Reality
[This is an excerpt from a piece I am writing for a Hindi language children’s magazine (to be translated by their editors) on the Upanishads. Thought I’d share this on the occasion of the second coming. I also recently learnt that the Eastern Europeans, followers of the various Orthodox churches, have their festivities next weekend.]
We get from S Radhakrishnan’s Principal Upanishads, a vocabulary for God (Brahman) as the impersonal supreme force, from whom all form and property emerge, but who is/are by themselves, formless, propertyless, infinite. It simultaneously gives us language for our personal God (isvara), with whom we are in conversation about our own trials and tribulations, as the giver of knowledge and direction to our earthly biographies.
This impersonal and personal god are one and the same, non-dual, Advaita. One is formless, and the other, deriving from it, takes the forms of our chosen gods who we idolise, and from whom we demand protection, love, care, mercy – the ones who wait in our temples, homes, shrines. The impersonal god is beyond our imaginative capacity. We cannot fathom their beginning nor their end. We cannot define or picture them. They have no beginning, no end, and were present before the creation of the whole universe and will be present after it ends. We can only define this impersonal, infinite god in negative terms – not this, not that
Stemming from the ultimate and eternal reality of the vast, infinite Brahman, beings and creatures (forms of life) arise. Creatures harbour within them a microcosm of the Brahman. We may understand this as the soul – atman. Brahman and atman are of the same quality – like a drop of water and the ocean. The atman arises from the brahman and merges back into it, upon being released from the cycle of birth and death.
The real that we perceive with our five senses is a precarious reality. It depends on what our limited sensory perception tells us about ourselves and the world. Most judgments we make about ourselves and the world around us, are based on the sum total of this sensory reality. For instance, our senses cannot tell us about outer space or very small particles or about the inner textures of light which is a wave and a particle. So, our sense of reality is a limited if deceptive one, that is held together by this ego (jiva). The world attracts in us a range of emotions through which we come to live in it, not realising that the world is an illusion (maya). Maya does not mean that the world is false, it is the reality mortal beings are presented with, in and through which to carry out their mortal will and actions. We must live inside this illusion-world and do our designated work (karma), try to achieve higher forms of spiritual knowledge (jnana), and love the world as an embodiment of the supreme god (bhakti).
