The Upanishads – Inner Knowing

“The Upanishads are epic hymns of self-knowledge and world-knowledge and God-knowledge.” – Sri Aurobindo

The Upanishads are profound crystallizations of immortal wisdom. They convey, not ideas or concepts primarily, but experiences, and they do so in the form of revelatory poetry. The wisdom of the Upanishads can be found in philosophical threads throughout history, including the teachings of Buddha, Pythagoras, Plato, Gnosticism, Sufism, Metaphysics, the Transcendentalists, Theosophy, the New Age Movement, and the amalgam of ideas and beliefs that pervade the modern yoga community. The Upanishads transmit the core of spiritual mysticism, and so relate to the mystical streams of all spiritual traditions, and because they are non-religious and universalist in nature, their simple truths resonate across religious boundaries and divisions.

In order to touch and be touched by these pearls of wisdom, we need to seek and find that within ourselves which resonates with them. The mind can take the words and concepts and interrogate and dissect them, looking for lines of logic, but then we will have missed the power and the beauty. We need to discover a faculty and an experience that is deeper and wiser than the mental, that can directly touch the rays of light that pour from the Upanishads.

As we go within and explore our inner dimension, we begin to see that thought is not the final frontier. In fact, thoughts can be like clouds in the sky, blocking the sun’s radiance. When we pay excessive attention to our thoughts, and allow them to solidify into rigid beliefs, we can develop a thick and unyielding personality that rejects vulnerability. And when we define ourselves based on others’ judgments, this dense layer is reinforced and strengthened.

In order to see what’s really there, we need to soften, become vulnerable, and release the thoughts and beliefs that make up this coating. Just as in our asana practice we learn to yield our weight to the earth instead of propping ourselves up using our muscular strength, in life we can learn to yield to the Divine One that encompasses and infuses us, letting our sense of self arise from this field of love rather than our habits and conditioning.

The Pavamāna Abhyāroha is a beautiful prayer that appears in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad:

om asato mā sad gamaya,

tamaso mā jyotir gamaya,

mṛtyor mā amṛtaṃ gamaya

om śāntiḥ  śāntiḥ śāntiḥ

Pavamāna is a word that appears throughout the Rig Veda in the context of purification. And Abhyāroha has a sense of an ascending prayer of devotion. This prayer of purification is a calling out to be led (gamaya) from falsehood (asat) to truth (sat), from darkness (tamas) to light (jyoti), from death (mṛtyu) to immortality (amṛta).

Purification is often misunderstood or misrepresented in modern western yoga. Part of this is because yoga today is frequently used to bolster the ego’s false power. It’s lumped in with fad diets and cosmetic surgery as a way to make us better, more lovable, worthier. We see what the ego does with the idea of purity and perfection: twisting it to strengthen the walls of its fortress. But actually purification, like yoga, is not a means of strengthening the separated, isolated, lonely self. It’s not a tool for creating a bigger, better ego, but a process of profound self-love.

Looking back at yoga’s history, we see traditions of self-mortification and self-denial that flowed from the doctrine of maya-vada. Maya-vada holds that all form is illusion, and that we should endeavor to escape the illusion by rejecting out bodies, our material lives, and our family/social ties to identify totally with the pure immortal oneness. Yogis in the maya-vada tradition leave society and practice self-deprivation and self-mortification (literally killing the self) as an approach to purification.

But the Divine One created this form and is this form.  From the Isha Upansihad, “All this that moves within the whirling universe is worn like clothing by the Lord.”  And the Taittirriya Upanishad, “Itself created itself; none other created it. And so it is called beautiful. And this that is beautifully made, it is no other than the Delight behind existence.” If we reject the form of our bodies or the form of our lives as essentially illusory, then we reject that One Who is that form.

At the same time, we do find that we are immersed in falsehood. We are surrounded by confusion about what’s real, what’s true, what’s good and wholesome.  We live in an evolutionary universe where the Divine One is emerging from the depths of ignorance and separation toward the expanse of truth and unity. We are this evolution; our collective awakening is the re-union of the One Divine Beloved with itself in the form of many Divine Beloveds.

Purification is not self-destructive. It is loving and nurturing. If you find a child covered in blankets, suffocating beneath the weight, the most loving act is to begin taking off the layers that keep the child trapped. So it is with your essential self, or Atman. Atman is the deepest and truest you, the one that is covered in blankets and aching to breath and be free. And purification is the process of peeling away the layers of falsehood that obscure your natural radiance.

This requires discernment, but we need not face it alone. Prayer acknowledges that purification is a partnership between Atman and Brahman, between the individual and God. Without this partnership, we are left with the ego in charge. To paraphrase Ramana Maharshi, when the thief is made the policeman, there will be plenty of investigation, but no arrests. Even as we experience ourselves as a limited individual self, enclosed within the walls of our own mind, we can call upon and receive support from the vast intelligent Love that holds all within its infinite heart.

“Beloved, lead us from falsehood to truth, from darkness to light, and from death to immortality.” This prayer is not a rejection of life, but the innate and natural cry of the separated self to be joined with All. This longing for union fuels evolution. It transforms and progressively purifies your mind, your life, and your body. The body will join with the soul, not by destroying itself or repressing its natural desires, but by releasing the desires that serve separation and not wholeness, enmity and not love. This process is collective and inevitable; it is the sweep of evolution. We can join in the flow, or we can be carried forward while we struggle and cling to the past. The path of purification frees us to let go of all that would hold us back and become the flow toward yoga, toward the embodiment of universal love.