The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad -1.12. Swami Krishnananda

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Thursday, August 20, 2020. 9:42.PM.
1.Introduction -12.
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1.
The bondage of the self is intrinsically involved in the structure of the individual. We bring sorrow with us even when our birth takes place; and it is often said that we bring our death also together with our birth. The meaning is that all experiences – joys, sorrows, including our last moment of life all these are a fructification of circumstances with which we are born from the mother's womb. We are born under certain conditions, and they are the seeds of what will follow later, so that the entire life of ours may be said to be an unfoldment of that which is present in a seed-form at the time of our birth. We do not pass through newer and newer experiences unexpectedly, as it were, but they are all expected things only. Every experience in life is expected, as a corollary is expected from a theorem in mathematics. It follows; it has to naturally follow, logically, from the principle enunciated. Likewise, the experiences of life are natural phenomena that follow logically from the circumstances under which we are born. And these circumstances which seem to be powerful enough to condition our future are again the consequence of certain antecedents, and so on. There is, thus, a vicious circle, as it were, in which we are caught up, so that we cannot know which is the cause and which is the effect of any event or experience.


2.
This vicious circle of suffering is Samsara, the sorrow of the soul, and it cannot free itself from this sorrow by merely undergoing experiences through births and deaths, because the experiences in life, the sorrows and the joys, whatever they be, are powers which come out automatically from the nature of individual existence, and unless this character of existence as the individual is studied, its sorrow cannot be diagnosed, or eradicated.


3.
The knowledge that is of the Upanishhad is thus inseparable from the 'being' of the self. This is the characteristic difference of the Upanishhadic wisdom, the Adhyatma-Vidya. It is not a knowledge that one acquires 'about' a thing, but it is knowledge which is inseparable from the very 'being' of him who owns this knowledge. It is knowledge of Reality, Satta-Samanya, as it is sometimes called General Existence. Knowledge of Existence itself is the knowledge announced in the Upani?had.  It is not knowledge of any person, an object or the structural pattern of anything. It is a knowledge of 'being'. It is a Consciousness of Existence which is going to be the freedom of the spirit. It is in this sense, perhaps, that we call the ultimate Reality as Satchidananda-Existence-Consciousness-Bliss. It is a Consciousness of ultimate Existence which is at once Freedom and Bliss. It is not a definition of any person or individual form. The nature of Satchidananda about which we have heard so much, is not a definition of any particular condition of life. It is not also a description of the happiness of the human mind. It is not a future condition that we are going to enter. It is a description of Eternity itself where 'being' and 'knowledge of being' become one and the same, where there are no sufferings, obviously. We cannot separate our own consciousness from the consciousness of our 'being', for instance. We are, and we are also aware that we are. Our awareness that we are cannot be isolated from the fact of our 'being'. Our 'being' and the knowledge of our 'being' are inseparable, so that 'knowledge' is 'being'. This is the type of knowledge that the Upanishhad promises to give us. It is, thus, something unique. Towards this end the Upanishhad, the Brihadaranyaka girds up its loins.


To be continued ....

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