The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad - Ch-1, Second Brahmana, Post-1 : Swami Krishnananda

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Monday, January 25, 2021. 04:04. PM.

Chapter I :

SECOND BRAHMANA: THE CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE

Post-1.

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Now follow some very difficult symbols of the Upaniṣhad. Literally, they cannot be easily grasped. Even the Sanskrit is not classical; it is highly archaic. It is a Vedic language. And the idea conveyed through this most difficult style is still more difficult, so that one cannot easily make out the sense of some passages, unless we deeply think over the words as well as the meanings that are hidden between the lines. An unphilosophical mind may not be able to understand the hidden meaning of these symbols, and perhaps it is the case with all symbols; they cannot be understood literally.

The symbolic description here is one of the process of creation. How things come; and what it is that we see with our eyes. Where are we living? What is the connection between the effect and the cause? What is our connection with the Universal Being? What is the relationship between the individual and the Absolute? All these points are discussed in a pithy and pointed way, in a few passages, commencing from the Brāhmaṇa, or the section of the Upaniṣhad that we are to study now.

naiveha kiṁcanāgra āsīt, mṛtyunaivedam āvṛtam āsīt, aśanāyayā, aśanāyā hi mṛtyuḥ; tan mano'kuruta ātmanvī syām iti. so'rcann acarat, tasyārcata. āpojāyanta, arcate vai me kam abhūd iti; tad evārkasya arkatvam; kaṁ ha vā asmai bhavati, ya evam etad arkasya arkatvaṁ veda.

Originally, there was nothing. Death was enveloping everything. That is all the meaning, literally, of this sentence. In the beginning of things, what was there? Nothing was there. There was a devouring, all-consuming death principle, as it were; nothing else can we conceive. In the Veda, also, there is this very same point reflected in the Nāsadīya Sūkta, which proclaims that, in the beginning, there was neither existence, nor non-existence. What was there, originally? Darkness enveloped, as it were, because there was not the light of sensory perception. What we call light is nothing but the capacity of the senses to perceive. When the senses cannot perceive, we say there is no light. In pitch darkness, a kind of light exists; but the eyes are incapable of catching the ray of that light. That frequency is quite different from the one that is necessary for the eyes to perceive. 

So, when there was no possibility of external consciousness, when there was no sensory activity, when there was no distinction between the subject and the object, when the seer was not distinguishable from the seen, what was there? We can imagine for ourselves, what can be there. If we are not to perceive anything outside, what would be our condition? We cannot imagine it, because such a condition has never been seen; but it would be a veritable abolition and obliteration of all consciousness, obliteration of all consciousness, because every kind of consciousness is equivalent, in our case, with externality. 

Therefore, in the condition of non-objectivity which is the origin of things, the cosmic beginning of things, where the distinction between the seer and the seen was not marked, where the one commingled with the other, where one entered the other, where the two could not be distinguished, for reasons obvious, what was there? Nothing was there! Naiveha kiṁcanāgra āsīt: Originally, nothing was there, because our idea of 'something' is an 'object'. There is no object present, because the object enters the subject, and vice versa. What was there, then? If nothing was there, could you tell me that it is capable of definition in some way?

To be continued ...

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