By Eknath Easwaran

What can be said of a state of being in which even the separate observer disappears? “Words turn back frightened,” the Upanishads say: every attempt to explain produces contradictions and inconsistencies. But the sages of the Upanishads must have longed so ardently to communicate that they had to try, even if the picture was doomed to be inadequate.

Some time ago I remember watching footage of how the Titanic was discovered – two and a half miles below the surface of the ocean, far beyond depths that light can penetrate, where the sheer weight of the sea would crush a human being. Scientists designed a twelve-foot robot called Argo and lowered it little by little through those black waters right to the ocean floor. At those blind depths, probing with cameras and sonar, they began to piece together a vivid picture of a world no one could have seen before. The video seemed to take us through doors that had not been opened for seventy years, down that famous staircase into a silent crystal ballroom uncorrupted by time – eerie, disjointed shots of a lightless landscape. That is how I think of the Upanishads, probing depths where individuality itself dissolves and sending up pictures of treasures sunk in the seabed of the unconscious.

What do they report? They tell us, first, that whatever we are, whatever we may have done, there is in each of us an inalienable Self that is divine:

As the sun, who is the eye of the world,
Cannot be tainted by the defects in our eyes
Nor by the objects it looks on,
So the one Self, dwelling in all, cannot
Be tainted by the evils of the world.
For this Self transcends all!

(Katha II.2.11)

They remind us that love is the first and last commandment of this realization, for the same Self dwells in all:

As the same fire assumes different shapes
When it consumes objects differing in shape,
So does the one Self take the shape
Of every creature in whom he is present.

(Katha II.2.9)

They call us to the discovery of a realm deep within ourselves which is our native state:

In the city of Brahman is a secret dwelling, the lotus of the heart. Within this dwelling is a space, and within that space is the fulfillment of our desires. . . .

Never fear that old age will invade that city; never fear that this inner treasure of all reality will wither and decay. This knows no aging when the body ages; this knows no dying when the body dies.

(Chandogya VIII.1.1.5)

They place us at home in a compassionate universe, where nothing is “other” than ourselves – and they urge us to treat that universe with reverence, for there is nothing in the world but God:

The Self is the sun shining in the sky,
The wind blowing in space; he is the fire
At the altar and in the home the guest;
He dwells in human beings, in gods, in truth,
And in the vast firmament; he is the fish
Born in water, the plant growing in the earth,
The river flowing down from the mountain.
For this Self is supreme!

(Katha II.2.2)

What does it mean to say that nothing is separate and God alone is real? Certainly not that the everyday world is an illusion. The illusion is simply that we appear separate; the underlying reality is that all of life is one. The Upanishads view the world in grades of significance: as waking is a higher reality than dreaming, so there is a level of reality higher than that. All experience is real. Confusion arises only when a dream experience is treated as reality after one awakes – or when life is viewed as nothing but sensation, without wholeness, meaning, or goal. The ideal of the Upanishads is to live in the world in full awareness of life’s unity, giving and enjoying, participating in others’ sorrows and joys, but never unaware even for a moment that the world comes from God and returns to God.

Last, most significantly, the Upanishads tell us that our native state is a realm where death cannot reach, which can be attained here in this life by those willing to devote their lives to the necessary purification of consciousness:

When all desires that surge in the heart
Are renounced, the mortal becomes immortal.
When all the knots that strangle the heart
Are loosened, the mortal becomes immortal.
This sums up the teaching of the scriptures.

(Katha II.3.14–15)

We should pause to understand the significance of such words, for nowhere do the Upanishads reach loftier heights. In the Vedic hymns, death meant roughly what other religions promise: transport of the soul, the “bright body,” to everlasting life in a heaven of bliss. The sages understood this “bright body”; they knew firsthand that when the Self withdraws consciousness from the body, the continuity of personality is not broken. Death would not be different:

As a caterpillar, having come to the end of one blade of grass, draws itself together and reaches out for the next, so the Self, having come to the end of one life and shed all ignorance, gathers in its faculties and reaches out from the old body to a new.

(Brihadaranyaka III.4.3)

But they also knew that ultimately body and mind are made of the same primal energy, called prana, and that everything created must someday be dissolved. If personality returns life after life, then heaven too must be only a state of consciousness, part of the created world. It might last longer and be more blissful than bodily existence, but heaven too had to be transitory: a kind of interregnum in another loka or “world,” in which the Self can look back and learn from past mistakes.

In this compassionate view life becomes a kind of school in which the individual self is constantly evolving, growing life after life toward a fully human stature. The goal is realization of one’s true nature: not matter, embodied or disembodied, but the uncreated Self:

The world is the wheel of God, turning round
And round with all living creatures upon its rim.
The world is the river of God,
Flowing from him and flowing back to him.
On this ever-revolving wheel of being
The individual self goes round and round
Through life after life, believing itself
To be a separate creature, until
It sees its identity with the Lord of Love
And attains immortality in the indivisible whole.

(Shvetashvatara I.4–6)

Thus Self-realization is immortality in an entirely new sense: not “everlasting life” but beyond death and life alike. In this state, when death comes, one sheds the body with no more rupture in consciousness than we feel in taking off a jacket at the end of the day.

In all of this, we need to remember that the Upanishads present no system. When, much later, India’s mystics and philosophers did build coherent structures on these foundations, they found they had produced points of logical disagreement. But all understood that in practice such systems come to the same thing; they simply appeal in different ways to the head and heart.

No one has explained this better than Sri Ramakrishna, the towering mystic of nineteenth-century Bengal who followed each path to the same goal: these are simply views from different vantage points, not higher or lower and not in conflict. From one point of view the world is God; from another, there will always be a veil of difference between an embodied human person and the Godhead. Both are true, and neither is the whole truth. Reality is beyond all limitations, and there are paths to it to accommodate every heart.

In the end, then, the Upanishads belong not just to Hinduism. They are India’s most precious legacy to humanity, and in that spirit they are offered here.

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