COMMENTARY
I
The Right Setting and the True Implications
The Mandukya Upanishad, like the Isha, is a quintessence of all the Upanishads. No improvement can be made on Sri Aurobindo's remarkable translation of the Isha, nor can anything be added to his masterly exposition of it. What we may do with profit is to point out how the Mandukya, though belonging to a later and more Vedantic period than the earlier and more Vedic peroid of Indian spiritual experience, confirms and corroborates in general the main lines laid down in the Isha.1
The fundamental intuition of the Upanishads is that the final Truth is That by which all things exist, That because of which all things exist, That of which all things are but phenomenal becomings, the one Infinite Essence, knowing which one knows all that is numerically multiple, just as "by knowing one nugget of gold one knows all that is constituted of gold".2 This essence, however, is no thin abstraction but the sole Existent which makes the whole world mysteriously kin and makes men feel that there is something common between them which is not mere similarity, something which unites them to all living creation and even to the dawns and sunsets of their poetic communions. Indeed, all religions bear witness to the constant haunting of the human mind by the brooding omnipresence of this basic oneness; but in India the sense of it assumed an unusual psychological complexion because her sages saw clearly that, if the numerically Many were truly a various manifestation of the essentially One, then this One which they called Brahman must be for human beings the inmost secret of their being, the supreme Self of their selves, Atman. But, since the one Essence is identical always and everywhere, the supreme Self of each human being must be no other than the supreme Self of the universe. Thus, not only was the one Reality seen to be a veiled infinite Being conscious of Itself and Its manifestation,
Page-11
"the Speech of speech, the Mind of mind, the Life of life"3 and the transcendent origin and goal of all personality, Purusha, but man also was seen to be in his ultimate essence That and, by his unique gift of self-consciousness, capable of the attempt to widen and deepen his infeeling by perceiving, as the Isha puts it, "the Self in all existences and all existences in the Self"4 and breaking beyond the superficial separative ego-sense or Ahankara into an actual realisation of his soul's basic oneness with God.
But the sublime practicality of the Indian genius did not rest content with high-sounding theories or the "frigid majesty" of sterile speculation. Thousands of men dedicated themselves to the pursuit of this Divine that promised to be their own highest Self and by long years of self-discipline and meditation first sounded the call of the Spirit, which was to thrill through the whole of Indian history. The result was a rich harvest of authentic experience of the supernormal, the exploration of the subliminal consciousness which modern psychology in the West has just glimpsed, the discovery of subtle planes of existence inhabited by powers of light and darkness which modern "spiritualism" has lately stumbled across, the development of the latent faculties of the mind and body which modern researches in hypnotism, telepathy and telekinesis have crudely begun to examine, the recollection of innumerable past lives concatenated by the karmic law of the psycho-physical momentum of action which modern theosophy has succeeded in popularising, the entry into a cosmic consciousness leading to a luminous participation in the bliss of a world-creative supraliminal Seerhood and finally the ecstasy of union with the sheer Absolute. It was on the basis of such a series of spiritual experiments, verifiable even today by those who have the courage to do Yoga, that the Mandukya Upanishad founded its fourfold division of states of consciousness, the fourfold nature of the Being which manifests Itself in the individual and the universe and whose symbol is the cryptic word OM, the mantra or divine rhythm heard by the Masters of Yoga in the
Page-12
inner consciousness during the high rapture of profound union with the imperishable Spirit in their hearts.
In Sanskrit the vocable OM is composed of three letters A, U, M, which are pronounced, according to euphonic rules, as one single sound. The syllable A is the first full articulation of the vocal organ, produced just by opening the mouth and blowing out through the larynx — a simple movement which accompanies all other forms of speech. U following A is the second basic syllable, produced when the mouth modulates by its expressive movement of projection the breath coming from the larynx. M following A and U is the third which completes the articulating movement of the larynx through the mouth, started by A and furthered by U, because it is produced by gradually closing the mouth in the course of vocalising the out-going breath. OM can be compared to the spatio-temporal universe. The spatio-temporal universe is an explanatory thesis unfolding the meaning of the Eternal who is beyond the movement in space and time, a mobile and evolutionary rendering of the permanent truth of the Beyond. Likewise the ineffable nature of that Immutable is symbolised in languages by OM whose sound comes by the first complete movement of the organ of speech and is, therefore, the fundamental expression of the pregnant silence out of which speech issues, so that the silence which in itself is always unmanifest may be regarded as the unspoken OM representing the Immutable whose proper self is always unmanifest. But it must be remembered that, like all the other utterances of the Upanishads, this word too is no mere philosophic symbol: it is primarily an inspiration and revelation fraught with the Vibrations of the higher planes and, when uttered with the right intonation and contemplated with the proper psychic attitude, a piece of spiritual onomatopoeia reverberating as no other name does with echoes of an immeasurable completeness carrying in itself the rumour, as it were, of a far-off shoreless ocean.
The Mandukya Upanishad is a record of the exploration of the Spirit symbolised by OM — a progressive withdrawal of
Page-13
consciousness into itself in order to discover its own depths. From the waking state the Yogi retreats by a powerful concentration into the lucent spaces of dream. Thence he plunges deeper yet till he has left the subtle lights and shades of dream and comes into contact with the luminous calm-centre of the flaming storm of puissant Knowledge-Will which originates from the depths of a supernal Delight, both the subtle and the gross manifestations in the universe and the individual. Going beyond even this Master Consciousness he finds himself in the ether of pure Self where there is no shadow of duality, an Identity of self-sufficient peace, an Infinity of beatitude eternally unaffected, undiminished and unobscured. The Mandukya traces "the great passage" inwards and upwards, which the ancients speak of and by which the soul regains the memory of its own first principle; but it is careful not to mix up the different stages of this journey with its full metaphysical estimate of the Real revealed to experience.
The whole mistake of the later school of philosophy lay in believing that each stage of the journey means a denial of the reality of its predecessor, so that, the pure Self having been reached, the rest of existence assumes the character of a colossal illusion because the sealed trance of union with the sheer Absolute gives no evidence at all of the other forms of so-called reality. But an argument of this sort is always open to the retort that we may as well deny the pure Self because our ordinary consciousness bears no evidence of it: if our unconsciousness of the Absolute does not mean that the latter is non-existent, there is no reason to believe that the sublime sleep of spiritual ecstasy means the actual negation of the mutable universe. Shankara, wiser as usual than his followers, seems to be aware of the illogicality of a trenchant illusionism and admits that though the pure Self eternally entranced has no awareness of the phenomenal world the latter is the result of a mysterious inherent power in the former by which, in an indescribable way, the phenomenon co-exists with the noumenon without obscuring or affecting
Page-14
its infinity of essential Consciousness. But in declaring that nothing can exist outside of Brahman who is "the One without a second" he as good as confesses that somehow the Self remains immutable though manifestation proceeds from It; and in confessing as much he saves his philosophy from being reduced to the absurdity which is the stigma of all logic infatuated with its own castles in the air. But even though his spiritual mentality refuses to be perfectly illusionist, his pure intellect is perplexed by this tremendous anomaly of a mobile cosmos co-existent with the Self that seems to be an infinite rest. He could not impress upon his intellect the double truth of the Spirit because he was naturally debarred from striving for the experience of it by his ascetic and excessively hostile attitude towards the materialistic age in which he flourished, with its insistent lures to the senses which he attempted to belittle and even nullify by proving them to be fruitless ephemera sicklied over with the pale cast of phantasmagoric thought. So he held that, practically, the last stage of the great passage inwards and upwards shut out the awareness of the rest of the journey though somewhere in some inexplicable manner the other stages co-existed with it.
The Mandukya Upanishad, however, labours under no such disadvantage of exclusive experience, though it deals with each stage of self-realisation separately. It nowhere insists that each plane or poise of being is an isolated status: the very word it uses denotes simply the proper seats or dwellings of the four forms of the Self, bearing not a shade of the idea that from each centre of being the soul proper to it cannot and does not act and react upon the other levels: the only inevitable condition is that it will interact in terms of its own peculiar nature. Ordinarily man is conscious of his "dream-self" on the dream-plane only, but that is so because his waking-self is not in rapport with the former: in other words, he is not fully conscious even of his dream-self because he is habituated to live mostly in his waking consciousness. But it is an undeniable fact, well-known to ancient psychologists, that the surface consciousness is no
Page-15
more than a wave thrown up by the hidden forces of the subliminal and that the latter functions in more or less full awareness of the physical plane even when the normal physical being is not in tune with this hidden knowledge. The special insight of genius, artistic, religious, or any other, is due to its being simultaneously conscious on more than one plane. What is dream to the average man can be to the Yogi a condition of clairvoyant and clairaudient wakefulness in which the subtle senses proper to the inward consciousness and not the gross senses are at work on both the planes: it is not the loose incoherent and almost involuntary phantasy of the untrained dreamer. In describing the pure Spirit the Mandukya refers to this double consciousness in saying that the proper nature of the Spirit is neither that of the gross nor of the subtle nor even of the state which is midway between them, aware of both of them. Yogic sleep also is not the dull unconsciousness into which the physical mentality usually sinks, nor is it confined necessarily to an exclusive perception of the concentrated divine energy which looses forth both subtle and gross realities. Prajna in his self-nature is a dense mass of Knowledge-Will, but in his creative movement he embraces and permeates all that he looses forth. The Mandukya recognises this double status by saying that he is the lord, creator, destroyer and indweller of everything — concentrated in the sense only that he holds the original principle of manifestation, the primal law and total truth of existence, not in parts and aggregated relations as the mind sees the universe but in their essential unity of purpose and single harmony of cosmic aim. Prajna is the Seed-Logos of the Stoic philosophy, logos spermatikos, reproduced in the universe as a multitude of Seed-Logoi or inmost divine Ideas which mysteriously guide the emergence of Facts in the external out of the play of Possibilities in the internal. Even when consciousness, as we physically or subtly know it, seems to be submerged in deep sleep, Prajna is secretly awake, omnisciently creating out of the massive intensities of his integral Knowledge and one-pointed Will a
Page-16
world-form of his transcendent Delight.
The Mandukya repeats its recognition of the double status of Prajna when to the first negative description given by it of the pure Spirit it adds the second that the pure Spirit is neither concentrated knowledge nor the consciousness of Prajna as the Master of Wisdom, the lord of everything who from his inmost coign of vantage looks out and comprehends the world in the terms of his own ultra-mental unified being. Though different in Its mode of being from all these other states, which we specifically called states of consciousness, the pure Spirit is not unconscious. It is conscious of the pure Self primarily, whereas Prajna is primarily conscious of creative concentration and bliss, Taijasa of subtle impressions and Vaishwanara of external impacts. But to be thus conscious is to fall out of the definable categories of awareness. And it is the exceeding of such categories that is brought home to us in the descriptions which follow. The pure Self is "invisible" because what is projected and emanated in the universe is not in the condition of pure selfhood but a self-becoming, so that the pure Self can never be held as an object of conscious vision. It is also "unrelated" because in Its basic nature, spaceless and timeless, It gives no hold to the other states of consciousness to establish a subject-object relation or communication with Its ineffable and non-dual infinity. For the same reason It is "unseizable and featureless"; but when the Upanishad makes It out to be almost unknowable and indistinguishable it only means that, being the very Self of all selves, It is not known except through identification. So long as we are in the ego-state the Supreme Self is always to be worshipped and meditated upon as being other than we are, because it is infinitely wider than the periphery of the ego though the centre of Its infinite divinity is to be found in our own heart of consciousness. That is why the ancients meditated on the God-Self seated in the heart, and in so doing assumed a transition from the manifest universe to Its unmanifest essence. It is "devoid of deceptive mutations" inasmuch as It can be changed or affected only if
Page-17
Its consciousness of being the original Self everywhere and always, who alone has ultimate reality and of whom Space and Time are only self-conceived terms, can be lost. In spite of all phenomenal imperfections and fluctuations Atman is aware of Itself seated in the heart of all phenomena. It is not oblivious of them either, for the Mandukya only says that Its consciousness is basically of the pure Self; but just as Prajna is also comprehensive of the world which issues from his concentration and bliss, so also the Self must be aware of the three other states inasmuch as It is the support, foundation and essential reality of all creative, subjective or objective facts. Even if the universe and the Creator were illusions, still they could not exist even as illusions outside of Its sole reality.
The Self, therefore, must be aware of everything, though It may regard it as only a peculiar rendering or manifested version of that reality of Itself which is in Its pure state unlike anything else — neti, neti, not this, not this. But the "unlikeness" need not be anything more than the primary pivot of Self-being, round the essential experience of which the three other states of Self-becoming simultaneously revolve. For the Mandukya unmistakably asserts that it is the immutable OM beyond time who is also all this in time, reminding us of the famous verse of the Isha: "That moves and That moves not; That is far and the same is near; That is within all this and That is also outside all this."5 In Its essential and original purity It is the transcendent Infinite, "the Peaceful, the Beatific, the One who is non-dual," and who, according to the Isha, is "bright, without scar of imperfection, without sinews, pure, unpierced by evil".6 But the Isha significantly adds that none else save He "has gone abroad", sa parya gāt, as "the Seer, the Thinker, the One who becomes everywhere"7 — that is to say, as the kavi who sees by direct vision and illumination the truth of what he manifests out of himself, as the manīṣī who has for his perspective the plastic interaction of possibilities working out the hidden law of the Infinite, as the paribhū who pervades the realm of eventua-
Page-18
lities with its rigid necessities of objective sequence. All of them are svayaṁbhū, at once the Self-existence and the Self-becoming, who "has ordered objects perfectly according to their nature from years sempiternal".8 Since Brahman and Atman are one OM cosmic as well as supracosmic, temporal no less than transcendent, it is this fourfold reality that is indicated in the Mandukya by the words: "This Self is fourfold." Hence the integral Atman is to be realised only by the simultaneous experience of Its fourfold reality in the terms of Its essential consciousness — an ideal implied by the Mandukya when, after explicitly defining Atman as fourfold, it says that the pure Self which by itself is only the fourth aspect is yet the one who is to be fundamentally realised as Atman.
Notes and References
1. Several scholars assign the Isha to a late age on grounds of linguistics. But linguistic elements can submit to a change under various conditions. The thought and the imagery, the cast and turn of mind, give the original epoch of the expression. Sri Aurobindo has remarked how verses 15 and 16 of the Isha, invoking the Sun-God of Knowledge, paraphrase in a more open style a packed Vedic verse of the Atris, while the Isha's 18th verse is taken bodily from the Veda.
2. Chhandogya Upanishad: VI. I. 5.
3. Kena Upanishad: I. 2 (Sri Aurobindo's translation).
4. Isha Upanishad: 6.
5. Ibid., 5.
6. Ibid., 8.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
Page-19