The Chhandogya Upanishad - 71: Swami Krishnananda.

===================================================================================

Sunday 01, December 2024. 09:50.
Chapter 4: An Analysis of the Nature of the Self
Appendix 1: Sandilya-Vidya
Mantram-4(Continued)
Post-71.

===================================================================================

The meaning of this vidya, meditation, is very profound. The more we think about it, the greater and deeper are the meanings that we will discover in it. And these meanings will be discovered as we go deeper and deeper into meditation. So here, we have got in the Sandilya-Vidya the whole subject of the Upanishad clinched, as it were, kept inside our fist for the purpose of daily habituation of the mind to spirituality and God-awareness.

This vidya contains the art of adjusting the mind inwardly as well as outwardly in the beginning by alternate processes, and then finally grasping the comprehensiveness of Brahman, the Reality in its simultaneously dual aspect of universality and individuality.

Adau brahmaham-asmityanubhava udite khalvidam brahma pascat, is a passage from Acharya Sankara's 'Satasloki' wherein he makes a reference to this vidya. He mentions how the consciousness rises gradually from the level of individual perspective to the universal one. It is not easy to understand the meaning of what Acharya Sankara is saying here, because of the fact that we cannot distinguish between our personality or individuality and the Atman, to which reference is being made. We always mix up the two. The Atman is myself and we know very well what we understand by the word 'myself'. It is an inveterate habit of the mind to think in terms of the body. So whatever be the thing that is associated with individuality is at once identified in meditation. The kernel that is within us, the essence that we are, is to be separated from the body that we appear to be, in this technique of meditation. In the beginning, there is consciousness that one's own self is all. Now this is not merely a statement that is to be studied grammatically or linguistically, but is a matter of experience. One's location in all things in addition to one's own body becomes a revealed truth in the advanced stages of this meditation. There are some examples to show how this happens.

It is something like the space within a vessel realising that it is everywhere. Just compare yourself to a little space that is contained in a small glass tumbler which has got obsessed with a notion that it is inside the glass tumbler only and that what is outside as space is not itself, but an object of itself, something external to itself. It has to elevate itself to the awareness of the non-distinguishability between itself and the external space. That is the real meaning perhaps of what is in the mind of Acharya Sankara. I am the all-the space within the vessel realises that it is all-space. It does not mean that it has become all-space by any effort of its imagination or activity. It is just a rising to the awareness that the wall around it, namely, the tumbler or the glass, is not going to limit its all-pervasive nature.

Then the realisation comes—khalvidam brahma paschat. It is not merely the 'I' that has become all, but every one is the same all. The Self that is in me is not in me only. The assertion "Aham brahmasmi—I am Brahman" can be made by each centre of individuality in a similar manner. This is a larger realisation, says Sankara. It is a rise from the limitation of one's individuality up to the cosmic Reality of one's essence, with a simultaneous awareness of the identity of every self, the so-called multiplicity of selves, with this single Self. So it is the total of all the selves in an indistinguishable mass rising to a single comprehension of the great Absolute Brahman. This is the actual inner import of the meditation which is called Sandilya-Vidya.

*****

Next

Appendix 2: Samvarga-Vidya

Continued

===========================================================================================