Commentary on the Isa Vasya Upanishad: 3. Swami Krishnananda

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Friday 21, March 2025, 10:45.
Article
Scriptures
Commentary on the Isa Vasya Upanishad: 3.
Swami Krishnananda
Part: 3.

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The geographical system of the universe, the astronomical pattern, the solar system, to take only one instance among many other things, conditions us. Human cooperation or no cooperation is irrelevant to the working of the planets and the operation of the solar system – which gives breath to our life, which pumps blood through our veins, and makes the heart pump and the brain think. Cosmic mysteries are beyond human imagination. Who pumps the blood and works the heart? Incessantly there is operation. Even when we are in deep sleep, the breath does not cease. Who pushes the prana like bellows even in the state of deep sleep, when we contribute nothing to the working of the breath? We are nowhere there. Who moves the breath and keeps the body warm and alive, even when cold sleep supervenes? Have we ever thought about the mysteries of the working of the heart? Why should it work? It moves without rest even for a moment.

Have we ever seen motion without a momentum? Unless there is something to propel the motion, motion is inconceivable. Where is the propelling force behind the motion of the heart and the action of the brain? We may be under the impression that the brain thinks and has knowledge. If the brain has plenty of knowledge inside of it, the skull of a dead man also will have knowledge. The propulsion of intelligence is elsewhere than in the cells of the brain, or the parts of the body.

Social life is transcended by universal life. That organisation is a larger society than the human society that we can imagine in our minds. The larger world before our eyes is itself a society of its own kind. The mountains and the rivers and the trees, the shrubs, the flowers, even stones and particles of sand, are not there unnecessarily, for no purpose. To consider these as unnecessary things would be to regard the tip of a fingernail as an unnecessary encumbrance of the body. The nail is not an encumbrance, though it is not doing great work for us. Yet it does some work, if we carefully think over the matter.

Unnecessary things cannot exist in this world. Their importance can be recognised and visualised only when we have the insight to probe into the circumstances of their existence, and the part that they play in a larger society of life – wider than the human, and even the organic as it is conceived – in a cosmical setup. The wind that blows, the rays of the sun that impinge upon the earth, the cool balming radiance of the moon in full-moon night, the scintillating movement of water in a flowing river, the waves of the sea, are not inconsequent occurrences. They are tremendously responsible performances taking place, as is the case with the performances in our own body. This system, which is physiological, sociological, cosmological, can be understood only on the acceptance of a living principle pervading all things, a life that is indwelling the parts, which look like physical entities.

Do we know that the life we seem to associate with our own selves is not capable of identification with any part of the body? I live, you live, and someone lives. I am alive. It is a great joy to feel that I am alive. This joy of the feeling that one is alive does not come from the nose, from the fingers, from any part of the physiological system. This is an instance of the presence of an unknown content operating beneath and behind visible particulars, which are otherwise physical in their nature. Our own personality is an example here. Our feeling, our joy, our satisfaction of having lived in this world, or of living in this world, is an unknown thing operating within the physiological setup we call the body. This very same link is bringing satisfaction in human society in the form of friendship, cooperation, a system of coming together or a get-together, a larger organisation of a nation.

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Continued

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