The Essence of the Aitareya and Taittiriya Upanishads - 4.4 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Monday, 07 Aug 2023. 06:15.

Chapter 4: Cosmology-4.

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An activity that is directed to self-satisfaction of the body is bondage. That is not going to liberate us. But all that we do in this world is nothing but that. We are not doing Karma Yoga. We should not be misguided. If we are consciously directing our activity towards the efflorescence of our individuality towards the Universal, then it is Karma Yoga. On the other hand, if we merely drift like a fly from place to place, it is not Karma Yoga. Any activity involving sweating and toiling cannot be called Karma Yoga unless the consciousness is there behind it. Otherwise, it becomes an ordinary, empty, humdrum activity which is impulse-driven rather than consciousness-motivated.

This distinction has to be carefully drawn. Impulse-driven activity is different from consciously directed yoga practice. And how many of us are conscious of what we are doing? We are driven by impulse only. When we are feeling hot because of the atmosphere outside, we feel like mitigating it by a contrary activity. When we are hungry, we are doing something contrary to it. Everything that we do is a contrary activity in respect of the particular experience through which we are passing. We have no idea of the basic disease behind it or the ideal that is ahead of us. But if this is clear, well, it cannot be called action. It is a movement of consciousness.

So these are the five koshas, as I mentioned. The annamaya kosha is the physical body. But it is not that the physical body comes first in the process of creation; the causal body comes first. The causal hardens itself into the subtle, and the subtle becomes the gross. These three bodies are the objects of experience in the sleep, dream and waking conditions, respectively. It is the causal body that we experience in sleep, the subtle body in dream, and the physical body in waking. These three bodies are subdivided into the five koshas, or the sheaths. The innermost one is called the anandamaya kosha. The next one is called the vijnanamaya kosha. Further to it is the manomaya kosha. Then we have the pranamaya kosha, and lastly we have the grossest one, the annamaya kosha.

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 abides, as if it is its own property. Now these activities of the physical body are driven or motivated by inner impulses coming from higher realms, and these subtler realms which are more pervasive in their nature are the other koshas mentioned, which are inside the physical body.

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To be continued

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