The Essence of the Aitareya and Taittiriya Upanishads - 3.8.& 4.1 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Saturday,  01 Jul,  2023. 06:30.

Chapter 3: Ishvara and Jiva-8.

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There are grades of knots. These are called granthis in mystical psychology. Granthis are like rope knots but are actually psychic knots, the knots of the mind. We may call them the knots of consciousness, if we like, which have somehow or other got stifled into a consciousness of these knots, so that the knots cannot become aware of there being a long rope behind them. If there is a longish rope with several knots at various places on the rope, the knots do not cease to be the rope, though they are knots; they are knots of the rope itself. There may be a hundred knots, but they are constituted of the very stuff of the rope. But if the structure of the knot becomes conscious of that particular structure only, and not the rope aspect of the structure, that would be bondage, or samsara. Similarly, we are conscious of the name-and-form aspect of our personality, and not the essential part of our personality. We are like this rope that is tied into a knot. The knot is the nama-rupa. It is the form, the shape, the configuration, but it is not the essence. The essence is something else.

Now, we have to slowly untie these knots of nama-rupa and realise the essence, and the way of doing this is the practice of yoga. The various stages of yoga, for instance, are mentioned in the system of Patanjali—yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana and samadhi. These are the stages of the untying process of the knots of consciousness, by which we gradually expand the dimension of our being and become conscious of larger and larger vistas of our own personality, getting wider and wider as we go higher and higher until we reach the highest Universal which includes all the particulars.

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Chapter 4: Cosmology-1.

Now this is, in a different way, the subject of the Taittiriya Upanishad also, wherein we are given a cosmological treatment of the entire bondage of the soul, and the process of the liberation of the soul from this bondage. As the Aitareya told us that the one Atman alone was, nothing else external to the Atman existed, it became the many as the Universal and entered into it, and projected itself as the various divinities, became the jivas, had these experiences, etc., so does the Taittiriya Upanishad tell us.

The original being is satyam, jnanam, anantam; or we may say satyam, jnanam, anandam—(satchidananda), where there is a simultaneous experience of everything, not a successive experience of particulars as we have today. This is the interpretation given by the commentators of the passage which reads as “saha brahmana vipaschita”. In that state of Brahman, there is an instantaneous experience of all things. Even when we use the word ‘instantaneous', the idea of time lingers in our mind. We cannot get rid of the idea of the time factor. We think everything is experienced at the same time. This is how we think in our own temporal way. It is not a simultaneity of temporal events that is called an instantaneous experience there. It is a timeless experience, because it is spaceless Being.

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To be continued

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