The Kenopanishad : Commentary on Section 1-2. : Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday, 21 Jun, 2023. 06:30.

Post-2.

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Bharatham-Kandy-Srilanka

It is strange, no doubt, that the ‘complex' should be regarded as one's self, because the self cannot be regarded as a complex bundle. We never, at any time, feel that we are made up of small bits. Never would even a fool feel that he is made up of parts. The affirmation of whatever be the characteristic of that is a single undivided wholeness of feeling. If we were to be suspicious of our being made up of parts, then we would be dubbed crazy. There would then be no confidence of any kind. We have an intuitive feeling of our being an undivided something, but we know very well that the body is not undivided. It has parts which can be divided spatially in terms of magnitude, and the body is subject to the laws of physics, chemistry, and so on. We never, for a moment, see through the body in a sense of completeness. It is always a bringing together of various conscious parts into a single judgment which makes us mistake the real agent for the body, and vice versa.

To cite instances, we are, bodily speaking, made up of parts. The eyes, the ears, etc., whose activities we are identifying with our real being, are isolated from one another. The eyes see and the ears hear. The eye may see when the ear may not be hearing. There may be a temporal gap between the functions of the eye and of the ear. Yet, this gap is bridged by a consciousness which affirms that one and the same element, one and the same being, one and the same self, has seen, or heard, and so on with the other principles which go by the name of the senses. The parts are thus brought together into a whole. We know very well that parts can never become a whole. They always remain parts. Whatever be the juxtaposition of the parts, they remain a mechanically connected linkage, and it is only for practical convenience that we regard an assemblage of parts as a whole. They never really become one. Two things broken up entirely cannot become one. They always remain two, whatever be the consolidating action of the parts. Though uniformity of the parts is likely to be mistaken for singularity of purpose and action, they are never truly single. Yet, our consciousness takes all these to be one unity.

The mental function that is the judging principle within us so mixes up sensory operations into an apparently single completeness that it never for a moment stops to think that the eyes and the ears and the other organs have not performed their functions at one and the same time. They are like many servants performing the injunctions of a single master. It is true that the servants are obedient to the master or are in harmony with the thought and feeling of the master; yet the servants cannot become the master. Not only that; all the servants need not work at the same time; they may be performing their duties at different times, in various manners. 

Yet the master integrates all these functions of the servants into his own will and he is likely to get the credit of his having done everything, as, for example, when we say that an army marches into a field and the soldiers have won the battle, the credit goes to the general: ‘The general has won victory.' So is the case with this unifying principle of consciousness within us which, by an act of error in its judgment, mixes up parts into a conscious whole, and then there is what is called the jiva-consciousness in us, which is nothing but consciousness embedded in the body.

Our feelings, thoughts and emotions connected with the body go by the name of jiva's functions. We become so engrossed in the activities of the body that the one is not differentiated from the other. The Upanishad questions: Is there really something which is distinct from these parts called the senses and their operations or can we say that the senses themselves are the Self? Can we regard the eye as the Self, the ear as the Self, the speech as the Self? Not possible, is the answer, because their functions are heterogeneous. There is no harmony among their activities. One sense may perform one function, the other another, quite distinct in time from the operation of the former, and if there is no unifying agent inside, there would always be a heterogeneity of sensory functions. The eye would be seeing something, the ear would be hearing another thing at a different time, and there would be no union of purpose and significance among the sensory operations. They would be like scattered parts with no purpose behind them. There would be no ‘I'-ness at all. It would only be parts thrown hither and thither. There would be none to affirm a singleness of consciousness and experience.

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To be continued

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