Upanishads : "The cream of Vedas"

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thursday, January 28, 2021.11:18. AM Chapter 4: Cosmology 6. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The sense organs are contained in this body. We are generally told that the karmendriyas, or the organs of action—speaking, grasping, locomotion, etc., which are the tendencies to action and the limbs that help such activity—are all motivated and controlled by the prana. The prana is the synthesised form of rajasic force, and the karmendriyas, or the organs of action, are the discrete or the diversified forms of the same energy. So we may say that all our activities are nothing but prana working. But these activities have ideas behind them, thoughts behind them. Thoughts precede action. The mind together with the senses of knowledge constitute the manomaya kosha, or the mental sheath. Here we are in an animal...

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sunday, January 24, 2021. 10:05. AM. (Spoken on January 14th, 1973) Post-2. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now, is it so? Is it a fact, or is there something else, a deeper truth standing between the soul and God? The Aitareya Upanishad tells us that this is not the whole truth. The objective analysis given to us in this Upanishad in the process of creation, the description of the way in which the universe has evolved, tells us that everything has come from that One. Ātmā vā idam eka evāgra āsīt (A.U. 1.1.1): The Atman alone existed in the beginning. Nānyat kiñ cana miṣat: Nothing living existed at that time. The Supreme Atman, Paramatman, existed. That has somehow become this cosmos. This is what the Aitareya Upanishad tells us. It has become the objective cosmos and also the subjective jivas. It has become not only the objective u...

  ------------------------------------------------- Saturday, January 23, 2021. 09:59. AM Chapter 4: Cosmology 5. ---------------------------------------- The annamaya kosha means the physical sheath constituted of the food that we intake. Anna is food; and as I mentioned earlier, the various impressions created by our sensory experiences contribute to the stability of the body, including the physical food that we take. And here we have a marked distinction of the limbs of the body—head, ear, nose, etc. We can feel that the various limbs of our body are completely cut off from the limbs of the bodies of others. In spite of the Upanishad crying out that all this manifestation has come from the One, we are least conscious of this fact, and we cannot even dream at any time in our life that we have any connection with the wall standing out there. Such is the condition of physical experience, where limbs are cut off completely into a little prison house of this body in which the Atman a...

------------------------------------------------- Saturday, January 16, 2021. 03:45. PM Chapter 4: Cosmology 4. ------------------------------------------------ 1. We have heard people say that Acharya Sankara was against karma. There is a point in what he says, though many people do not understand what the implication of his statement is. Every action that we do normally is a movement of ignorance in the direction of an object that is there outside—apparently, but not really. How can a movement in the direction of an apparently existent something liberate us from bondage? If our activities are directed to the sublimation of individuality, and have as their purpose the universalisation of our status, that could be Karma Yoga. That is not what Acharya Sankara condemns. He condemns karma which is binding in its nature, which is born of the ignorant feeling that body is real and, therefore, everything that is associated with the body is also real. 2. An activity that is directed to self-s...

  ------------------------------------------------ Sunday, January 10, 2021. 03:16. PM Chapter 4: Cosmology 3. ---------------------------------------- Our experiences are through the layers of our personality. These layers are called koshas in the language of the Upanishads. A kosha is a sheath, like a sheath or scabbard for a sword. These sheaths are something like peels of onion growing one over the other, and while there can be many such layers conceivable, five of them are mentioned as predominantly experienced by us in our day-to-day life. These are the so-called annamaya, pranamaya, manomaya, vijnanamaya and anandamaya koshas. These koshas are not actually like peels of an onion, though the illustration gives some idea of what these koshas are, because one peel of an onion is not connected with another peel. They are independent; but the koshas are not so independent. They are various gradations of density, one slowly passing into the other, and we cannot know where one begi...