Each day it becomes clearer that the glib promises held out by scientific materialism and the free market will not suffice to heal the heart, order the mind, and restore in us that compassion and nobility of purpose which befits our species and our destiny.

 And this is where the perennial wisdom of the Upanishads comes in. Now, more than ever, these ancient texts offer invaluable education in what is our true evolutionary priority—the development of the unused cosmic potential that resides in each and every one of us. This latent spiritual intelligence is our human birthright, waiting to be uncovered. It is the one tool that is indispensable if we are to solve our manifold problems. The fruit of this intelligence is the realization that we are one Self. Unless we begin to live this reality, our future is bleak indeed.

    If you search for the Upanishads in a bookstore or on the Net, you will probably be directed to a section marked “Indian philosophy.” This unfortunate pigeonholing is doubly inaccurate, as, strictly speaking, the Upanishads are neither “Indian” nor “philosophy.” Their teachings are universal, no more Indian knowledge than E = mc2 is German-Jewish physics. Nor are they “philosophy” in the conventional sense of being the hard-thought conclusions of professional thinkers, who, despite—or perhaps because of—all their intellectual striving, rarely exemplify the dictionary definition of the philosopher as one who is “wise, calm, and temperate.”

     Certainly, like any philosophers, the sages of the Upanishads were concerned with finding Truth, but they realized that as all experience is, and always must be, mediated through the mind, knowledge of the outside world can only go as far as the knower has knowledge of himself. Moreover, they considered our normal waking state of consciousness too limited and too unstable to comprehend any ultimate reality, for as Truth is that which does not change, it demands an equally unchanging consciousness to appreciate it. So their interest was to transcend the ostensibly rational processes by which we normally try to make sense of the world and reach a state of pure Being, which, lying beyond all thinking and feeling, is the very basis of the mind.

    They called this state the Self and, as it is unchanging and impartial, considered it the only reliable basis for true understanding of both inner and outer reality. To live in this state of expanded awareness is to be enlightened, and thus the Upanishadic ideal agrees with the ancient Greek definition of true philosophy as gnosis, the cultivation of sacred wisdom. The sage of the Upanishads embodied Plato’s vision of the Philosopher King as described in the Phaedrus: an enlightened being who would “live in constant companionship with the divine order of the world.”

     Are the Upanishads poetry, then? Yes, if we understand poetry in its highest sense, as the inspired use of sound to transform awareness and unlock the door to the infinite. The Upanishads are the distillation of a timeless wisdom that, to protect itself, was transmitted orally from generation to generation, as sacred knowledge always has been. (Those cultures that first developed writing, such as Sumeria and ancient China, did so primarily to record commercial transactions, never to transmit priestly knowledge.) This perennial wisdom is known as the Vedic tradition of knowledge. Its medium was Vedic, the sacred language par excellence, believed to be not merely a conventional system of representation based on linear logic but a language of nature herself, composed of the primordial sounds that promote order in the evolving universe. These sounds, like music, communicate preverbally and have a universal meaning that transcends all cultural boundaries; they nourish and purify the physiology and thrill the soul.

    The nearest spoken language to Vedic is Sanskrit, oldest of the Indo-European tongues, and it is in their Sanskrit form that the Upanishads have come down to us. The recondite complexities of Vedic knowledge have concealed its deeper meaning from Western scholars, who, not being born into the tradition, have almost without exception failed to plumb its depths. As the recorded Vedic material predates the Old Testament by at least two thousand years, academics have assumed its elaborate abstractions and symbolic cosmologies to be a primitive and inchoate articulation of the religious impulse. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    According to this teaching, the ground of all being is an infinite and unified field of Consciousness, eternal and self-luminous. This Consciousness creates the universe from its own depths, by reverberating within itself. These reverberations generate sound, and this sound, the vibrations of the first sprouting of the absolute field of intelligence that underlies and pervades everything, is called Veda. Thus, Veda is said to be the source of creation; it is the DNA of the universe, containing all manifest possibilities in seed form. These possibilities, the impulses of creative intelligence latent in the very nature of the absolute Consciousness, unfold in an orderly and sequential manner as the same laws of nature time after time, cosmic cycle after cycle, to structure life.

    To find the nearest equivalent of this abstract view in Western thought, we must again look to the ancient Greeks. Their concept of logos, synonymous with Veda, was adopted by early Christian theology as the divine “Word,” celebrated in the well-known opening verses of St. John’s gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” According to Vedic understanding, however, this process is not confined to a historical beginning at a particular point in time. “The beginning” is ongoing, as the eternal unfolding of the Natural Law that governs the universe, moment to moment. In theological terms it is the continuous and invincible enactment of the will of God.

    So the Veda, in the highest sense, is not a collection of scriptures sitting on a dusty shelf in some temple or library but the pulsation of life itself, taking place in the depths of our own being to structure our minds and bodies. Made in the image of God, with our uniquely developed brain and nervous system, we are the prime example of “the Holy Word” made flesh. One whose awareness is pure enough to cognize these sounds directly is known as a seer (rishi), and it is from the cognitions of such seers that the entire Vedic teaching, including the Upanishads, has been revealed.

    The Sanskrit word for poet is kavi (“maker”), and the Vedic poet was a bard who could see the present, past, and future because his awareness was rooted in the infinite depth of the present moment, in touch with the transcendental field that lies beyond time. Such a bard is a seer whose utterances, flowing from the very cusp of experience, resonate with divine power, as did Adam’s words in Eden, when his God-given gift of naming the animals conferred authority over them. Indeed, such a seer is himself an Adam, first of men; with his mind stationed at the source of creation, he is at one with the inexhaustible freshness of the endlessly dawning light.

     As regards the word upanishad, it is derived from the root shad, meaning “to sit, settle, or approach,” together with the prefixes upa, “near,” and ni, “down.” An upanishad is thus “a sitting-down-near,” and in the India of their composition, no less than today, the seeker of wisdom approached a teacher, sat down at his or her feet, and settled the mind to receive spiritual instruction. Both teacher and pupil had to be well qualified for their relationship. As the Mundaka Upanishad tells us, while the teacher was to be both “learned in the scriptures and established in brahman”—in other words, an enlightened being—the pupil was expected to be pure and receptive, “one who is calm and whose mind is quiet.” What is required is not an argumentative frame of mind but a mental “settling down”—an upa-ni-shad—a turning of the attention inward, away from the constantly changing world of everyday experience toward the silence that lies between, and beyond, our thoughts.

     The direct experience of this silence is the gift of meditation, and the practice of meditation has always been central to both the teaching and understanding of these texts. Ultimately, the Upanishads celebrate an ecstasy that transcends thought and the workings of the intellect. And as this realm is beyond words, any attempt to describe it must at best be “a near approach”—an upanishad.

Isha Upanishad

    This sparkling gem of a text holds a special place in the pantheon of Vedic literature. Traditionally there are said to be 108 Upanishads, of which a dozen or so are principal, and in collections of these, the Isha Upanishad is generally placed first. Such preeminence is in accordance with the literary tradition whereby the entire content and range of a teaching is contained, in seed form, in its opening. Thus the Isha Upanishad, although a mere eighteen verses, describes with unmatched lucidity and balance both the path and the goal of all Vedic endeavor—Enlightenment.

    Vedic wisdom defines Enlightenment clearly: that state in which the Self is enjoyed at all times, throughout all experience. What, then, is this “Self”? As the Mandukya Upanishad has intimated, it is not the ego-personality we usually identify with—the limited, mortal “self” conditioned by environment and life experiences and indissolubly associated with the body. Nor is it the “Higher Self,” talked of in various New Age teachings, which watches over, advises, and directs us, like some internalized parental, or even godlike, force with whom we can converse. Such intuitions, consoling and nourishing though they may be, stem from unfathomed but still limited levels of our own circumscribed individuality. To the conscious ego they may well appear to be imbued with the mysterious power of the “other,” but they are not the transcendental silence of the spirit.

    The Self of which the Upanishads teach lies beyond thought, feeling, or archetype. It is the impartial basis of all other aspects of our personal identity and beyond them all. As the unchanging ground of our own consciousness, it is infinite and eternal, the unbounded substratum in which all experience, including that of an individual self or ego, arises. In itself, the Self does nothing. It merely is. It does not think or perceive or act—these are the functions of our mind and body—it is pure Being, the unattached and immortal vastness from which, and in which, all else takes place. If we want a parallel from a Western tradition, the Self is the eternal: “I am that I am” of the Old Testament.

    Yet just as the silent, calm depth of the sea is the basis of all the individual waves that rise and fall, so is this absolute Self the basis of the ever changing relative world of time, space, and causation. The Self vibrates to become the substance of our thoughts and experiences; all the forms and phenomena of the universe are its temporary and non-binding modifications. This paradoxical situation, whereby the unlimited Divine gives rise to the limited world without compromising its limitless status, is reflected in the language that characterizes the mystical confessions of all religions and is a feature of this particular text.

     In our normal state of awareness, which the Upanishads call “ignorance,” we look outward from a fixed center we call “I” and see a world of differences existing separately from ourselves. The enlightened perspective, on the other hand, sees all phenomena as projections of the endless spaciousness of the Self, which is our true nature. The locus of awareness has now shifted from the boundaries of a limited personality to the expansiveness of an all-inclusive field, not localized to the body, in which all phenomena arise, inhere, and eventually pass away. The typical person thinks he exists “within” his body and that his body exists “in” the world; the enlightened experience that not only the body, but the entire world exists in them, as fluctuations of the Self.

     To describe the view that results from such a radical turnaround in consciousness, we must stand conventional language on its head, because our usual concepts serve only to delineate a world of particulars as seen from the perspective of an isolated and separate ego—an individual calling itself “I.” Faced with this situation, the sage has the choice to remain silent—as the Buddha famously did when he delivered a discourse on Truth by holding up a flower and saying nothing—or to employ paradox to tease the intellect out of its conventional perspective. The experience of the enlightened may sound paradoxical, but that is partly due to the limitations of unenlightened logic and its language. The eye of wisdom continues to see the play of opposites, of course, but it is no longer blinded to the all-embracing unity that underlies, interpenetrates, and harmonizes them. When the conceptual veil through which we ordinarily see the world is lifted, each limited object shines with the boundless light of the spirit, and each transitory experience is a celebration of eternity. As the text says, the truly wise is one who “sees everything as nothing but the Self, and the Self in everything he sees.”

     This wholeness of life, the unity-in-difference of the manifest relative world and the unmanifest Absolute, is known as brahman. It is the mysterious holism of brahman that is the subject of much of this Upanishad. That a life of the spirit is not incompatible with life in the world is further emphasized by the text’s use of a common device in Vedic literature, the number 100. As the inventors of the concept of zero, the ancient Indians were fascinated by the hidden potential of “no-thing,” its fecund emptiness. In the number 100 here, the two zeros symbolize the fullnesses of the Absolute and relative, and the one, their unity. Thus, when the text talks of “aspiring to be one hundred,” it means not just enjoying a long life but living Enlightenment.

     The path to the complete liberation in brahman proceeds in two stages: first, a transformation into the Divine, and then a translation of the Divine into everything. The key to the first stage is meditation, the settling of the mind into that silence that is its source. Long misunderstood to be a difficult, even ascetic undertaking, this process is in fact easy and enjoyable. The settled state of awareness comes not through forcibly restraining the mind but by “enjoying the inner.” This refers to the mind’s nature to withdraw spontaneously from the world of change as it entertains progressively refined levels of thinking during meditation. The subtler levels of thinking are increasingly charming, as they are nearer their source in the Self, whose nature is bliss. Therefore, no effort is needed. When all mental activity has been transcended, awareness is left by itself, pure and unbounded. This state is initially experienced in the depths of meditation. However, once the nervous system becomes purified enough, the mind is able to reflect this fundamental level of silence at all times, no matter how active it may be on the surface. The permanent awareness of the Self during all activity is the first stage of Enlightenment; it is technically known as Cosmic Consciousness.

    But this is only the first part of the journey. In Cosmic Consciousness, the Self is lived as a state of radical non-attachment, a witness of everything, including the activities of the body-mind. This blissful state of subjective freedom is never overshadowed, no matter what circumstances occur, but by comparison with the Self the objective world is a place of limited charm, a realm hedged in by restrictions and forever being eroded by transience. Thus, in Cosmic Consciousness a state of duality exists between the freedom of the Self and the limitations of the non-Self. If the highest level of evolution, the state of total Enlightenment, is to be lived, then the rift between the infinite Self and the finite world must be healed, and all of life, no matter how ephemeral, must be infused with the glory of the spirit. Full development necessitates a growth from a way of seeing to a way of being with. This proceeds through the growth of a heartfelt devotion that transforms the lucidity of unattached insight into a loving empathy with everything that arises in the theatre of experience. Cosmic Consciousness must mature into Unity Consciousness.

    As it structures creation, the divine intelligence unfolds in myriad gradations of light that become increasingly less rarefied, more solid. Before the transition to Unity Consciousness occurs, there is an intermediate stage known as God Consciousness when the transcendental radiance begins to be experienced on the sensory level. The scintillating innermost depth of material existence, the subtlest level of relative life becomes perceptible. In Wordsworth’s phrase, “earth and every common sight” become “apparelled in celestial light.”

    This finest level of material creation is technically known as “the golden womb.” The final four stanzas of the Isha Upanishad address this stratum of creation in its most striking form, as the sun, the endlessly generous source of all light, life, and intelligence in our solar system. The most important of the Vedic deities, Agni, a figure who amalgamates many aspects of the divine alchemy of creation—consciousness, spirit, light, fire, and the energy of transformation—is petitioned. These lines, recited even today at Hindu funerals, celebrate the final purification and release of karma when the limited self, for so long contracted around its ancient core of held memories, finally unravels and returns to its source in the unbounded ocean of Being.

Yoga Interantional