The Upanishads (Easwaran's Classics of Indian Spirituality Book 2)

by Eknath Easwaran

The supreme Self is neither born nor dies. He cannot be burned, moved, pierced, cut, nor dried. Beyond all attributes, the supreme Self Is the eternal witness, ever pure, Indivisible, and uncompounded, Far beyond the senses and the ego. In him conflicts and expectations cease. He is omnipresent, beyond all thought, Without action in the external world, Without action in the internal world. Detached from the outer and the inner, This supreme Self purifies the impure.

1 The mind may be said to be of two kinds, Pure and impure. Driven by the senses It becomes impure; but with the senses Under control, the mind becomes pure. 2 It is the mind that frees us or enslaves. Driven by the senses we become bound; Master of the senses we become free. 3 Those who seek freedom must master their senses.

Practice meditation. Stop all vain talk.

12 There is only one Self in all creatures. The One appears many, just as the moon Appears many, reflected in water.

22 “I have realized the Self,” declares the sage, “Who is present in all beings. I am united with the Lord of Love; I am united with the Lord of Love.” OM shanti shanti shanti

The aspirant who is seeking the Lord Must free himself from selfish attachments To people, money, and possessions. When his mind sheds every selfish desire, He becomes free from the duality Of pleasure and pain and rules his senses. No more is he capable of ill will; No more is he subject to elation, For his senses come to rest in the Self. Entering into the unitive state, He attains the goal of evolution. Truly he attains the goal of evolution.

Indian tradition makes a distinction between the Samhitas and Brahmanas, which deal mainly with ritual performance, and the Aranyakas and Upanishads, especially the latter, which deal with interpretation: what the rituals, and then what things in general, mean.

When this image occurs in the Vedic context it’s pretty clear that the bird that does partake – that is, the person who enjoys the fruits of life – is being held up for praise. In the Upanishadic contexts it is just the other way around: he or she who is not hypnotized by the ever-changing stream of phenomena but observes it in detachment is heading for the supreme human destiny.

mysticism and the intense devotion that is always a part of mysticism have become the heart of India’s civilization, and if it survives the current corrosion of values by materialism the way it survived, in centuries past, the successive attacks of Mongols, Muslims, and British, the spiritual culture of India will be a precious resource for a world reawakening to the need for spiritual values.

whenever you have a truth-utterance (a profound statement by someone in a higher state of consciousness) you have an Upanishad. In this sense the Bhagavad Gita is an Upanishad, and the epic in which it is embedded, the Mahabharata, however violent on the surface, itself teaches detachment from worldly gain and communicates the predisposition of inner calm (shama) leading also to spiritual peace (shanta).[6]

Diversity is not disharmony. Without formal rules, Hindus organized a vast collection of texts into categories and canonized them in a system that was authoritative throughout Hindu culture. In this respect India invites comparison with another ancient people with intense spiritual longings who remained decentralized, not by choice but by the destruction of their political integrity: the Jews. In this description of the Mishnaic inheritance we might almost be reading a description of the Upanishads:[7]

Even more than diaspora Jewish tradition, the survival strategy of Indian culture was cumulative. This is a particularly useful generalization to bear in mind. India was probably the only country where three in many ways contradictory systems of medicine, Indian, Arabic, and Greek, flourished side by side; a similar toleration extended to the successive stages of evolution in religious consciousness through which India passed. Outworn forms of religious worship were virtually never discarded – as Professor Sarma points out, the sages did their job of moving people beyond their “rather low type of sacrificial religion . . . without in any explicit manner breaking away from the traditions of the past.”[8]

The resulting accumulation can be confusing because most traditions have not been cumulative; they reject a “creed outworn” when they move on to a new stage. The ability to accommodate rather than reject older beliefs has a very practical outcome.

“As men approach me, so I receive them,” Sri Krishna says in the Gita. “All paths, Arjuna, lead to me” (Gita 4.11). This too helps explain the mixtures, or more properly layers, of religious consciousness displayed in the Upanishads.

when the Upanishads describe the soul as traveling through various realms after death, they are really referring to realms of psychic experience we can have in this life.

It was Gandhi who really brought this abstruse doctrine back to vibrant life: act, by all means, but make your act, in the modern sense of the word, a sacrifice. That is, he explained, choose a selfless goal, use right means (nonviolence), and never be pushed into action for your own benefit – a tall order. Gandhi was not waxing metaphorical when he called his programs for the deliverance of India – and of the individual activist – yajna. By drawing upon the not-to-be-denied need in all of us to work for a selfless goal he elevated even his political campaigns to the level of models for every action we might want to take today.

The Upanishads share with all sages the same high vision of what the human being can become: without sacrifice, we stop short of something that is essentially human.

Tradition has isolated four powerful formulaic utterances (mahavakyas) embedded in the early Upanishads. One is sarvam idam brahma, “All is Brahman” (Chandogya III.14.1), which states the foundation of mysticism: that everything is ultimately one.

This Self cannot possibly be subject to any change, not even death. This is perhaps why belief in reincarnation died hard even in the West. It was a cherished belief not only in pagan but in various Jewish and Christian groups in the early centuries of our era, but was brusquely rejected by the emerging orthodoxy and seems an unsettling and unverifiable hypothesis to most of us today. Yet it differs only slightly, almost by a question of semantics, from the modern concept of evolution, which holds that the individual dies with the death of the physical body. Indian religious systems hold as a core belief that the individual is not that which dies: it is more accurate to think of ourselves as the forces which brought our body and personality into existence – forces that will continue shaping our destiny beyond what we call death, “as the wind takes on the fragrance from the flower” (Gita 15.8).

One of the critical “secrets” of the Upanishads is that renunciation is the opposite of deprivation. When the senses (indriyas) are untrained they run wild, leading to a state of conditioning that is the opposite of freedom (Katha I.2.5–6). Joy comes from putting these faculties back on track under the guidance of the Self. This is precisely why the Upanishads teach renunciation. Not only are joy and renunciation not contradictory; they positively require each other. Taken together they form the key value of Hinduism, as Mahatma Gandhi taught when he took for his own mahavakya those three opening words of the Isha Upanishad: tena tyaktena bhunjitah, “Renounce and enjoy.”

If we could trace where a desire arises from – and the Upanishads do, repeatedly – we would find that in most cases something – a thought, an external event – has stirred up some wisp of the vague sense of incompleteness we harbor beneath the floor of surface consciousness as long as we are not identified with our Self. We immediately misinterpret this stirring as a desire for something outside us. This is maya: misinterpreting the longing for union within as a call from something outside the Self.

As a great sage of modern India, Sri Ramana Maharshi, who was very close to the Upanishads in spirit, once declared, “There is no happiness in any object of the world.” The Self is pure happiness, which we mistake as coming from outside; so the closer we come to the Self within, the more we are aware of – the more we feel already – what we were looking for outside us. This is what the Upanishads mean by joy. “Renunciation” refers simply to dropping the outside reflection for the reality which is within.

The Upanishads do not deny the need for political freedom; they simply claim that inner freedom comes first, and is really the only reliable guarantee of all other forms. The more freedom one wins within, through control over one’s own thoughts and passions, the less one will be manipulable by others, and the more one will be able to seek political freedom – without going on to manipulate others oneself.

If one is socially or by personality weak with regard to another (that is, not yet svamin oneself), one still need not be exploited: “for by dharma even the weak man can hope to prevail against a king” (Brihadaranyaka I.4.14, with Shankara’s comment).[20] This dharma is nothing other than nonviolence; as we have seen, ahimsa paramo dharma, “There is no higher dharma than nonviolence.” It is a fact not to be glossed over that Gandhi, one small man, prevailed against the British Empire in the height of its historic majesty with that secret. Can there be a secret more necessary to learn?

In the end, unity in diversity is not a paradox at all. Unity is the center – in Upanishadic terms, “in the cave of the heart” – of conscious beings, while diversity flourishes on the surface of life. It is as necessary to foster diversity there at the outside as it is to hold unity on the inside. Gandhi made this notion of inside and outside concrete for us: there must be “heart unity” among all, meaning spontaneous concern for the welfare of others, and that very concern must lead to complete toleration of natural differences and even differences of wealth and station (which did not please his Marxist critics) as long as they are not abused.

Unity in diversity formed the cornerstone of India’s national consciousness from ages past; it may yet form her contribution to a global consciousness which, as S. Radhakrishnan has said, the world has no choice but to develop.

In a supremely important fragment Heraclitus declares, “You may search the limits of the soul without ever finding them, go down any road you will; such a profound reality it has” (Fr. 45). It would not be unfair to suggest that we have taken the scientific worldview he made possible to its very limits in the opposite direction: happiness is caused by endorphins, mother love is programmed by genes and triggered by chemicals; a full-page ad in my university’s magazine recently boasted a picture of a chromosome with the heading, “This is your life.” The soul has so shrunken from view that far from standing awestruck by its infinitude we have difficulty remembering that it exists: indeed, why speak of soul; mind or consciousness play no role in the electrochemical image of the human being which popular imagination and some scientists today present unchallenged.

But the time has come to challenge them. It is curious to look back from this vantage point and observe that the similarities between the founders of Western thought and the scientist-sages of the forest are so striking that from time to time Western scholars keep trying to find out whether the latter somehow influenced these “Ionian physicists” who awakened Western philosophy and science in the generation before Socrates directly.[26] Such an influence would not be unlikely. Yet at no time has the “Upanishadic” vision of a Heraclitus or an Augustine really become our own. Here the Upanishads challenge us to put in place fundamentally different concepts of who we are, and to build a life of thoughts, of personal habits, of lifestyle, of relationships, of institutions and values, and finally even of foreign policy based on the unity of consciousness rather than on the separateness of biochemical fragments. Cultural and historical

In the full text of his oft-quoted remarks on the Upanishads we meet a bit of a surprise: From every sentence deep original and sublime thoughts arise, and the whole is pervaded by a high and holy and earnest spirit. In the whole world . . . there is no study . . . so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. They are destined sooner or later to become the faith of the people.[27]