The Essence of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: 15. Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday 13, Mar 2024. 08:00.

Scriptures

Upanishads

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 

Chapter 3: The Supreme Goal of Life - 2.

Post-15.

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The more you forget yourself, the more are you happy; and this tendency to forget oneself is the pressure of the Universal to manifest itself in the particular. When it is consciously experienced, it becomes Yoga practice; when it is unconsciously experienced, it becomes a rapture of the senses and a desire of the mind, which is binding in its nature. So, Yajnavalkya tells Maitreyi that all affections, all loves, all attractions, all pleasures, all happiness, anything that we like in this world, is ultimately our tendency to like the Absolute, and it is the Absolute casting its shadow on the various objects of sense which we mistakenly see in the vehicles of satisfaction. The Universal has neither a subjective side nor an objective side—“Yatra hi dvaitamiva bhavati, taditara itaram pasyati.” When the Universal is lost sight of, when the particular alone is visualised, then it is that we miss the awareness of the real abode of the happiness that comes out at the time of the contact of the subject with the object. When we are awakened to the awareness of the Universal, we would see that it is neither a subject nor an object—that state of awareness is called Brahma-sakshatkara, the realisation of the Absolute.

At the end of the Second Chapter we have what the Upanishad calls the Madhu-Vidya, or the knowledge of the interconnectedness of things, imparted by the great sage Dadhyanc Atharvana. Usually, consciousness and object are regarded as exclusive of each other. The one cannot be in the position of the other. The perceiver is consciousness and the object is what is experienced by consciousness. The two are categorised as two distinct characters in the field of experience. Where the subject is, the object cannot be; and vice versa. The object cannot be the subject and the subject cannot be the object; consciousness cannot be matter and matter cannot be consciousness. This is our usual notion of things and our practical experience, too. But the Madhu-Vidya gives us a revolutionary idea in respect of what we usually regard as a field of the duality of subject and object.

The Madhu-Vidya is an insight into the nature of things, which reveals that there are no such things as subjects or objects. They are only notional conclusions of individual subjects from their own particular points of view, the one regarding the other as the object, so that there is a vast world of objects to a single individual perceiver, and this is the case with every other perceiver, also. The fact of experience itself is a repudiation of the phenomenal notion that subjects are cut off from objects, as if the one has no connection with the other. If there has been a gulf of difference, unbridgeable, between the experiencing consciousness and the object outside, there would be no such thing as experience at all. The great revelation of the sage Dadhyanc Atharvana is that the Adhyatma and the Adhibhuta are linked together by the Adhidaiva, and a Transcendent Divine Presence connects the phenomenal subject and the phenomenal object, through an invisible force, so that we have a universe of interrelated particulars, one entering the other, one merging into the other, one coalescing with the other, like the waves in the ocean, and not the universe we see with our eyes, as a house divided against itself.

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Continued

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