Sri Ramakrishna Math : The Vedanta Kesari, February 2003

An article based on notes taken down by Mr.Gilbert Vaillant during lectures delivered at Centre VedantiqueRamakrichna, Gretz, France, in the 1950's by Swami Siddheswarananda on the Mandukya Upanishad. The notes have been translated and edited by Andre van den Brink.

The Mandukya Upanishad is the only upanishad which is purely metaphysical. It teaches ajata vada, the way of the unborn, of non-causality. In the metaphysics of Vedanta a distinction is made between (1) reality (tattva)--that which does not change and which persists through all our experiences, and (2) truth (mata), of which, according to the Vedanta, there may be any number. Swami Vivekananda explains this with the example of the sun: somebody is travelling towards the sun and at each stage he takes a picture. The images are all different, but no one can deny that they all show the same sun. The reality always stays the same, whereas the truths, although all true at their own particular level, are relative. As such, everyone else is entitled to a place for his standpoint which is as important as the place occupied by our own standpoint.

The reality is the Totality of existence, which has two aspects: (a) the manifested aspect, and (b) the non-manifested aspect. The purport of the Mandukya Upanishad is to prove that, irrespective of the level of existence at which one may find oneself, there is only one Reality which is.

Maya is that which is constantly changing, thereby giving rise to the numerous contradictions in life. That is why Swami Vivekananda explains that maya is not just a theory of illusion, but a fact of our experience: it is the confrontation of the contradictions in life, the play of interaction between the positive and negative poles, wherefrom the ordinary, relative knowledge springs. The only way by which we may know life, is by means of opposites, by opposition. And true knowledge (jnana) arises from the confrontation of the silence with the tumult. Only very few can have that jnana.

This confrontation is to be met on a basis which connects all the data of our perceptions and experiences, and which is not a denial. (Compare the concept of dharma, which literally means 'that which holds things together'.) When you faint, you deny pathologically; but in samadhi, you deny supernaturally in a trans-psychological state. But the reality is the Totality, the whole of everything (sarvam). A summing up of three or four states of consciousness would mean that the one reality is a compound, which is im-possible. And it is a great error of spiritual and philosophical life to think that all that is matter in life is to be rejected: by trying to make psychological supports and abstractions for oneself, by practising yoga, by leaving the world, retreating into caves and thus to deny the world completely. Surely, there are ways to leave the world, to practise meditation, samadhi, etc. for oneself, but that is not the ultimate state. It is not a matter of denying, of escaping or destroying the world, but of destroying avidya that we are ignorant of the one reality as one undivided Totality.

One seeks solitariness, because one is too much occupied by the outer world. We practise detachment and renunciation in order to break our attachment to the material world; we enter the monastery in order to discipline ourselves, but we can never deny the Totality. Why not try to get rid of those contradictions of life here and now, in the little place that we occupy in life? Why practise all these gymnastics, which only serves to postpone the true knowledge?

Therefore, it is not the yoga-samadhi as such, as the ultimate form of meditation, against which a charge is being made by the Mandukya Upanishad, but the wrong use of it as a means to arrive at the knowledge of reality. It is a warning against the practice of meditation as an end in itself. The world is not going to be explained by concentrating oneself exclusively on a condition of peace or by making oneself immune to the world. And this explanation of the world, of life's contradictions, is what is needed. The word samadhi means 'sameness of vision'. That sameness of vision comes with the enlightenment of the buddhi, the faculty of metaphysical discrimination, as a metaphysical insight. In the Bhagavad Gita, Sri Krishna taught this buddhi yoga to Arjuna on the battlefield. He did not advise Arjuna to go and meditate in the caves, but to fulfil his duty as a warrior on the battlefield, established in the metaphysical insight. Sri Ramakrishna also admonished Naren (later Swami Vivekananda) to see Brahman with open eyes. Thus we can make a distinction between yoga-samadhi and the jnana-samadhi: the former is a condition, in time, between a 'before' and an 'after', whereas the latter is a metaphysical insight into our true, intemporal being, which is not time-related.

So the Mandukya Upanishad breaks the wrong notion that the philosophy of Vedanta or the spirituality of Hinduism would advocate an escape from the world. The solution of problems and contradictions of life is the vision of the Intemporal here and now. Why not seek that knowledge right from the beginning? 'The unreal never exists; the real never ceases to exist.' Even in the midst of confusion and error, the awareness of the reality of the Eternal Now never fails.

We make a distinction between Time itself as the Totality of the Eternal Now (turiya), and 'time-duration' which is an interpretation afterwards of that which is constantly changing. The eternal Now is an ungraspable certainty, it is the eternal Subject which never becomes an object of knowledge. When there is the notion of particular attention, there arises the notion of time-duration, of Time apparently being divided into durations. Then there is duality and multiplicity, and we enter into the scheme of numbers. Through particular attention we are living in time-duration, as it were; in other words: in relativity. This particular attention is innate in all beings and is the negation of Totality as the indivisible One. That is the ignorance, avidya, of the Vedanta, and the western 'fall' and 'original sin'. It keeps 'the third eye' of wisdom closed.

At present we have not the vision of the Totality, but the experience of relativity--maya. The literal meaning of the word maya is: 'That which measures (the Unmeasurable).' The ignorance (avidya) makes itself felt as a want, a gap, and as an individual, we are constantly looking for possibilities to fill that gap: trying to fill our lives sensibly so as to come to fulfilment. In our attempts to find compensation we are caught by the desire to embrace the particular in the manifestation. In the process of wanting to grasp the reality through the particular, we enter the field of time-space to be confronted there with the contradictions inherent in all experience--maya. These contradictions are life--through this polarisation we know life. But, at the same time, there is the possibility to detach ourselves from it. The same relativity (maya) may be solved through the very fact of its being inescapably related to the Totality in the eternal moment of here and now--just as forms of clay are always indissolubly connected with clay.

Through the practice of objectless attention we open ourselves to the possibility of being the pure and non-dual consciousness. Through the detachment of objectless attention, that very attention may be realized as the unrelated and unborn Now of Time. We don't have that attention; we are that attention as pure Intelligence, apart from all physical and mental activities. That realisation is the realisation of the metaphysical insight.

In the second verse of the Mandukya Upanishad is the mahavakya 'Ayam Atma Brahma': This Atman is Brahman. The realisation of this mahavakya is not an experience, but a metaphysical insight falling outside the realm of duality. With this realisation disappears the ignorance regarding the non-dual nature of the one reality and, along with it, all the rapports and relationships which were built between the 'I' and the 'non-I'. At the same time, the illusion that there had ever been the question of two selves, a higher Self and a lower Self, the latter being in search of the former, disappears.

As long as there is a seeking, there is the sense of separation. As long as there is a seeker, there is the faith in the words of the holy scriptures and in the example of those who realized their true nature. Faith is a knowledge 'by anticipation': without faith one cannot progress, whereas a belief may be refuted at any level.

Realisation is not the outcome of a certain discipline or planned action, but a metaphysical insight which makes one recognize that the reality is one integral whole. The metaphysical insight cannot be 'practised' as one would practise yoga. When all our personal efforts have collapsed through the bankruptcy of all our seeking, only then, on that basis, can the reality come and seek us with its grace. Realisation is a gift of the Omnipresent to stay in the Intemporal, where past and future dissolve in the moment of the eternal Now. Realisation is the perception of the reality, a unique happening, indivisible, and therefore, ungraspable by the mind and its categories. The metaphysical insight is not a form of mental cognition (vritti), it does not remain stuck in an intellectual conviction, but implicates the person as a whole.

The Mandukya Upanishad teaches us 'to see Brahman with open eyes'. In the words of Meister Eckhart: 'To see God is to see through the eyes of God.' It is a great outburst against the fixed idea that realisation is an exclusive state of security, in which there is no longer any danger, created by religion and yoga. Nor is it a matter of transcending the world: the world stays as it is. There is only the overcoming of the ignorance regarding the truth of the one reality. Indian thought does not avoid the world of matter at all, but gives it its true value. There is no question of mystique or of transcendentalism: the whole of reality may be seen in a single grain of sand. Why seek a transcendence?

There is but one reality and three ways of seeing it. The three states of consciousness are three different visions of one and the same reality, they are like zones of attention through which the awareness of the reality persists. Let us take a stone, for example: in its grosser aspect it is perceived as a form of gross matter; under a microscope it is perceived as a specific molecular structure in movement; and with an even subtler perception the stone appears as a speck of light. All three are but the different presentations of one and the same substance.

What one sees in realisation is the reality and always only the reality. Mind and matter are equally Brahman. On the one hand, there is only Atman-Brahman who, as the eternal Subject, is the Self of all our experiences; on the other hand, the experience of the world is but 'one unbroken perception of Brahman' as an Object. Therefore one can no longer say, 'Brahman is real and the universe is unreal.' 'All that exists is Brahman.'