S1E3 Mystical Realization in the Upanishads

This episode focuses on a body of sacred literature known as the Upanishads, which represents a clear shift away from the traditional Vedic sacrificial rite, which becomes internalized within the individual human for the first time in Indian history. Internalization of the sacrifice ensues due to an elevation in the status of the human body as a worthy object of meditative inquiry, and the new place of mystical realization. Elevation in the status of the body leads to innovations in disciplines ranging from Ayurvedic physiology to Hatha Yoga. The Upanishads also show clear examples of practices that prefigure modern practices, particularly pranayama.

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Episode Transcript

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In the last episode, we talked about the brahmanas as a shunned body of literature that still involved the Vedic, original Vedic revelation, but with the beginning of it sort of being modified in an obvious way. We talked about the brahmanas being part of the late Vedic Period and positioned that just before the emergence of the Upanishad. The Upanishad are one of the great bodies of spiritual literature in all of time. They emerge in in two periods, or scholars usually group them together in the same way that the Vedas are talked about early and late, or the early Vedic Period. In the late Vedic Period, there are early Upanishads and there are late Upanishads. And so the early Upanishads are said to be composed somewhere between 504 100 BCE. You can see how contemporary this is with the brahmanas, some of these early Upanishads of note, the brihad, aranyaka, the Chandogya, the kaushitaki. At this time in history, we're close to the Buddha. This is a little bit before that time. To kind of give you an idea of of when this early period is, Siddhartha lived between 483 and 410 sometime when we get to the later Upanishads, we're at 400 BCE to 1200 CE, see quite a lot of time passing. There an incredibly prolific period in the emergence of this body of literature. Some of the later Upanishads are the kata Upanishad, the special Tara, the Mundaka. Wendy Doniger comments on this basic place that we are right now, just as the brahmanas are, among other things, footnotes to the Vedas. So the Upanishad began as a sort of cliff note to the brahmanas, that is meditation on the meaning of the Vedic ritual and myths. So as the brahmanas summed up, in a certain sense and ritualized and gave the details of the earlier Vedic Revelation, the Upanishad, in some way, is doing the same thing. Here's something from the scholar, Edwin Bryant, to help us focus our inquiry. The Upanishads reveal a clear shift in focus away from the conventional outer sacrificial rite, which is relegated to an inferior type of religiosity, replacing it with an interest in philosophical and mystical discourse, particularly the quest for the ultimate underlying reality, underpinning the external world, Brahman, which is now localized also in living beings as Atman, so a shift away from the conventional sacrificial rite. We saw some of that last time when we talked about the myth of Prajapati and his the idea that through his own toil and not an external fire, he began to produce heat, which caused a transformation, ultimately leading to the production of gold. But the Upanishad really mark a time when that idea that we're moving away from the way sacrifice has been done is really more clear, really distinct in a certain way. Well, the Upanishads happened during a time in history that has been called by several scholars, namely Carl Jaspers, in his work, the origin and goal of history this time is called the Axial Age. I think it's Jaspers that terms it that, and it is a time of radical cultural change and philosophical change. What's interesting about that is that Jaspers claims that this this particular change, that it has a particular flavor that we'll talk about, that he would say the Upanishads also represent. It's a time when that happens in many. Cultures that don't have a lot of contact with one another, some contact, probably in some way. But he he speaks of it almost like as it's an evolution in the collective consciousness of humanity, if you'll allow me to use that term. Here's a quote from Wikipedia that kind of sums up this vast amount of cultural material that begins to be focused philosophically in a new way, Confucius and loud say, we're living in China. All the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Moti, Chuang, se and Lia zu and a host of others. India produced the Upanishads and the Buddha and like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to materialism, skepticism and nihilism. In Iran, Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil. In Palestine, the prophets made their appearance from Elijah by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to deutero Isaiah, at the same time, Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato of the tragedians, the Thucydides and archimenities, everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India and the West. So some people obviously are going to dispute this in some way, but I have seen other offshoots of the theory. Namely, there is a woman named Karen Armstrong who wrote a book called The great transformation that is about the Axial Age in which I first really started learning about the Vedic sacrifice and this evolution of our consciousness trying to retain something of this original thing, but then having it morph. And what we're going to talk about today, having it go inside finally, you know, and sort of once and for all, for a vast majority of people, Armstrong speculates that the reason that people moved away from conventional sacrifice and and obviously, these are examples that I just gave from Jaspers where that happens like all over the place. In the Hebrew prophets in particular, you start hearing, no more burnt offerings, no more blood smeared altars. That's not the kind of thing that the God of Abraham wants. So this movement away from sacrifice, Armstrong speculates that it happened as a result of us being so close to violence and beginning to understand, even if some even if, in only some intuitive way, what we have to do to our own consciousness, to to undergo or to witness and interpret positively, these these acts of violence. And I think that's an interesting thing to consider, given what we said about the Veda, this sort of original vision of the Veda, that all of our existence is sacrificial, because all of it involves eating. So now we're starting to try to deal with the consequences of that in ways that in the Upanishad become mystical and start looking a lot like what we call yoga, the Axial Age. If we were going to kind of sum it up in a kind of general way, that's acceptable, the idea that so so near and dear to all of our hearts, like this idea, look within in order to discover the answer to certain problems, existential problems, or even salvation, that we should look within, this is said to be An Axial Age idea. Now, what is the central teaching of the Upanishads? I think there is a diverse teaching across all the Upanishads, and there are many. Remember how long that that lasted, somewhere between 400 BCE and 1200 right, CE or a, d, as they used to say. But the a tradition has developed and is clearly discernible in all of that material that generally has been called Vedanta. Vedanta means you can see the word VEDA in there, V, E, D, A, N, T A and Anta means and and so in a way, the Upanishad were called the final commentary on the Veda, something that is the end of it. Not only the end of that period that includes the brahmanas, but also a. Philosophical critique of the Veda and the brahmana that sort of came to an ultimate resolution in some people's minds. So what? What's, what's Vedanta about? So let me quote Wendy Doniger here in an impossibly long sentence I'm going to probably chop up a little before I get to the end of it. Quote, the person is the individual soul, the atman or the self. And this is identical with Brahman, the world soul. Let me stop with that fragment right there. There's an identity of individual soul with world soul, sometimes Brahman is translated as atman also, but with a capital A, whereas the individual human soul is translated with a small a, okay, in order to distinguish those two. Now back to the to the sentence, just as salt becomes identical with water into which it is dissolved. So the individual soul becomes identical with the world soul upon realization. So basically, this is the central teaching of the Upanishad. It's a doctrine sometimes called pan in theism. What does that mean? Panentheism could be summed up as the idea that the world is made of God. It's a little bit different than pantheism, which sort of says that everything is divine, right in a certain way, but he but in some forms of pantheism there, there is often referenced a difference between something that is impermanent, and something that is more permanent, even that subtle thing sometimes is there in panentheism, the world is actually made out of God. And we've already said that the individual soul is identical, right, with Brahma and so when the two, when the manifest and the unmanifest are absolutely connected. When there is no separation between the two, it is possible to say something like the world is made of God, or everything in experience is made of God, and already you're beginning to see mystical union as central in these ideas. So this idea that everything is made of the Divine has a famous is made in a very famous statement, tat tovam Asi, tat tavam Asi, the Chandogya Upanishad. It means you are that, or thou art that we're going to come across this again. This is the orientation, this mystical union, this sometimes powerful monism. Oneness is called Vedanta. It means the end of the Veda, as we said, the end is considered to be Gnostic in a certain way, that that means that Vedanta, the doctrine of Vedanta relies heavily on the idea of realization, seeing it right, understanding very clearly exactly this identity between the individual soul and the world soul, and that there can be nothing separate from that. That's the realization the gloss in Vedanta is less on doing something like for instance, doing lots of pranayama, or doing work, or doing something like this, it's so much more on realizing what is happening. The classic metaphor is seeing that the snake in the corner of the room is actually a rope when you turn the light on. Is the great image that comes as that's often given right in in studies of Vedanta. Just like that, we see, and once we see, we can't unsee, then we know who we are. We are identical with the source at the level of soul, then we know that we are no longer liable for the cycle of rebirth, because we've realized and that means we'll go home and like salt into water, will be dissolved into the source. So. There is a group of sayings that come from several of the Upanishads from the the itera, the mandukya, the Chango Chandogya. And here's a hard one, brihad aranyaka, Sanskrit speaker, sorry, but I'm trying in each of these various Upanishads, there is a statement of this, no theological or Gnostic realization that's at the center of the teaching of Vedanta prajnanambrahma, Insight is Brahman, or Brahman is insight. And so just look at the two equations there. Insight is Brahman. Brahman is insight. This means realizing is the same as the experience of the source, the direct, the experience of the direct. Never, connectedness. Never, not connectedness. Sorry, always already connectedness, that insight is the full thing. Ayam atma Brahma the self, the Atman is Brahman. We mentioned this one already, tatvam ASI, thou art that from the Chandogya and finally, aham Brahmas me, I am Brahma. Throughout the series, so far, we've been tracing the Vedic triad, the original material in the Vedic revelation up through different periods in history that are significant for the practice of modern yoga. The Vedic triad is still here in the Upanishad, and I think this is the first time, one of the first times that you really see a transformation of these three materials into something that is revolutionary and produces a whole lot of revision and future insight and investigation in the realm of yoga, in the realm of awakening, right of Being freed from ignorance. And so remember that the Vedic triad is, is the human level, and that's the soma, that's the food for the fire. Then there's the sacrificial fire, Agni, and then there's the divine which was called Vayu. And that value, that word value, means wind. And so we see there the fluid, the fire and the wind that is at the divine level, at the human level, and as far down as you could go and as far up as you can go, this is the triple dynamic. This is present in the Upanishads, and transformed. And it becomes rasa, tapas and prana. So whereas we have Soma in the original we now have rasa. Let's go through these one at a time. Rasa is related to the to the word resin in English. It's the Indo European root, or the theoretical indo European root for that word, resin. And so it means essence, the essence of a thing. But notice the the body of it. It's a sap. It's a resin. And so it means juice. So the soma has become the juice, the liquid, the oblation, but now that rasa that's inside us, we're going to see that again in Ayurveda. Now we have tapas, this internal heat that is our door or or subtle work that's become Agni, and then the wind from heaven in the Vedic sacrifice has now been, quote, unquote, stepped down a couple of levels, and it has become prana, and that's going to be immensely important for theories About pranayama and medical things that happen later in Ayurveda. So to to give it weight again, this is not the the first time inclinations toward internalizing the sacrifices happen, but this is probably the first time where we see it as an entirely internal ordeal in a certain way, we really see that the human itself is now clearly manifesting all the parts of the macro, micro, sacrificial template. And the work is something that I myself might do. So here the human body. Is the rasa, in general, the liquid that is involved in the sacrifice and and that means that the human body is imaged as the oblation. Now, if y'all don't know what an oblation is, the oblation is the is a liquid, the liquid that's poured into the fire. Robert colosso makes a lot out of this book, or out of this idea. In his book, ardor, which is on the bibliography that goes somewhere that my companions know, you'll be able to have access to it. Ardor makes a lot out of the pouring of the oblation into the fire as the beginning of the sacrifice, because it's the beginning of stepping into a context where something is really lost forever, because the it's a liquid that's poured into the sacrifice. You can't take it back out now, if it were a stone or if it were a log, you'd have time to pull it out in a way, and so you're with those kinds of objects, you're kind of still in a place where no real loss, or no immediate loss takes place. But when it's liquid, you could say it's own baby. Now, something can be lost forever. That which appeared is going to be made, is going to disappear and be made invisible. And if it's in the sacrificial context, it's going to be reabsorbed at a higher level. So that liquid is the human body. Now, so that's beautiful, because we can see when we see bodies practicing, when we see bodies at all this vivifying liquid without which the sacrifice can't happen. The sacrificial fire, we said, is now top US, okay? And this idea that we mentioned in the last episode about religious austerity, or yogic austerity as the way to increase tapas or build internalized heat, really comes to fruition in the Upanishad, the the people who wrote the Upanishad or the the kinds of folks who who engaged in these religious austerities for the purposes of escaping birth and death, were referred to as the aranyakas. I think I'm right. That means forest dweller. And so we see ascetics here. We see people who have left the major part of society, basically Vedic sacrificial society, and they're in the fringe. They're living, quote, unquote, in the forest, a lot of meditation, eating very little, right? And so on. And so you're starting to see the emergence of a particular flavor of aspirant when it comes to the idea of how to deal with the existential problems in human life, or the predicament that we're in, God, freedom, love and death. Lastly, the wind by you, which was the sort of symbolic representation of the heaven or the higher, is now conceived as this breath that moves in and out my body. And we're going to start to see references of how the breath is going to be worked with specifically to fan the flames of tapas in order to keep the fire happening. So you start to see stuff like pranayama emerging, and it's very clear right in the Upanishads. So the internalization of the Vedic sacrifice now we finally get it localized entirely in the area of a human, the inside and so on and so forth. We should spend more time on this idea of the body as the oblation or the sacred liquid, the SAP or resin of existence that's poured into the fire that the human body is that that's, in a way, a new status for the body, and this idea that throughout the history that we're doing, the body is going to be this continual seed of contemplation that's either going to be denigrated more or it's going to be exalted more. Is something that will go forward with us all the way through Tantra, leading up to Hatha and leading up to the asana culture, you know that we see today, the body begins to take on different valence is a value, or it becomes has greater status as time progresses. This is very important for things like research and development into medical areas or the area of healing and medicine. You have to think that the body has something very profound. To tell you, in order to study it for the purposes of trying to help with sickness and so on and so forth. That's Ayurveda, this idea that the body gains a new status, or this that the body gains a new status also shows in Hatha and Tantra, in the sense of those disciplines are going to conceive of the body as as actually being able to be transformed into something divine itself, a Siddha, a master, right, free from birth and death. The Alchemist feels the same way. So the body now being exalted in a certain sense, or at least, we're being affectionate and fascinated with it and its internal workings that's really going to go forward with this. And a really important thing to point out here, David Gordon White says it this way, once the bodily microcosm was transformed into the seat of the sacrifice, interest in the internal workings of the body became greatly expanded. This expansion leads to research and development into two areas. We're going to call them the mystical and the medical. I'm actually borrowing those from David Gordon white. Let's do the mystical. First. This leads to yoga practice as we know it now. David Gordon White says, In the later Upanishads, there are vague references to yogic techniques by which to generate transformative inner heat in tandem with meditative, nociological Gnostic quote that's me inserting that realization of the identity of the individual soul with the universal soul. And so you start seeing references about technique that is designed to produce or invite a kind of absorption. We mentioned in the last episode that that this is a leftover of the rapture, that Soma created a need for humans. Realize that that mystical union, in some sense, is something that is something we need. We need to stay in relation with something like that in order to be who we are, or if you want to say, become who we are. Notice here that it's two things, another one, two punch. It's the heat of tapas, a burning right. That is a spiritual ardor combined with knowledge, and that's how we get to liberation, which is called moksha, and that means freedom. This heat and knowledge are conceived of as burning up accumulated karmic baggage from many, many lifetimes of ignorant action, karma falam, ignorant action. And the reason that action is ignorant is because it grows out of a sense of separateness. Or you could say we are suffering a case of mistaken identity. We believe that we are something that could come and go. We believe that we are something impermanent in a sense, and we act accordingly. We develop desires and attachments for things to to really deal with the this sense of emptiness that knowledge of impermanence supposedly gives us. But the Upanishads going to say, No, you're seeing it wrong. Remember, and when you see it correctly, you'll see that that snake you were afraid of was actually a rope, and that realization itself will free you. Now this is heat and knowledge, right, burning up accumulated karma. In this new context, we could say more about rasa also. It's interesting that in the Maitree Upanishad, the word rasa is used to designate the highest, eminent of the highest Guna, the strand known as Satva, essence, or purity, that comes from that information comes from David Gordon white too. Let me unpack that for you, what is this eminent of the highest Guna, the most subtle aspect, aspects of the reality that is available, in some sense, to experience, comes from something called the Satva gun which is essence and purity. So when, when the manifestation first emerged out of the nothingness that it came from, the first things, quote, unquote, to emerge were very, very, very subtle and one of the most. Subtle of those as Satva and so that's way up the chain of creation before us. Look that in the Upanishad rasa, this oblation, which is the body, is seen as an eminent, something that comes directly from the SAT vagoon, something that comes directly from essence or purity. And it's when you combine that idea that there is this subtle imminent that comes from a very subtle source. With the idea of the yoga that's emerging, you get the idea of a vital fluid being produced right from a spiritual discipline. This points forward right into hatha yoga. This points forward into Ayurveda and right living, because the most subtle essences that the human produces through the digestion process, those would be reproductive tissue. And then even beyond that, OGIS, which is another homologue of of Soma in a certain way, this is the essence that that we produce. And if we digest well, and we live well, and we experience mystical union and right relations and right action and right speech and so on, then we make we we more efficiently make this subtle liquid. So this, this idea that whatever rasa is, that this body is not something foul or or just totally impermanent and worthless, but that it's actually the subtle imminent of like the highest Guna, the Satva. Guna, right, is an amazing evolution in in value, and that directly affects the way we practice, going forward into the future, being sympathetic, in a way, to the body. So there's how some research and development went into mystical concerns. What about the body as oblation, producing medical R and D, specifically in Ayurveda. So in Ayurveda, the one of the expressions of the Vedic triad is the dosha tri, dosha kapha, pitta and vata, the earth and water. Data point, the water and fire data point, and the Air and Space data point. Or here we have fluid Kapha fire, Pitta and vata breath. This is the inner human metabolic activity, the flow of the doshas that theory arose directly out of the body, gaining new status in spiritual discourse. Also Ayurveda appropriates from the Vedic matrix, the notion of wind or value. That's a that's also directly related to the Upanishads idea of prana. Now the wind of Heaven is Prana, and it becomes my own prana, in a sense. And when that wind of Heaven gets stepped down several levels and and takes up a home in the body, it's called Vayu. And there are five primary values that run the physiology, all motion, all diastolic, systolic pulsation in the body, all intake and all output. So Ayurveda is directly affected and comes up with theories about how the body works physiologically because of this new status that the body is gained as oblation in the Upanishad, the practices of Ayurveda begin to serve in the place of the sacrifice because of this connection the whereas The Sacrifice formerly mediated between heaven and earth. Now the the Ayurvedic activity, the Ayurvedic physician in particular, or the Vaidya, can intervene in the relationship between the microcosm, which is our internal dosha metabolism, and the macrocosm, and that's the external environment and the time and change of the seasons. All of this grows out of this late Vedic matrix in the Upanishad and Ayurveda is said to be kind of developing concurrently with this. And so these ideas are all mixed in together. So I. We love to leave you with stories. We love to give you direct material from the in this case, Upanishad, so that you have images that your imagination can work on, so that you can begin to see yourself possibly as the alchemist, the yogini, the sacrificer, the eater, the one being eaten, and so on. This makes it richer for us as we move toward the modern world. Here's a quotation from the svetas vatara Upanishad, when he holds the body steady with the three sections erect and withdraws the senses into his heart with the mind, a wise person will cross over all the frightening rivers of embodied existence by means of by means of the boat of Brahman his breathing, restrained here within the body and his energy under, under control. He should breathe through one nostril when his breath is depleted. A wise person should control the mind, just as one would a wagon yoked to unruly horses, and engage in the practice of yoga, when, by means of the true nature of the Atman, which is like a lamp, a person perceives the truth of Brahman in this world, he is freed from all bondage because he is known the divine, which is unborn, unchanging and untainted by all things. So that's a mouthful. There's a lot in here. We have an overt reference to yoga. And that reference to yoga looks like breathing, being restrained. Quote, here in the body, it looks like energy. Quote, being under control. It looks like tending a fire. It looks like being wise, like someone who is driving a wagon, hooked, to quote, unruly horses. This probably one of the most famous images from the developing yoga tradition of what we're dealing with when we're trying to do yoga practice, when we're trying to understand our and realize our identity with the source of all things, when mysticism has become important, dealing with the body and dealing with the the mind, the body mind complex. Body mind, soul complex, is just like driving a wagon that's hooked to unruly horses. Those horses become a very important image later on for the senses. So the the senses themselves are as powerful as horses, and unruly horses can drag the wagon into oblivion. And so yoga here, even in the beginning, is seen to be a kind of fettering of some kind of crazy ass habits and energies that move through the human at all times our senses being that they're going to get us in trouble if we're not careful. This yoga of keeping the horses in check is happens by means of, quote, the true nature of the Atman. And so the soul begins to be the main thing that the senses are concerned with. They begin to turn toward the self, or the Atman. And the self is like a lamp when that is perceived. The truth of Brahman in this world is known. So there again, we begin to be able to look out and see the world made of God. We're freed from all bondage in this seeing, because all bondage results from believing that we have been born, that we will continue to change and that we will be tainted. What we realize is that we are unborn, that we are unchanging and untainted by all things. So we have pranayama. We have what's called pratyahara here, sense withdraw or practice that centers around the senses. We have meditation or Diana. We have concentration, Dharana. And we. The later, we have something called tarka or inquiry, and also Samadhi. Both of those are mentioned in the Maitree Upanishad as well. After the passage that I just read to you, those of you who have had any contact with the yoga sutra immediately are going to see something that looks a little bit like the eight limbs here, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana, tarka is in there, and then Samadhi, absorption right into the self. So we're clearly seeing the modern world when we begin to see the Upanishads revelation and the way it's put in into practice. Now, if we can provide a quick summary to bring this to an end, the Upanishad shift us away from the external sacrifice, that ancient sacrifice becomes revitalized and reinterpreted and it is placed in the vicinity of the human as the human. The identity of the human soul with the Divine is taught in the most beautiful of ways, and the idea that once realized, we will be reabsorbed into the source new discourses on the body as an oblation. Remember the body as the liquid that's poured into the fire. Those new discourses lead to research and development in both mystical and medical areas. This generates an intense interest in internal physiology, for instance, and also it generates an intensely deep observation of experience, say, in a meditative context, and then we see explicit mention of the categories and qualities and practices that define much of the future yoga that you and I know they're clearly expressed Here, most clearly expressed here for the first time. So I hope this has been interesting to you. We really appreciate you listening. God bless you, and we'll see you next time.