The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad -1.8 Swami Krishnananda

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Saturday, June 20, 2020.09:37. AM.
1.Introduction -8.

1.We are to free ourselves from this mess of involvement, through a deeper diagnostic technique applied to our own life; and this is the purpose of Upanishad. The difficulty of this achievement is well-known. Every one of you knows what this difficulty is. Just as you cannot peel your own skin from the body, you cannot dissociate yourself from the conditions of life. But such a feat has to be performed in this superpsychic technique known as Upani?hadic contemplation of 'being'.

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The beginning of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is, thus, a rise of thought into the inward principles of outward sacrifice as advocated in the Brahmanas of the Vedas: What is a sacrifice; what is a ritual; what is a performance; and what is an action? 

When this is understood in its principle, its inward significance, it becomes commensurate with human thought; it becomes inseparable from mind; it becomes a part of one's psychic life. You will find, on a careful investigation of the matter, that anything that you do is involved in a process of thought. It may be a religious ritual or a worship, a performance or a sacrifice, or it may be a secular deed it makes no difference. It is mind that is working in a particular fashion; that is all, and nothing more, nothing less. So, unless the mind in its essentiality is probed into, human action is not understood. 


The Upanishad is a revelation of the inner principles of life as manifest in actions of a variegated nature. The ritual of the Brahmanas is contemplated in the Upanishads. The Vedic sacrifice, or, for the matter of that, any kind of religious performance, is a symbol, ultimately, which is the point of departure in all esoteric approaches to religion. External religion is symbolic of an internal principle which is true religion, towards which the Upani?had drives our minds. 

This departure is to be found in every religion in the world. The symbolic character of human activity and religious performance is brought out in a study of esoteric principles, which is the philosophy of life. The activities of human life are symbolic in the sense that they are not representative of the whole Truth, but manifest only certain aspects of Truth. 

Every action is involved in cosmic relations of which very few are brought to the surface of one's notice when the action is really performed. We always think that an action is motivated by an individual or a group of individuals towards a particular relative end which is visible to the eye and conceivable by the mind, but never do we imagine for a moment that there can be farther reaches of the tentacles of this action, beyond the reach of the human eye and mind and our little action can really be a cosmic deed, that God can see what we do, and the whole universe can vibrate with the little word that difficult thing for us to understand; and the Upanishad explains it to bring to the purview of our consciousness these inward secrets of outward action, telling us that the outward sacrifice is symbolic of an inward contemplation of Universal Reality.

To be continued ...


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