Lessons on the Upanishads: 28 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Tuesday 27, October 2026, 20:42.
Books
Vedanta & Upanishads
Lessons on the Upanishads: 5.1.
Chapter 5: The Isavasya Upanishad Continued and the Kena Upanishad-2.
Post-28.

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Chapter 5: The Isavasya Upanishad Continued and the Kena Upanishad-2.

All ends that you expect, all fruits of actions that you desire, are placed in the future, in the time process, which is yet to come. You do something today, just now, and you expect some result of action to follow after some time. This 'after some time' is the futurity of it. All actions individually motivated are, therefore, bound by time and, therefore, they are also binding in every other way. All bondage is the bondage of the time process. Only the entry of timelessness or eternity into your life can liberate you. You have to live in the present much more than in the past and the future. But if you worry about the past and get aggrieved about the future, the present is obliterated from your vision. Then the crocodile of the time process will consume you completely. Knowledge and action go together because action is nothing but the movement of knowledge itself. As the movement of waves on the surface of the ocean is in fact a movement of the ocean itself and there are no waves actually speaking—the ocean itself is moving—in just the same manner, all action is the movement of knowledge. Everything that you do from the point of view of this knowledge of the Upanishad is God Himself working through you. The Bhagvadgita also says that you are an instrument in the hands of God—nimittamatram bhava (Gita 11.33). You are like a fountain pen that writes; the Writer is somebody else. You are a tool or an instrument; the Handler is somebody else, because you are a part and God is the whole. The whole determines the part, so you cannot assume the role of the whole while you are only a segment of the totality to which you belong.

Hence, make not the mistake of imagining that you can grab this world and have a lot of property, wealth, land, etc. You will not get it. You may appear to be getting it, but it is an illusionary presentation before you. You will be clouded with a delusion that things are under your control. You will find that nothing is under your control. Even the body is not totally under your control; it is working in its own way, and you have to cooperate with it. No process—individually, socially or outside—is entirely under one man's control, because there is a total wholeness that is operating in all parts, in which we are also participants.

We have to deeply contemplate this great significant teaching of the Upanishad that contemplation is action, and action is contemplation. In Germany there was a great mystic called Meister Eckhart. He used to humorously say, “If you want to meditate more, work more. If you want to work more, meditate more.” What is this contradictory statement? Because work requires a lot of energy and participating capacity in the structure of the whole which is this creation, this capacity to participate will manifest itself through internal contemplation. So if you want to work more, you have to meditate more. And if you want to meditate more, you have to work more because of the fact that your meditational process also is a kind of work, in the sense of an internal participation in cosmic affairs. Psychological participation becomes meditation, and any kind of gesture that you make outwardly to manifest this internal contemplation becomes action. Thus, meditation manifests itself as action and action energises the process of meditation. Therefore, make not the mistake of isolating action from knowledge.

The greatest masters who lived in this world were very great active participants and great masters of wisdom and meditation. They lived as highly energetic participants in every kind of work and were in union with the realities of life within. As a matter of fact, if you create a kind of rift between two things, even mentally, you are creating a rift in your own personality. A personality rift will manifest itself as a rift in society, social behaviour and all things in the world. An alignment of personality will be marred by a psychological rift that you create by the very thought that what you do has a duality behind it—namely, knowing one thing and doing another thing. What you think, that you say; what you say, that you do; what you do, that you speak; and what you speak, that you think. Karmanyekam vachasyekam manasyekam mahatmanam: “Great souls have only one thing in their action, in their speech and in their thought.” And the same verse is repeated in the case of opposite personalities: karmanyekam vachasyekam manasyekam duratmanam. One thing in action, one thing in speech, one thing in thought is the characteristic of great people, but with a different shift, the same thing is the case with people who are paltry and unknowing. What do they do? “One thing is their action, one thing is what they say, and one thing is what they think.” It is a shift in emphasis, but the words are the same.

So the Isavasya Upanishad tells us again, as a third instruction, that knowing is being, and action is the movement of being, and action is also what is called becoming. If the whole process of creation itself is a manifestation of God's Being—the greatest action that you can think of at any time—why should not your action be a manifestation of your being? And your being is nothing but the knowledge of your being. If God's knowledge of His own Being can reveal itself as the wondrous work of this creation, why should not your knowledge of your being manifest itself as your actions? How is it that you find a difficulty?

Here is the essence of the whole matter. If you cannot remember everything, remember at least these two sentences. They will act as a recipe for you to memorise these thoughts. If God's Being can manifest itself as the wondrous action of creation, and inasmuch as your being is inseparable from God's Being, it stands to reason that your actions also should be a manifestation of your being. Therefore, there is no conflict between your actions and your being, which is nothing but the knowledge of your being.

The fourth instruction is: There is no difference between creation and God. The Universal and the particular, the Eternal and the temporal, God and creation, purusha and prakriti, the internal and the external, whatever word you may use, stand always in a state of harmony. God is not outside the world, and the world is not outside God. God is not extracosmic, as some thinkers may tell us. He is not a deus ex machina. He is not an instrumental operative force standing outside the material of creation. We bestowed some thought on this previously. The pervasion of God in all creation rules out any kind of extra-cosmic existence of God. He is not outside the world, standing somewhere in the seventh heaven and fashioning this world as a potter fashions the pot. God is not merely the efficient cause or the instrumental cause; God is also the material cause. In the case of the pot, the potter is only an efficient cause; he is not the material cause. That is, he himself does not become the pot; he has an external material. But in the case of God, external material does not exist because He is infinite. This world, therefore, is a revelation of God. We have to use words carefully here. We cannot say He has modified Himself, changed Himself, transformed Himself, nor can we say He has become something else. We cannot say that, because He has not become something else. He is as He was. In the past, present and future, He exists in the same condition.

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