Lessons on the Upanishads - 3.1: Swami Krishnananda.

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Monday 30, September 2024. 06:40.
Upanishads
Chapter 3: Preparation for Upanishadic Study - 1.
Post-17.

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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 Upanishadic discussion itself. It is the subject of the Atman, but it is more easily heard than clearly 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 is that the Atman is yourself; it is not somebody else. In all courses of knowledge and procedures of study, you place yourselves in the position or context of students, and you consider the world of objects outside as subjects of observation, 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 a university and study subjects like mathematics, physics, chemistry, sociology and what not. All these subjects, which are so well placed before you in great detail, are external to yourself. Everything that you study, anywhere, is outside you. You do not study yourself in any course of study that has been made available to you.

But the Upanishad is a study of ourselves. Atmanam viddhi is the great oracle of the Upanishad: “Know thyself and be free.” It is something astounding to hear that you can be free by knowing your own self. It is so because of the fact that you have a feeling generally, in the work-a-day life of the world, that you become free only when you know the world outside. You 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 very deep-rooted. How is it that freedom is embedded in you only, and not anywhere else? I mentioned on the very first day that this particular something, which the Upanishads call the 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; it is the study of the self of every Mr. so-and-so. Everything, everyone—all things—are a pure subjectivity in themselves.

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—and perhaps even in nonliving elements, like an atom. They maintain an identity of themselves. The Atman may be said to be the characteristic of the 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 in logic. Everything is what it is; nothing can be other than what it is. There is a peculiar inherent tendency of the maintenance of selfidentity in all things. You have to listen carefully to every word that I speak. This inherent tendency in everything in respect of the maintenance of that vehement form of selfidentity consciousness is the Atman.

The Atman is not merely a force that causes this impulse of self-identity in things, it is also a consciousness of there being such a self-identity. You are what you are, but not only that; you are also aware that you are what we are. So it exists, and it is also conscious that it exists. Therefore, the Atman is existence, and it is also consciousness. Now, what sort of existence? It is the existence of the fact that it cannot be identified with anything other than itself. This is the characteristic of pure subjectivity. You cannot become somebody else. Rama cannot become Krishna, Krishna cannot become Jesus, Jesus cannot become Thomas, and so on. 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 a centrality of apprehension, awareness, is the work of the Atman within.

Continued

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