KENOPANISHAD -11: Swami Krishnananda.

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Friday  30,  Aug  2024 06:20.
Article
Scriptures
Kenopanishad
Commentary on Section 1
Mantram - 5 (Continued)
Post-11.

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Mantram- 5(Continued):

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad has a series of negations known as neti neti, 'not this, not this' or, rather, 'not thus, not thus', which means to say that Truth is not this which we are seeing or conceiving through the senses and the mind. How are we to negate the not-Truth from the Truth, or the not-Self from the Self? By setting aside those things, those forms, those conceptions which are external to the knowing consciousness. The objects, in the beginning, appear multitudinous, and we choose a few objects for the concentration of our minds. Later on we entangle ourselves in more and more of larger numbers of things, and then, at a very advanced stage, with a philosophically construed mind, try to take the universe as a whole in mental grasp and concentrate the mind on that. Nevertheless it is an object, vastest in extent though it be. From the varieties of isolated objects, objectivity boils itself down to a single object of the whole universe philosophically conceived, which, in the Samkhya, is called prakriti, the biggest object ever conceivable, as opposed to the purusha or Pure Self-consciousness. There the Samkhya ended. A huge object was presented before us, the universal object, the prakriti, and there the matter was closed with a gulf between the Self and its content. Now we do not know what to do with this prakriti. Even that cannot be the Self, says the Upanishad—nedam yad idam upāsate—for Consciousness cannot be one with an isolated content.

Upasana does not necessarily mean religious worship. It is any kind of concentration of mind, any judgment or evaluation, any sensation, perception or thought, when it is charged with a feeling, ardour or love, upasana, from the point of view of this Upanishad: nedam yad idam upāsate. If we want to recognise this pure Self in us, we have to isolate all sorts of objectivity, not the objects necessarily. There is a difference between isolation of 'objects' and isolation of 'objectivity'. This is a subtle distinction which many people cannot easily note. We generally reject objects while what we are called upon to do is to eliminate objectivity, and the inability to make this distinction oftentimes is tantamount to a failure in the vairagya, or the spirit of renunciation, in any seeker. People have a wrong notion of things and then they think they are in a state of vairagya. The wrong notion is the need felt for a rejection of objects rather than the objectivity in objects. What is wrong with us is not the thought of an object so much as the thought of the objectivity of the object, the externality of a thing, the outsidedness of value. This is the mistake that we are committing, and it is this that the Upanishad, in the present context, regards as derogatory to true spirituality.

In the same way as there is the atma-chaitanya within us, there is vishaya-chaitanya (object-consciousness) in the object. To give an illustration: Water is under the waves of the ocean. Whatever be the distance of two waves between themselves, there is water beneath both the waves. Likewise is consciousness predominantly present both in the subject and the object. Subjectively it is called the atma-chaitanya and objectively it is vishaya-chaitanya. In the perception of an object, naturally, there is a kind of coordination established between the subject-consciousness and the object-consciousness. On other occasions I have tried to explain how this perception takes place at all. The presence of consciousness hiddenly manifest in objects becomes responsible for our consciousness of objects; otherwise, even the objects could not be known. In the perception of an object there is reality perceived because there is the very same consciousness in the object also as it is in the subject, but what is wrong here is that it is recognised as an external something. The water of one wave is the water of another wave, also. They are not two different substances, but in sensory perception the mistake is committed in isolating the form from the content or the essence.

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Continued

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