The Essence of the Aitareya and Taittiriya Upanishads : 3.2. Swami Krishnananda

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Wednesday, August 19, 2020. 4:52. AM.
Chapter 3: Ishvara and Jiva - 2.
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1.
To give an illustration, it is perhaps exactly as one would experience in dream. There is a split of consciousness into the knowing subject and the world of experience; but the split has not taken place. If it had really taken place, we would not wake up into the integrity of our mind. But nevertheless, there is an experience of such a transformation, change and division having taken place.

2.
The first consequence of this division is, as the Upanishad puts it, an intense hunger and thirst. Well, this is a very beautiful word, implying much more than what our usual hunger and thirst would connote. The hunger and thirst of the divinities who wrenched themselves, as it were, from the total of the Universal can be called, in the language of our modern philosophers, the constitutional appetition of the individual. It is not merely the stomach asking for food or the throat asking for water; it is the entire setup of individuality craving for experience in an objective manner. They craved for objective immortality, a thing that they had lost on account of their isolation from the Whole. They became mortal. Mortality is the consciousness of the isolation of the part from the Whole; and then every disease crops up at once.

3.
Hunger and thirst visited these divinities who were cast into this restless ocean of experience objectively, which is what we call this samsara or the world, the universe. But how could this hunger be satisfied? The hunger and the thirst, or the appetition of the individual for satisfaction, can be satisfied only through a medium of experience. There must be a body; there must be a food to appease this hunger. Where is this food and where is the vehicle? Where is the body in which these divinities are to ride and to have their experience of the satisfaction of their hunger and thirst?

4.
The whole Upanishad is very symbolic and metaphorical in explaining a highly spiritual experience. The divinities were archetypal, superphysical essences. These are the deities. They are not physical bodies like ours, and there was no food for them to satisfy their hunger of the appetition for contact. What were they to contact? So, they asked for an abode: “Give us a body. Give us a vehicle. We want a house to stay in.”

To be continued ....

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