NOTES
1. Upavyākhyānam: Meaning an exposition which brings out the hidden significance. The term may be taken as a link-word indicating the apposition of the second to the first thought in the same verse. For what is implicit in His unmanifest being, the Divine makes explicit in the movement of the universe in Space and Time.
2. OM is spoken of as akṣara which means "immutable" as well as "fixed letter or sound"; the double sense, implied also in verse 8, seems intended to convey that this cosmic movement bears in its very play of variations the suggestion of a supracosmic Constant of which it is an expression.
3. Brahman. The term meant in the Vedas the sacred Word of Inspiration. The larger sense of the Word as Logos underlay it, for the inspirations received by the Godward-turned mentality were regarded as deriving from the same source as the energy of the hidden Idea sustaining the universe. In the Upanishads it means clearly the supreme Consciousness which expresses itself in the cosmos.
4. Ātman. The word means That of which everything is a self-expression: hence the true Self of all, dwelling equally in the universe and the individual.
5. Chatuṣpāda: literally "four-footed". In the language of Vedic and Vedantic philosophy a foot signifies a step or grade in the hierarchy of being — a level, plane, status or organised form of consciousness, one of the many "vyahritis" or worlds of manifestation, and even an unmanifest mode of conscious existence. The three steps of "the wide-spanning Vishnu" which support the supreme Reality are well-known both in the Vedas and in the Upanishads.
6. "Seven-limbed, nineteen-mouthed": the seven limbs of the Male Universal, "Vaishwanara", are stated in the Upanishads to be the various parts of the universe: the highest ether is his head, the sun his eyes, the air his breath, the sky his body, water his lower organ and the earth his feet. Vaishwanara represents both the universal and the
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individual aspects of external Nature, because in Indian thought these two are always looked upon as complemen-taries implying each other, the macrocosmic and the microcosmic expressions of one and the same underlying reality. The nineteen mouths or avenues and means of expression are (a) the five perceptive senses of sight, audition, taste, smell and touch; (b) the five active senses which operate for speech, locomotion, the seizing of things, ejection and generation; (c) the five aspects of "prāṇa" the universal Life-Force — "prāṇa" , which introduces the universal vitality into the individual and actuates him towards more abundant living; "apāna", which leads him to expend his energy and so tend towards death; "samana", which regulates the in-coming and the out-going forces and maintains as far as possible an equilibrium of interchange; "vyāna", which distributes the vital energies by a pervasive movement in the system; and "udāna", the finest form of all, which serves as the strength of human aspiration towards the Divine and a secret channel of communication between the physical life and the greater life of the Spirit; (d) the fourfold "antaḥkarana" or inner instrument of consciousness — "citta", the basic mind-stuff receptive of the conscious values of stimuli and reactive in sensational and emotional expressions; "manas", the perceptive mind which serves as a subtle sixth sense gathering together as well as transcending the ordinary human consciousness; "buddhi", the sheer intellectual power of discriminating and co-ordinating all experience and thought — in short, the intelligent will which is meant to preside over our consciousness; and finally "ahaṅkāra", the ego-sense which constitutes the empirical experience of a limited body, life and mind.
7. "Taijasa" is the consciousness of the subtle and subliminal planes which are behind the world of gross reality dominated by the physical mentality and which have their own refined counterparts in objects and means of experience. The subliminal has planes of life and mind, with a deepmost recess which may be called the plane of soul, the psyche,
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containing the potentialities of the Divine Delight beyond the subtle world.
8. "Concentrated", because the still inner consciousness in relation to which we are in a condition of dreaming sleep and with which our ordinary mentality, by being insufficiently developed or refined, is unable to keep a contact, is that of the ultra-mental plane proper to the divine Will which creates from the core of all existence and holds in itself the unified aim towards whose fulfilment the whole universe tends. It possesses the truth of things in its integral unity, the truth which works itself out by its own ultra-mental law through the subtle and the gross manifestations.
9. The Sanskrit term is ānandamaya, meaning the substance of formative Delight. This Delight is the self-existent beatitude proper to the divine nature which manifests the universe by diffusing itself through the concentrated energy of the causal Will. It is the plane of the free interplay of divine Love where each is in all and all in each, supporting on the one hand the action of diversity-in-unity by which the causal Will creates and on the other the one supreme Conscious Being in which all are all.
10. The term "prajñā" means, with reference to the context, the consciousness which by its inherent quality is the divine manifested source of all other manifestations of consciousness and so the Lord or "īśwara" of everything, who in his own being concentrates all the Wisdom and Delight which he looses forth in the act of creation. From his consciousness are derived the two particular modes of internal and external awareness proper to "taijasa" and "vaiś-vānara". The world-consciousness inherent in his very quality of being "Prajnic" or original of all other forms of conscious manifestation is in its supreme pregnancy the unified condition which holds the seed of creation cast by the supernal Delight. All these different shades are brought out in verse 7 which starts to define by a process of elimination the Consciousness which is basic even to that of Prajna and is the very Self-Being which forms the stuff of all Self-Becoming,
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the extracosmic Immutable out of whom, by a surpassing miracle, proceeds the endless history of the cosmos.
11. Advaitam: It is inaccurate to say that this term denotes That which never manifests multiplicity; it may, with at least equal propriety, mean That which remains a unity even though manifesting itself under the figure of multiplicity. For the first interpretation lands us unnecessarily in a categorical denial of empirical reality and is even more akin, than the frankly mystical faith of the latter in omnipotence, to a Tertullian "Credo quia absurdum".* The second interpretation does not deny empirical reality, but refuses to accept its seeming multiplicity as anything more than a representative device of the supreme consciousness. Anyway, "advaitam" simply connotes That besides and beyond which there is no other or second, That in which there is nothing that is not in essence its own being.
12. This peculiar emphasis draws attention to the fact that the fourth state is the same as the yogic trance of absorption in the Divine, and gives us the Reality in its most ultimate nature, in its last and basic form as distinguished from its three other forms — that is to say, in its fundamental selfhood; but, it must also be remembered, in its fundamental selfhood as experienced under the conditions of the exclusive absorption which usually characterises the deepest trance so that the contents of its realisation are held rather unnaturally in vacuo, so to speak. To forget this would be to misunderstand the metaphysics of the Mandukya Upanishad from beginning to end.
13. The Self or Atman is not only "It" but also "He", because the supreme Essence is self-conscious and self-delighted and, as such, is not merely the impersonal commonality which is the eternal base of all apparent differences, but the original infinite Person as well, out of whose substance of infinite selfhood all specific formulations are regarded by us as if derived and whose pervading presence
* "I believe because it is absurd."
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seems to be, as another Upanishad says, "verily, a thunderbolt uplifted, for fear of whom the wind blows and the sun shines".
14. The word OM is in Sanskrit a euphony of three letters which are supposed to be basic to speech and therefore symbolic in their combination as well as separately of the fourfold nature of the World-Logos, "the Word which was in the beginning", in both its spoken and unspoken aspects. Further explanation is given in the commentary.
15. Amātra: "unsyllabified", meaning "undivided", because when A,U, and M are spoken as OM, one single sound is produced, symbolic of the single yet fourfold truth of being.
16. Avyavahārya: translated "unrelated" in verse 7, means, in full, existing without communication and commerce with anything, free from the necessities and limitations of a changing existence, because in its essentiality Atman manages to remain unsullied by the ignorant relations and vicissitudes proper to phenomena. It is not even relative to knowledge in the mental sense, for, as Yajnavalkya asks in the Brihada-ranyaka Upanishad, "how can one know the ultimate Knower in oneself except by the very fact and realisation of being the Knower?"
17. Prapanchopashama: translated "devoid of deceptive mutations" in verse 7. In Indian philosophy the state of being engrossed in the play of multiplicity to the forgetfulness of the basic unity of the Self is called the Ignorance. But Atman is said to be free of the bewildering influence of the mobile world of phenomena and, being undeluded and unperturbed by changes, is in a state of illumined peace. There is no suggestion of sterile immobility in the pure Sanskrit expression: to see it there one needs to be prejudiced enough to confuse calm with passive impotence. The Upanishads, as a rule, do not make a graveyard and call it peace. How even the Mandukya does not really contradict what it has itself said at the beginning — namely, that OM's transcendence of spatio-temporal activity none the less comprehends it — the
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commentary will elucidate.
18. The term Veda which is used in the concluding phrase of each of the last four verses does not signify the act of mere mental knowing. It means, originally, realisation by the identification of consciousness with the object, a secret rapport with and insight into the truth of appearance. So when the universal Vaishwanara is known thus by the individual by means of yoga, all desires and hankerings cease, because the ego-limitation is transcended and the whole universe is possessed in the one cosmic consciousness and does not require to be possessed physically. Similarly, the realisation of the universal Taijasa leads to unity with the inner nature of the whole cosmic movement, an identification of the individual's purpose with the universal play of subjectivity which transmits through an apparent clash of individual centres the fiat of the omniscient: through this inward sympathy the whole organic life of the body in both its gross and subtle aspects becomes illumined with the sense of the divinity which is behind the subjective plane. The realisation of Prajna the Transcendent who is the universal Lord makes one at the same time partake of the creative Origin beyond the becomings of the universe and be a conscious centre of the macrocosmic form of one's own microcosmic divinity: hence a conscious measure of all things, possessed of their innermost truth and supporting principle of guidance. Lastly, the realisation of the supreme Self awakes one to the ultimate Essence, and leads to the completest identification possible because the Upanishadic object and goal of realisation is the Self of one's self.
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