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Excerpt
from "The Swetasvatara Upanishad."
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(PDF) OM, Handle FoR the DiviNe
When we try to think of God or the Divine Being, we have only the mind to think with. The mind is our instrument, our creature; before we can succeed, we have to find out what its nature is. Among other things, our mind lives for sense impressions, concrete realities. That is what makes it comfortable. If you give it a concept like Immortality, it grows restless and uneasy. Give it Love, and it is restless even there: It tries to think of love and immediately turns to a sense object, something specific. We tell it to think of Glory and it can’t—it again identifies with the familiar. So it’s clear that if you want to think of anything—not only these abstractions but anything at all—you need a name or a word to think with. That is the mind’s nature. We have to give it a word or a name before it can have a thought; it needs to know what to think to begin with, and to be able to think. Every thought in the world has a corresponding word or name that announces it to the mind. When we want to think of God, the mind wanders in a void. It thinks of the sky perhaps, but even that is something definite—blue, somewhat tangible. We need a name for God, or a word. We can’t think of the Absolute itself: we need something to give the mind some support to hold onto. As we have seen, if you tell the mind to think of Love, it gets restless, but if you think of some aspect of Love or some loving person—an image or symbol—immediately it feels more comfortable. Therefore we give it what it needs. There are many visual symbols for the Divine. Christ is one; he is a vehicle towards Brahman, a channel towards the Absolute. He did not point to himself, but beyond. Buddha, also, said, Don’t glorify me; tread the path that I have trodden, and you can experience what I have. With OM we’re concerned with another kind of symbol, the auditory…. OM is believed to be the sound of the creative power, of the Divine Will in action. OM is the sound of the Deity—at least, that which we can pronounce. Yogis are said to hear it in their meditation. Not only in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, but also in Christian traditions: Eastern Orthodoxy has had the sound HOM for centuries. “Whosoever knows OM, the Self, becomes the Self,”* says the seer of the Mandukya Upanishad. OM can be viewed as a handle by which we seize hold of the thought of the Deity; without a handle it is difficult to open the door. OM is a mantra, a sacred or inspired sound that is repeated to evoke to the mind a sense of that reality we are seeking to know directly. It stands for the Beyond, the Reality within, the Divine. There are many other mantras as well. We may prefer to repeat the name of Buddha, or of Jesus, or Krishna, or of some other name that represents the Divine. Whatever is congenial to us we should use. But in lieu of some special partiality, many find OM acceptable because it symbolizes the Godhead in the most impersonal and universal way. * The Upanishads, Breath of the Eternal, Trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester, (Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1975), 76.
Note: The image is the
Sanskrit "\"symbol
for OM.
... The individuality that we know now is separatist. That is what we cling to. It is egoism responding when we protest: What will happen to my individuality in mystical experience? However righteous it sounds, that is the ego speaking, loving divisions and differences; whereas, the spiritual element in us is trying to find unity and oneness. We want to develop and polish our individuality, but keep it intact, apart from other entities. We want to develop it, not lose it. In mystical experience, however, we lose the egotistic sense of individuality and gain a different consciousness entirely. It is like explaining to a boy of ten about the joys of married life. He doesn’t believe there are any other joys except the ones he knows. So we think our idea of individuality is the ultimate when it is only the beginning. There is something much beyond that.... We have to keep training our minds not to think that [mystical] experience has anything to do with annihilation, as we all tend to believe at first. It is simply the dissolution or extinction of the ego-power. Therefore, will mystical consciousness cause us to become nothings and lose our individuality? Quite the contrary: It will expand us to include the universe. The individuality we hug close is trapped in a kind of shell, like the caterpillar in a cocoon. Just as the caterpillar goes through metamorphosis to break free from its cocoon to achieve the next stage of development and become a butterfly, so we have to break the encasement of the ego-consciousness. After we do this, the Infinite will not be alien to us, although it is now. The feeling of exaltation and bliss that accompanies the experience, universally attested to, is the sign of coming into our true realm. We’re attracted to the Infinite, but we’re afraid of it, too. When we don’t have any direct experience of something, we are a little estranged from it even as it lures us on. This is what undergirds our fear that we are going to lose our individuality. But all the sages declare that the Infinite is our actual self. The discovery will be like suddenly coming home to ourselves in a flashpoint of awareness, consuming but a single moment. It will be like illuminating a dark room—after the light appears we don’t wonder where the darkness has gone, it seems never to have been. The moment the light is on, we don’t conceive of darkness any longer. This is how it is with the experience of the true self. The old self, so afraid to develop beyond its known limits, is magically wiped out, and we don’t think of it any longer—just as we don’t recall the darkness, which has not so much been changed as somehow fallen into nonbeing. Our true nature is Light. For more on mysticism: See also THE MYSTICAL STATE VS. THE DREAM STATE, IS MYSTICISM ESCAPISM? and Mysticism in our Words of Wisdom section.
AS WITHIN, SO WITHOU T
“What is within is also without. What is without is also within.” Chiefly
this means that
The Self is within; Life is within. Each of us is a carrier of the whole life of the universe. The Upanishads started with this ultimate statement at the dawn of religious history. Even now we stagger towards the idea as though it’s the latest revelation. This bold statement is very modern and overwhelming in its implications. But in almost every paragraph of the Upanishads, set down over 2,500 years ago, this is their first and last word. They never developed or explained it. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. We are told that we are carriers of the whole life of the universe within us. And we want to settle for just a little mortal, finite existence. But it’s hard to shake off the trammels of this old consciousness that makes us believe in a limited, separate existence. We need to hear and reflect on these ideas so that we can slowly move towards a more concrete awareness of the reality of the Self. “What is without is also within.” The Self is everywhere. So when we see other people, we must be careful not to hate them or harm them because the Self is equally in them as it is in us. This brings us back to Christ’s statement: “Resist not evil.” We see how Vedanta throws light on this difficult, mysterious saying of Christ. There’s no real evil from the point of view of the Self. The evil exists in terms of human beings who have been conditioned in one way or another, but to the Self everything has a purpose and is allowed to exist. We can’t say that anything that is permitted to exist is evil exactly; it may have a negative, rough function or catalytic function, which in terms of evolution might be called evil, but in terms of mysticism, or the Self, it’s not evil. If you are a practicing mystic, you must be careful to overcome evil with good and love your enemies, as Christ said. Who can really love their enemies except the mystic, and near-saint? But Christ wants us to be perfect. The rest of us can’t love our enemies, but at best we tolerate them, are civil towards them, and with much effort we can accept them. That’s about as far as we can go, but it’s better than hating them. It is a long way from where we used to be when we thought the solution was an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth—the old law—that’s not Christ’s law or the Upanishadic law, but the law of mankind, of states, of governments. Christ’s law says that you must love these people. Why should we love others who are hateful, who are our enemies? Because the Self is in them, even though they may not know it. They may not be acting well, but that does not change their inherent reality. The Self has created them and permitted them to live; It has accepted them. Therefore, if you are a mystic, you have to accept them. If you want to have the Self accept you, you have to accept the creation in totality, not in part. (pp 114-116 )______________________________ * The Upanishads, Breath of the Eternal, trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester, (Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1975), Swetasvatara Upanishad, 32. |
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the
Self [the Divine Self] is within us; we are not separate from the Self,
and the Self is also without. It isn’t as though the Self is a witness to
all the eternal things like love, life, and joy. The Self is the love, the
joy, the existence—this is the Self’s nature. These are merely names
whereby the intellect defines it for its own purpose. 
