VI   Works, Devotion and Knowledge   THIS THEN is the integral truth, the highest and widest knowledge. The Divine is supracosmic, the eternal Parabrahman who supports with his timeless and spaceless existence all this cosmic manifestation of his own being and nature in Space and Time. He is the supreme spirit who ensouls the forms and movements of the universe, Paramatman. He is the supernal Person of whom all self and nature, all being and becoming in this or any universe are the self-conception and the self-energising, Purushottama. He is the ineffable Lord of all existence who by his spiritual control of his own manifested Power in Nature unrolls the

V   The Divine Truth and Way   THE GITA then proceeds to unveil the supreme and integral secret, the one thought and truth in which the seeker of perfection and liberation must learn to live and the one law of perfection of his spiritual members and of all their movements. This supreme secret is the mystery of the transcendent Godhead who is all and everywhere, yet so much greater and other than the universe and all its forms that nothing here contains him, nothing expresses him really, and no language which is borrowed from the appearances of things in space and time and their relations can suggest the truth of his unimaginable being. The c

'Isha Upanishads' by Sri Aurobindo - Page 1 of 7 Note on the Texts     Note on the Texts   ISHA UPANISHAD comprises Sri Aurobindo's translations of and commentaries on the Isha Upanishad His translations of and commentaries on other Upanishads, as well as his translations of later Vedantic texts and writings on the Upanishads and Vedanta in general, are published in Kena and Other Upanishads, volume 18 of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO. Sri Aurobindo had a special interest in the Isha Upanishad, whose principle of "uncompromising reconciliation of uncompromising extremes" (p 83) underlies his own philosophy as well He first translated the Isha around 1900, and over t

The Secret of the Isha   It is now several thousands of years since men ceased to study Veda and Upanishad for the sake of Veda or Upanishad Ever since the human mind in India, more & more intellectualised, always increasingly addicted to the secondary process of knowledge by logic & intellectual ratiocination, increasingly drawn away from the true & primary processes of knowledge by experience and direct perception, began to dislocate & dismember the manysided harmony of ancient Vedic truth & parcel it out into schools of thought & systems of metaphysics, its preoccupation has been rather with the later opinions of Sutras & Bhashyas than with the early truth of

Ish and Jagat   The Isha Upanishad in its very inception goes straight to the root of the problem the Seer has set out to resolve; he starts at once with the two supreme terms of which our existence seems to be composed and in a monumental phrase, cast into the bronze of eight brief but sufficient words, he confronts them and sets them in their right & eternal relation Isha vasyam idam sarvam yat kincha jagatyam jagat Ish and Jagat, God and Nature, Spirit and World, are the two poles of being between which our consciousness revolves This double or biune reality is existence, is life, is man The Eternal seated sole in all His creations occupies the ever-shifting Universe

Part Two   Incomplete Commentaries from Manuscripts     Isha Upanishad   All that is world in the Universe   The Sanscrit word जगत् is in origin a reduplicated & therefore frequentative participle from the root गम् to go It signifies "that which is in perpetual motion", and implies in its neuter form the world, universe, and in its feminine form the earth World therefore is that which eternally vibrates, and the Hindu idea of the cosmos reduces itself to a harmony of eternal vibrations; form as we see it is simply the varying combination of different vibrations as they affect us through our perceptions & establish themselves t

VOLUME 17 THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SRI AUROBINDO © Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 2003 Published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry PRINTED IN INDIA Isha Upanishad Publisher’s Note   This volume contains Sri Aurobindo’s translations of and commentaries on the Isha Upanishad His translations of and commentaries on other Upanishads and Vedantic texts, and his wr

'Isha Upanishads' by Sri Aurobindo - Page 1 of 50 The Karmayogin   A Commentary on the Isha Upanishad       NOTE   Sri Aurobindo modified the structure of The Karmayogin: A Commentary on the Isha Upanishad while he was working on it He began with a two-tier division: "Chapters" and sections Later he introduced a superior division, the "Part", and began calling the lowest-level divisions "Chapters" The intermediate divisions, earlier called "Chapters", became known as "Books" The numbering of these divisions is neither consistent nor complete The table on the opposite page shows the structure as marked by Sri Aurobindo in the manuscript and prin

'Isha Upanishads' by Sri Aurobindo - Page 1 of 50 The Life Divine   A Commentary on the Isha Upanishad   [Draft A]   Foreword   Veda & Vedanta are the inexhaustible fountains of Indian spirituality With knowledge or without knowledge, every creed in India, sect, school of philosophy, outburst of religious life, great or petty, brilliant or obscure, draws its springs of life from these ancient and ever flowing waters Conscious or unwitting each Indian religionist stirs to a vibration that reaches him from those far off ages Darshana and Tantra and Purana, Shaivism & Vaishnavism, orthodoxy & heresy are merely so many imperfect understandings of Ved

'Isha Upanishads' by Sri Aurobindo - Page 1 of 50 Chapters for a Work on the Isha Upanishad   [1] The Isha Upanishad   The Puranic account supposes us to have left behind the last Satya period, the age of harmony, and to be now in a period of enormous breakdown, disintegration and increasing confusion in which man is labouring forward towards a new harmony which will appear when the spirit of God descends again upon mankind in the form of the Avatara called Kalki, destroys all that is lawless, dark and confused and establishes the reign of the saints, the Sadhus, those, that is to say,—if we take the literal meaning of the word Sadhu, who are strivers after