a mighty giant is this world before us. So the quantity engulfs the quality; the Asuras overpower the gods. But, the gods have their own strength; quality is superior to quantity, as we all know. Yet, we are frightened by the quantity of things because of the incapacity of this little quality of the spark to assert its pure independence in its primitive originality.

This is the meaning behind the Upanishadic story of the Devasura Sangrama, very interestingly told us, though not in much detail. But it becomes a large epic like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the Puranic stories later on, all meaning finally the agelong struggle between the divine and the undivine forces. It is a conflict between Spirit and matter, Light and darkness, the Subject and the object, the Seer and the seen, the ‘I’ and the ‘you’, and so on. For this purpose, we have to conduct a very incisive analysis of our position and engage ourselves in the very same discipline which was contemplated by the gods in heaven after receiving several kicks and blows and getting defeated. We have been defeated many a time. We have passed through many, many forms of earthly existence. We are told that we have passed through 84 lakhs of species of living beings, etc.; and now we have come to the end of it, as it were, by assuming human form.

It is not really the end, but it is the end in the sense that we have a consciousness of the future or the destiny of ours. So the purpose in existence has awakened itself in man, while in the earlier species this consciousness of the purpose is supposed to be completely obliterated in sleep and there is only a kind of instinctive action without the consciousness of a higher purpose or a destiny in life. But even though man’s existence is not the finale in creation, in a way it is a great achievement indeed. It is a kind of pass mark that we have obtained in an examination, but it is not complete. A pass mark is not an entire success. It is only a patting on the back that we are well, and it is good. But there is a lot to be done further, above the human level, to reach that original position which we have lost.

We have to traverse a long distance, but we have the consolation that we know how much time it will take, what are the means that we have to employ, where is the destination, etc. Even to have this consciousness of purpose is an achievement, though this is a meager achievement because, though we have a consciousness of the purpose of our existence and the nature of the destiny ahead, it has not yet been realised and achieved. So while we are aware of the fact, we have not yet come to possession of this fact. This effort towards the coming into direct contact and realisation of the great purpose of existence, and to regain our original position as angels, is the art of yoga.

The Essence of the Aitareya and Taittiriya Upanishads - Ends.

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