KENOPANISHAD -7: Swami Krishnananda.

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Friday 05, Jul 2024 06:10.

Article

Scriptures

Kenopanishad

Commentary on Section 1

Mantras - 3&4 (Continued)

Post-7.

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What the Upanishad here calls eyes, ears, speech, mind, intellect, etc. are rays of Self-consciousness projecting themselves externally towards objects. The rays are projected externally! That is the truth of the whole matter; and as they are always tending towards objects outside, they cannot cognise their background. The Self, then, is not conscious of itself. There is only object-consciousness. This object-consciousness is double, or twofold in function. First, it is an alienation of Self into body-consciousness and, second, it is a further alienation of body-consciousness into society-consciousness, where there is a greater entanglement in the multiplicity of values that are psychologically created for the purpose of convenience. The method of self-analysis was explained as a gradual self-withdrawal, a withdrawal of consciousness from the psychological entanglement created later on in terms of social relationships into personal consciousness, which, again, is an entanglement in physical existence, from which, again, there should be a gradual transcendent withdrawal.

This third mantram points out that the eyes and the other instruments, such as the senses of speech, etc. cannot cognise the Atman by any amount of effort because all their effort is misdirected and misconstrued. This is, indeed, for their own ruin, this their wonted activity. There was a rat. Rats never keep quiet. They always go on running about, munching something. The rat happened to find a basket containing a cobra; it happened to be a snake charmer's house. The rat thought there was some fruit or eatable inside, and it took the whole night to make a hole. It worked throughout the night, and the moment it entered the basket, you know what it got. It found its own death. Likewise, all this effort of the senses is for their sorrow in the end. They think they are wise, but they work for their destruction on account of tending away from Truth. Farther and farther do they go into spatial and temporal arenas, into what they regard as the world which they value much more than the Self itself. As it is also clear to us these days, where we imagine we are highly educated and cultured, it is merely in a misconstrued and erroneous manner, because there is a tendency to run away from the centre rather than move towards the centre. This one cannot call culture or education, and this is the reason why there is restlessness throughout the world, and we cannot set it right even in millions of years unless the crucial point is touched and tackled—the fundamental error in human thinking. The thought process of the human being is wrongly directed. Hence it is that no effort of the sense organs, or even of the mind, can create a peaceful world for mankind. This is what the mantra would tell us in its essential purport. There, in the Atman, the senses do not move. The Atman is such a transcendent Being, the presupposition of all cognitions and perceptions, the very being of all activity, psychological or physical, that it has never been seen by any person or persons

The reason for the transcendence of the Atman is that it is anyad eva tad viditād atho aviditād adhi. It is different from what is known and it is different also from what is not known. So we know where we stand. Hence, it is incapable of knowledge of any kind. There is always, usually, either the known or the unknown. There cannot be a third thing. But this Atman is something different from both. It is not the known, because all known things are objects of sense. All that we regard as the known is outside the Self. The known is what is located in space and time. The known is the un-Atman, the not-Self. Thus it is that the Atman is other than the known. But it is also not the unknown, because it is the very Self of that which tries to know anything. How can we say that we do not know our own Self? The knower cannot be oblivious of his own Self. The abolition of Self-consciousness would abolish also object-consciousness. That there is cognition proves that there is a cogniser. The objects are known because of the subject being there. The very possibility of any knowledge of things, or objects, is enough demonstration of there being such a thing as a knower or a subject behind them. So we cannot say that it is unknown. Nor is it the known, because the known is what is known to the senses, empirically. So, how are we to speak? How are we to instruct about it?

The Upanishad teacher says:  "How is this to be taught about? We cannot understand. This is what we have heard about it from ancient seers." 

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Continued

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