Introduction to the Upanishads - 1. Swami Krishnananda

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Friday 12, Apr 2024 06:54.
Post-1.

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I made a brief reference to the natural difficulty that one may feel in understanding the subject of the Upanishads, that difficulty being the nature of the Upanishad discussion itself. It is the subject of the Atman, as this boy mentioned just now, but it is easily said than really understood.

All our educational technology these days, as education is generally understood, concerns itself with objects of perception and intellectual understanding. The Atman is not a subject which can be perceived through the sense organs, nor can it be understood intellectually by any kind of logical acumen, the reason being that the Atman is yourself; it is not somebody else. In all courses of knowledge and procedures of study, you place yourself in the position or context of a student, and you consider the world of objects outside as subjects of observation and experiment and study. In your education you do not study yourself; you study something other than your own self. You go to a college or university, and you have themes like mathematics, physics, chemistry, sociology and what not. All these themes which are so well placed before you in great detail are external to yourself. Everything that you study, anywhere, is outside you. You don't study yourself in any course of study that has been made available to you.

But the Upanishad is a study of yourself. Atmanam vidhi is the great oracle of the Upanishad. Know thyself and be free. It is something astounding to hear that we can be free by knowing our own selves. It is said because of the fact we have a feeling generally in the work-a-day life of the world, that we become free only when we know the world outside. We study sociology, history economics and what not, external studies and empirical observations, for the purpose of acquiring freedom in life. The more are you educated, the more you seem to be free in human society. But the Upanishad says this knowledge cannot make you free. It is only the knowledge of your own self that can assure you true freedom.

The reason for this opinion of the Upanishads is also very deep-rooted. How is it that freedom is embedded in you only and not anywhere else? I mentioned to you on the very first day that this particular something which the Upanishads call Atman is not a prerogative of any particular individual; it is not something that is in you only, it is the pure subjectivity of all things. The deepest essence of anything and everything in the universe is what is called the Atman. So the study of the Atman is not the study of the self of some person, Mr. So-and-so and all that; it is the study of the self of every Mr. So-and-so, so on and so forth. Everything, everyone, all things are a pure subjectivity in them. There is an I-ness or a feeling of self-identity even in a tree which grows according to its own predilection for the purpose of its own survival. The instinct of survival is present in each and every living entity, perhaps even in non-living elements like an atom. They maintain identity of themselves. Atman may be said to be the characteristic of self-identity of everything. You cannot become other than what you are. You are something, and you want to be that thing only, and you cannot be something else. A is A, A cannot be B, this is the law of identity and logic. And everything is what it is; nothing can be other than what it is. This peculiar inherent tendency of the maintenance of self-identity in all things (you have to listen to me carefully every word that I speak), this inherent tendency in everything in respect of the maintenance of that vehement form of self-identity consciousness is the Atman.

It is the Atman not merely as a force that causes this impulse of self-identity in things, it is also a consciousness of their being such a self-identity. You are what you are, but not only that, you are also aware that you are what you are. So it is existing and it is also conscious that it exists. So the Atman is existence; it is also consciousness. Now, what sort of existence? The existence of the fact that it cannot be identified with anything other than itself. This is the characteristic of pure subjectivity. For no reason can you become somebody else. Rama cannot become Krishna, Krishna cannot become Jesus, Jesus cannot become Thomas, and so on and so forth. A particular thing is just that particular thing for the reason that it is constituted of characteristics that make that thing only that thing. This cohesive element which brings the parts of your personality into the centrality of apprehension, awareness, is the work of the Atman.

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Continued

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