By Eknath Easwaran
Yet the Upanishads are not philosophy. They do not explain or develop a line of argument. They are darshana, “something seen,” and the student to whom they were taught was expected not only to listen to the words but to realize them: that is, to make their truths an integral part of character, conduct, and consciousness.
Despite their idyllic setting, then, these intimate sessions were not casual Ivy League seminars on the commons green. Students were there because they were prepared to devote a good measure of their lives – the traditional period was twelve years – to this unique kind of higher education, where study meant not reading books but a complete, strenuous reordering of one’s life, training the mind and senses with the dedication required of an Olympic athlete.
In this context, it is clear that the questions the Upanishads record – “What happens at death? What makes my hand move, my eyes see, my mind think? Does life have a purpose, or is it governed by chance?” – were not asked out of mere curiosity. They show a burning desire to know, to find central principles which make sense of the world we live in. The students gathered in these forest academies were engaged in a colossal gamble: that they could learn to apprehend directly a Reality beyond ordinary knowing, of whose very existence they had no assurance except the example of their teacher and the promise of the scriptures. It is no wonder that such students were rigorously tested before being accepted – tested not merely for intelligence but for singleness of purpose and strength of will. What is remarkable is that candidates were found at all. As the Katha Upanishad says, only a few even hear these truths; of those who hear, only a few understand, and of those only a handful attain the goal.
This fervent desire to know is the motivation behind all science, so we should not be surprised to find in Vedic India the beginnings of a potent scientific tradition. By the Christian era it would be in full flower: Indian mathematicians would have developed modern numerals, the decimal place system, zero, and basic algebra and trigonometry; surgeons would be performing operations as sophisticated as cataract surgery and caesarian section. But the roots of this scientific spirit are in the Vedas. “All science,” Aldous Huxley wrote, “. . . is the reduction of multiplicities to unities.” Nothing is more characteristic of Indian thought. The Vedic hymns are steeped in the conviction of rita, an order that pervades creation and is reflected in each part – a oneness to which all diversity can be referred.
From this conviction follows a highly sophisticated notion: a law of nature must apply uniformly and universally. In renaissance Europe, this realization led to the birth of classical physics. In ancient India it had equally profound consequences. While the rest of Vedic India was studying the natural world, more or less in line with other scientifically precocious civilizations such as Greece and China, the forest civilization of the Upanishads took a turn unparalleled in the history of science. It focused on the medium of knowing: the mind.
The sages of the Upanishads show a unique preoccupation with states of consciousness. They observed dreams and the state of dreamless sleep and asked what is “known” in each, and what faculty could be said to be the knower. What exactly is the difference between a dream and waking experience? What happens to the sense of “I” in dreamless sleep? And they sought invariants: in the constantly changing flow of human experience, is there anything that remains the same? In the constantly changing flow of thought, is there an observer who remains the same? Is there any thread of continuity, some level of reality higher than waking, in which these states of mind cohere?
These are the kinds of questions the sages asked, but for some reason they did not stop with debating them. They became absorbed in the discovery that as concentration deepens, the mind actually passes through the states of consciousness being inquired about. And in concentrating on consciousness itself – “Who is the knower?” – they found they could separate strata of the mind and observe its workings as objectively as a botanist observes a flower.
The significance of this discovery cannot be exaggerated. Since consciousness is the field of all human activity, outward as well as inner – experience, action, imagination, knowledge, love – a science of consciousness holds out the promise of central principles that unify all of life. “By knowing one piece of gold,” the Upanishads observed, “all things made out of gold are known: they differ only in name and form, while the stuff of which all are made is gold.” And they asked, “What is that one by knowing which we can know the nature of everything else?” They found the answer in consciousness. Its study was called brahmavidya, which means both “the supreme science” and “the science of the Supreme.”
It is important to understand that brahmavidya is not intellectual study. The intellect was given full training in these forest academies, but brahmavidya is not psychology or philosophy. It is, in a sense, a lab science: the mind is both object and laboratory. Attention is trained inward, on itself, through a discipline the Upanishads call nididhyasana: meditation.
The word meditation is used in so many different ways that I want to be clear before going further. Meditation here is not reflection or any other kind of discursive thinking. It is pure concentration: training the mind to dwell on an interior focus without wandering, until it becomes absorbed in the object of its contemplation. But absorption does not mean unconsciousness. The outside world may be forgotten, but meditation is a state of intense inner wakefulness.
This is not an exotic experience. Even at the university I had students whose concentration was so good that when they were studying, they would be oblivious to what was going on around them. If I called them by name, they might not even hear. Meditation is closely related to this kind of absorption, but the focus is not something external that one looks at or listens to, such as a microscope slide or lecture. It is consciousness itself, which means that all the senses close down.
Similarly, although meditation is not discursive thinking, it is not the same as intuition or imagination. We read about the concentration of great artists, writers, and poets who, by focusing on the impressions the world presents, or on a block of formless stone, seize what fits a unifying vision in their mind and fashion some way to share it. Brahmavidya has affinities with this way of knowing also, which is not so different from the intuition of a great scientist. But brahmavidya is not concerned with the insights that come from concentrating on a particular part of life; it is concerned with how concentration yields insight at all. Observing what happens as concentration deepens, the sages of the Upanishads learned to make a science and art and craft of insight – something that could be mastered and then taught to others, as a painting master in the Renaissance might take a gifted student to live as part of his family and absorb his art.
Recently I read a penetrating remark by William James, the great American psychologist, which spells out the significance of this skill: “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character and will. An education which should include this faculty would be the education par excellence.” James was not guessing. He tried to teach himself this skill, at least as it applies to everyday affairs, and he succeeded well enough to lift himself out of a life-threatening depression. In this pivotal achievement he grasped the connection between training the mind and mastering life. He would have acclaimed the forest universities of the Upanishads, which built their curricula on this connection: “education par excellence” is almost a literal translation of brahmavidya.
Brahmavidya and conventional science both begin when a person finds that the world of sense impressions, so transient and superficial, is not enough in itself to satisfy the desire for meaning. Then one begins to stand back a little from the senses and look below the surface show of life in search of underlying connections. But the sages of the Upanishads wanted more than explanations of the outside world. They sought principles that would unify and explain the whole of human experience: including, at the same time, the world within the mind. If the observer observes through the medium of consciousness, and the world too is observed in consciousness, should not the same laws apply to both?
In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad there is a long, haunting exposition of the states of mind the sages explored. They called them waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep, but somehow they had made the brilliant observation that these are not merely alternate states which a person slips in and out of every day. They also represent layers of awareness, concurrent strata lying at different depths in the conscious and unconscious mind.
In dreaming, the Upanishad observes, we leave one world and enter another. “In that dream world there are no chariots, no animals to draw them, no roads to ride on, but one makes chariots and animals and roads oneself from the impressions of past experience.” And then the leap of insight: “Everyone experiences this, but no one knows the experiencer.” What is the same in both worlds, the observer both of waking experience and of dreams? It cannot be the body, for in dreams it detaches itself from the body and senses and creates its own experiences – experiences which can be as real, in terms of physiological reactions, as those of waking life. “When a man dreams that he is being killed or chased by an elephant, or that he is falling into a well, he experiences the same fear that he would in the waking stat.”: his heart races, blood pressure rises, stress hormones pour into the body, just as if the event were real. Dream and waking are made of the same stuff, and as far as the nervous system is concerned, both kinds of experience are real.
When we wake up from a dream, then, we do not pass from unreality to reality; we pass from a lower level of reality to a higher one. Havelock Ellis, the psychologist who devoted his life to the study of sex, observed, “Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life.”
If waking experience is impermanent, should there not be something abiding, something real, to support it? Might it not be possible to wake up into a higher state, a level of reality above this world of constantly changing sensory impressions? The sages found a clue: in dreamless sleep, the observing self detaches itself not only from the body but from the mind. “As a tethered bird grows tired of flying about in vain to find a place of rest and settles down at last on its own perch, so the mind,” like the body, “settles down to rest” in dreamless sleep – an observation in harmony with current research, which suggests that in this state the autonomic nervous system is repaired.
This still world is always present in the depths of the mind. It is the deepest, most universal layer of the unconscious. Wake up in this state, the Upanishads say, and you will be who you truly are, free from the conditioning of body and mind in a world unbounded by the limitations of time, space, and causality.
Wake up in the very depths of the unconscious, when thought itself has ceased? The language makes no more sense than a map of some other dimension. Here the Upanishads are like pages from ancient logbooks, recording journeys of exploration into the uncharted waters of the world within. If Freud’s limited glimpses of the unconscious can have had such an impact on civilization, the sages who mapped the mind three thousand years earlier must rank with the greatest explorers in history.
Yet this is dangerous territory. We know what forces can buffet us in the dream world, and that is only the foothills of the dark ranges of the mind, where fear, passion, egotism, and desire so easily sweep aside the will. One of Hopkins’ “dark sonnets” hints at the dangers of these realms:
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.
Hold them cheap May, who never hung there . . .
The Katha Upanishad would agree. In famous words it warns that the ascent to the summit of consciousness is not for the timid: “Sharp like a razor’s edge, the sages say, is the path to Reality, difficult to traverse.” Nothing in the Upanishads is more vital than the relationship between student and guide. The spiritual teacher must know every inch of the way, every danger and pitfall, and not from books or maps or hearsay. He must have traveled it himself, from the foothills to the highest peaks. And he must have managed to get back down again, to be able to relate to students with humanity and compassion. Not everyone who attains Self-realization can make a reliable guide. I have been saying “he,” but this is not a role for men alone. My own teacher is my mother’s mother.
This spiritual ascent is so fraught with challenge that we can see why the sages took their students young. Exploring the unconscious requires the daring of the years between twelve and twenty, when if someone says “Don’t try to climb that peak, you’ll get hurt,” you immediately go and start climbing. As we grow older, something changes; we start listening to those cautionary voices and say we are learning prudence. So it is no accident that the hero of the Katha Upanishad is a teenager. The message of the Katha, which echoes throughout the Upanishads, is to dare like a teenager: to reach for the highest you can conceive with everything you have, and never count the cost.
What makes a human being dare the impossible? What fires the will when we glimpse something never done before and a wild urge surges up to cry, “Then let’s do it.”? Here in San Francisco a young woman blind from birth decides to sail alone across the Pacific and succeeds; I can’t imagine getting as far as Alcatraz. Mountaineers decide that it is not enough merely to climb Mount Everest; they have to climb it alone, take no oxygen, and choose the most difficult ascent. And just a few months ago a man and woman mortgaged their future to put together a fragile plane with a cockpit smaller than a phone booth, so they could fly around the world without a stop. We ask, “Why did you do it?” And the pilot of the Voyager can only reply with a shrug, “Just for the hell of it.” He can give no better reason, yet everyone understands.
The sages would say similarly, “Just for the heaven of it.” Just to reach for the highest. Human beings cannot live without challenge. We cannot live without meaning. Everything ever achieved we owe to this inexplicable urge to reach beyond our grasp, do the impossible, know the unknown. The Upanishads would say this urge is part of our evolutionary heritage, given to us for the ultimate adventure: to discover for certain who we are, what the universe is, and what is the significance of the brief drama of life and death we play out against the backdrop of eternity.
In haunting words, the Brihadaranyaka declares:
You are what your deep, driving desire is.
As your desire is, so is your will.
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny.
(Brihadaranyaka IV.4.5)
In the end, all achievement is powered by desire. Each of us has millions of desires, from big to trivial, packed with a certain measure of will to get that desire fulfilled. Imagine how much power is latent in the human personality! With just a fraction of that potential, young Alexander conquered continents, Rutan and Yaeger flew Voyager around the world, Einstein penetrated the heart of the universe. If a person could fuse all human desires, direct them like a laser, what would be beyond reach?
This stupendous aim is the basis of brahmavidya. Every desire for fulfillment in the world outside is recalled – not stifled or repressed, but consolidated in one overriding desire for Self-realization. Contrary to a common misunderstanding, there is nothing drab or life-denying about this apparent reversal of human nature. The passion it requires is not different from what a great ballet dancer or gymnast or musician demands. In Sanskrit this ardent, one-pointed, self-transcending passion is called tapas, and the Vedas revere it as an unsurpassable creative force. From the tapas of God, the Rig Veda says, the cosmos itself was born.
What daring the sages of the Upanishads conceal in their anonymity! It is no wonder that so many came from the warrior caste. There was nothing world-denying when these sages-to-be left their courts and cities for the Ganges forests. World-weariness cannot generate tapas. They yearned to know life at its core, to know it and master it, and that meant to master every current of the mind.
Sex, of course, is the most powerful desire most people have, and therefore the richest source of personal energy. Brahmacharya, self-control in thought and action, was a prerequisite in these forest academies. But this was not suppression or repression. Sexual desire, like everything else in the Upanishads, is only partly physical. Essentially it is a spiritual force – pure, high-octane creative energy – and brahmacharya means its transformation. Tapas, the sages say, becomes tejas: the radiant splendor of personality that shows itself in love, compassion, creative action, and a melting tenderness which draws all hearts.
Nothing is lost in this transformation. It is clear in the Upanishads that sex is sacred, and ashram graduates often went back into the world to take up the responsibilities of family life. But they did so in freedom. Free from conditioning, they had a choice in everything they did, even in what they thought. Their ideal was not to retire from the world but to live in it selflessly, with senses and passions completely under control. This freedom is the hallmark of the Upanishads, and nothing better suits the life-affirming spirit of the Vedas.
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