The Mundakoupanishad : Post-65 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday 21, Aug 2024. 06:10.
The First Mundaka: 
Second Khanda
Mantram: 12.
POST-65.

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Mantram - No 12.

The efforts of an individual are generally stained by ignorance, selfish desires and actions connected with those desires. Karmas are enjoined only on such people as cannot extricate themselves from the clutches of these fetters. The different regions and experiences which are accessible to these people, are also of the same nature as their causes. They give rise to such unpleasant experiences as rise and fall in different states. They are also dependent on and affected by the defects consequent upon the non-performance of what is enjoined and the performance of what is prohibited. People who revel in mere phenomenal selfish actions alone, get such births as those of beasts, demons, etc. These experiences should be properly analysed with the help of such proofs of knowledge as perception, inference, verbal testimony and comparison. The true nature of these experiences in the different worlds should be known in its essential form. 

These experiences are the different roads to Samsara. They extend from the unmanifest potentiality of beings to the lowest inanimate matter. They are either manifested or unmanifested, physical, astral or mental, objective or subjective. They are interdependent like the seed and the tree. They are the sources of extreme misery and are absolutely essenceless. They are illusory like a juggler's trick or water in the mirage or a city in the clouds or like objects in dream or like a breaking bubble. They are now seen and now not seen. Such experiences should be known to be the results of desires and actions belonging to the mind and senses. An aspirant should turn his back to all these and should come to the conclusion that the whole universe is produced by nescience and its undesirable consequences. The network of this universe is kept intact in the forms of pleasure and pain, virtue and vice, good and evil, etc.

A wise aspirant, therefore, should get disgusted with all these experiences beginning from Brahman down to a blade of grass. That which is not produced or created, is not attained through that which is produced or created. There can be relationship only between similar things, and not between two dissimilar things. A product has got non-eternal characteristics and, therefore, it will not be able to know the eternal as long as it is bound to such lower characteristics. Moreover, all effects or produced things can relate themselves to another thing only through a change or modification or an action. It is obvious that self-transformation is not the way of attaining true knowledge of any object. 

Since a transformation is transitory in nature, the knowledge that is effected by it would also be transitory. In this universe of manifestation, there is nothing that is not produced. Brahman is not something that is produced. Hence, the attainment of the knowledge of Brahman is not possible through a transitory process, which is the characteristic of produced things alone. Everything that is done leads only to what is done or produced. That which is eternal and not produced, is attained only through pure Knowledge which is not non-eternal or produced. Brahman is not subject to either producing or creating or obtaining or purifying or modifying in any way.

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Continued

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