PART VI
NEW LIFE AND FREEDOM
Jnana
Only what is alive can cease to live, we have said. But what sort of life is meant?* Real life does not die. 1 How could it? It would cease to be life; the most one could say of it would be that it appeared to be life. Anything that can die is mortal, and therefore mortal life, that is, a life that will die, amounts to a nonliving life, which is a contradiction in terms. There is no such thing as mere temporal life, or life dragging on only for a time, for the mortal element it contains is only a passing guest, a parasite that will obviously die when it ceases to suck the life sap from life itself. There may be mortal beings, beings that have life only for a time, but life itself is immortal. To live life involves, then, transcending the temporal order. But does life exist at all apart from its living parasites? Is it merely a question of keeping “alive” a chain of living beings caught in a temporal-spatial succession? Is life only a miserable and tragic joke? What is real immortal life? Or rather, is not life always and constantly new? Is not life itself this incessant renewal and permanent newness? Immortality cannot be the clinging to a continuation of mortal life. It cannot be “life” artificially kept “alive” as in a modern hospital. True immortal life, therefore, implies not only the transformation of the object (“life”) but also the transformation of the “living” subject as well. This radical metamorphosis is liberation (moksha).
These are topics which Man has always pondered, and Upanishadic Man did so in a very special way. What is a full and authentic life and how may we reach it?
The Vedic experience is not one of death and resurrection as two dialectical moments of a process. The concepts of death and resurrection, if introduced at all, should not be understood as belonging on the same plane. The Vedic experience contains no idea of a temporal link connecting the two, as if resurrection were coming after death in a temporal sequence. In fact it is this great fallacy which the Upanishads are striving to overcome. What Upanishadic Man is interested in is not a return to the old familiar life, not a “new” old life; not a resurrection, but a “surrection,” an ascent to the heights of real and everlasting life. A mere reversion to “life” is precisely the danger and the dread. It is samsara, that is to say, the clinging to the spatiotemporal world of intranscendent events, slavery to history, entanglement in the chain of karman which confines us to this world until we have exhausted our “epiontic” obligations, or even our cosmic duties, our rna. 2
The Upanishads do not teach a death experience, but an experience of life. Ultimately there is no experience of death and the death experiment is, in the last analysis, unreal because the “subject” who died was not real. The supreme Upanishadic experience is discovered precisely by realizing that the experiment of death is only a psychological experience, made by the immortal atman.
The Vedic experience is one of liberation, of freedom from everything. It thus includes freedom or liberation from time. What both fascinates and haunts Upanishadic Man is not anything that comes after, but that which has no after. As long as we are entrammeled in the net of mere temporal existence, we are in the clutches of death, even if we postpone death by a sequence of successive existences. An afterlife is as inauthentic a life as a prelife. The piercing of the skin of time as with a needle, without either hurting or destroying the spatiotemporal epidermis and yet transcending it, is what liberation is all about.
Part VI needs a word of explanation. We have followed the course of the human and cosmic cycles as mirrored in the Vedas. Now, the end is not death and dissolution, nor is it an indefinite and horizontal repetition of one and the same circle. One of the discoveries of the Vedic wisdom is precisely that, whereas time is circular, Man is not, so that for him it is not a question of beginning all over again. On the contrary, it is imperative that he escape the enclosure of the circle. The circularity of time indicates its ontic finitude, whereas Man is infinite. Man has to break the circularity of time in order to reach the ontological fullness of his being. To enter into this other nontemporal, but no less real, sphere is to attain realization, to reach liberation from the encirclement of time and freedom from temporal chains. It is a truly new life, not in the sense of a “recycled” life but in the sense of a new type, a new kind of life, indeed, the only real and authentic life.
There is a misleading semantic ambiguity in what we have just been saying. We said “Man” where it might perhaps have been better to write “person,” or that “core of the human being” which transcends temporality and thus is capable of speaking and understanding this kind of language. Man, however, does not consist only of that core; there is also something temporal in him. We may like to call it individuality or another similar name. Yet, and here is our point, the temporal and the “eternal” (for we have to name it in one way or another) are not two elements, not two separable parts of the one Man. If Man ceases to be temporal, then he succumbs as Man, for Man consists of temporality; if he remains only temporal, then he is not yet born as Man, for Man consists also of transtemporality. The temporal and the transtemporal, however, are not on the same plane; they are not homogeneous and, for this reason, cannot be considered as two elements of his nature.
The Vedic Revelation, in accordance with the sayings of the Upanishads which seem to recognize a theological, 3 a cosmic, 4 and an eschatologica l5 trinity, or as it is summed up in the affirmation of the Mahabharata that “everything proceeds in a triple manner,” 6 could be said to convey a threefold experience. The preservation of the harmony of this experience--which could be described as the New Life--is one of the most precious contributions of the Vedas to Man’s maturity.
The first feature of this experience is that it embraces life in all its fullness in the most immediate and material way. To live a full life means to prosper in the world, in love, in one’s family, in the community, and in other affairs. There is no full human life without this dimension. The Vedic Revelation is a constant reminder of the generosity of the world, of its self-offering to Man, like that of the young bride who presents her charms and the allurement of all her finery to her husband. Life is emphatically earthly, and Vedic Man has no qualms about enjoying it. Without indulging in any psychological or psychoanalytic theory, the shruti rejects every kind of repression and every form of renunciation of positive values, even if such renunciation is for the sake of objectively--but not existentially--higher values.
The second feature of this experience does not negate the first one; rather it goes through it, pierces it, as it were. If the first feature is crystallized in the first three purusharthas or human values of the Indian tradition--kama, artha, dharma; love, riches (or the power imparted by riches), virtue--the second feature corresponds to the fourth purushartha, namely, moksha, liberation. Furthermore, there is a correspondence within the traditional ashramas or stages of life. It is only after the first stage of discipleship (brahmacarya) and the subsequent period of life as a full-fledged citizen and householder (grhastha) that a Man can enter upon the third stage of hermit or forest dweller (vanaprastha) and eventually the fourth stage, namely that of a renouncer (sannyasa).
The second feature is embedded in the first one. It could be said to arise from a certain disillusionment at not finding the desired fullness or joy in human values; or it could be said to stem from the discovery of the hidden dimension of all those worldly experiences. In either event it is the experience of supraspatial and transtemporal reality, the discovery of the mystery concealed in the cave of the heart, of which the texts so often speak. A post-Upanishadic tradition turned this idea into the exclusive center of life and existence and developed out of it the well-known ascetic and world-denying attitude of certain Indian spiritualities. Such an attitude can be a powerful and welcome corrective to an extreme this-worldly one, but the radical acosmism of such schools cannot be said to represent the spirit of the Vedas.
It is the third feature that synthesizes the other two. We would like to stress this feature particularly, not only because we consider it to be at the center of an adult human spirituality but also because it represents the core of the Vedic experience. In point of fact it is stressed again and again that the message of the Vedas is without internal contradiction, that it is harmonious and also one. Now, this oneness is not the oneness of a discarnate quintessence, which for the sake of passing beyond everything leaves reality behind, but a total cosmotheandric or Advaitic intuition, as we may now proceed to call it. This third feature combines the first two and sets them in a proper perspective. Without it the other two insights are incompatible and even doctrinally contradictory.
This third experience-within-an-experience is all-encompassing and thus proceeds neither by accumulation (like the first one) nor by elimination (like the second one), but by integration; it is, however, a peculiar integration which may often present itself as an oversimplification to the eyes of those who view it from without. It is a special and unique kind of simplification which does not reject anything, but condenses and concentrates everything until the highest slmplicity is reached. It is not without reason that words like yoga, yukta, tantra, and many others suggest a via positiva rather than a via negativa. The Laws of Manu rightly summarize the injunctions of tradition in their declaration that “in agreement with shruti and smrti, the householder is said to be superior to all [the other ashramas or states of life], for he supports all three,” adding that “just as all rivers, big and small, go to their rest in the sea, so men of all stages of life find their rest in the householders.” 7
Indeed, viewed from the outside, the accumulation of material or intellectual values may resemble a cancerous proliferation, but it is precisely this third trend that prevents possible exaggerations in the other two. It is easy enough to adduce examples of “material” repression or “spiritual” indigestion. The middle way of the Buddha is, we submit, a genuine understanding of the Vedic experience. However this may be, this Vedic insight is far from being a compromise or a reduction of the rigors of a healthy asceticism. It is certainly not an attitude that is merely this-worldly, a spirituality confined to the construction of the human city or the proper arrangement of the sociological needs of a human kingdom. The city of Brahman is not a city of politics, just as the real temple of the divine is not the house built of wood or stone. This attitude consists neither in total involvement in nor in absolute withdrawal from the city of Man; nor, again, is it a timid refusal to engage oneself fully in the pursuit of total human perfection, the word “human” signifying all the ambiguity contained in different anthropologies and different world views.
This basic attitude is neither a compromise to reduce the needs of Man to a minimum, as if he were a pure soul dwelling in a borrowed body, nor an ideal synthesis between opposites such as may afford a way of escape from the human condition. It is rather a harmonizing of polarities and an inclusion of both poles without eliminating either and without sublimating them in such a way that they become no longer recognizable. It is, thus, not a via negativa of enduring the tensions in constant expectancy of a constantly postponed solution; it is, on the contrary, a positive affirmation of the other two dimensions together with the discovery of their ontonomic relationship. This discovery renders unnecessary any drastic emasculation of life, which appears unavoidable only when we lose that all-suffering and all-transforming active patience of which sages speak.
This spirituality does not maintain a separation between the sacred and the profane, the religious and the secular, the cultic and the political. There is not here a diplomatic coexistence of two independent domains. That would be a misleading “katachronistic” interpretation. On the contrary, all is integrated into one insight which allows for the tension and struggles of the human condition and incorporates them, like so many threads of a loom, into the structure of the weaving so that together they constitute the total theanthropocosmic sacrifice.
This insight, then, would seem to be the loftiest peak of Vedic wisdom. No wonder that few have reached it and that the way is steep and difficult. No wonder also that for one who has arrived there the temptation invariably arises to remain on the peak, although it is so sharp that it permits only a prayerful standing posture. Since this breakthrough occurs in the Upanishads, we limit ourselves entirely to the Upanishadic witness, with the exception only of a few pioneering texts from other parts of the shruti. Because we do not give here any text of the Bhagavad Gita we may make a brief reference to the synthesis offered by the Gita. In point of fact the Bhagavad Gita puts before us this experience in unmistakable terms. On the one hand, it does not preach flight from the world or recoil from one’s secular duties. It does not point toward a nontemporal and everlasting kingdom in the caves of the earth or the depths of the heart. On the other hand, neither an earthly kingdom nor a political victory is to be sought. No hopes are pinned on the triumph of the Pandavas, or on a just and happy temporal society on the plains of this world; nor does the Gita feel impelled by a kind of ethical monism to defend nonviolence at any price, nor does it defend a theory of just war or justify the temporal gains and rights of the righteous. The Gita invariably takes a third path and offers advice that does not cease to challenge us, a counsel that becomes fatal the moment that we do not have the purity of mind and heart which is required on all occasions. The Gita does not admit casuistry, nor can it be turned into a piece of legislation. It does not belong to the mere sociopolitical world, nor is it otherworldly or merely a “spiritual document.” “It is not a battle that is going to be fought but a great sacrifice that is going to be celebrated, with Krishna as the high priest,” says Karna the half brother of the Pandavas in a moment of insight. “Let us die in the sacred field of Kurukshetra,” he adds, knowing well that he is going to lose. You cannot, if you are a man, refuse to participate in the cosmic sacrifice! Arjuna is told to fight, to win, to care, but with so much intensity, with so much insight, that he pierces the appearances and reaches reality. But he meets reality as he goes to encounter it, not flying from it or denying it. He is told, not that all he sees before him is unreal and that therefore he must flee toward the only real, but that the real core of all things resides in those very things themselves and that only by mastering them will he attain true deliverance. Exactly the same point is made to Arjuna’s elder brother, the righteous king Yudhishthira, by Krishna himself when he proposes to retire to the forest, after his total victory over the Kurus, instead of remaining as king. No, he must act as king that he is, renounce any sense of possession, but perform nevertheless his earthly duty. 8
The eternal is not outside but within the temporal; the world is not an illusion, if it is seen for what it really is. The illusion is to mistake it for what it is not; the mistake, in other words, is to have an unreal notion of reality and thus to mistake as real that which is only the veil of the real. The veil is certainly real, but it is no less certainly a veil. The one error is to mistake it for that which it veils, while the other error, so the Gita constantly warns us, is to think that we can see things without a veil, that we can discard or remove the veil altogether, as if behind the veil were a naked reality. This is sheer concupiscence. There is nothing behind the veil, because it reveals precisely by concealing. This is the symbolic character of reality, to which we have already often referred. Perhaps one of the most stringent formulations of this insight is the one that derives from a later but not unrelated tradition and perhaps brings it to its greatest depth: nirvana is samsara and samsara is nirvana. This does not mean that these two concepts express two sides of the same coin, but rather that we have two viewpoints from which to look at reality, which itself is not independent of our vision of it.
The way to the New Life is a long and elaborate one. In Part VI we seek to expound some of the stepping-stones on the way. In its three sections we attempt to trace the unfolding of this experience mainly as it is recounted in the Upanishads, which deal almost exclusively with this theme from all imaginable angles. The purport of the shruti, and in particular of the Upanishads, is, according to a practically unanimous and exceedingly ancient tradition, moksha or liberation. Yet when we read the Upanishads we do not do so from the exclusive position of any single school, but in the light of the whole shruti. We seek to extract from them what they really seem to be saying within that context.
Mindful of the fact that our introductions are not commentaries on the texts, but simply presentations of them in such a way as to avoid obtruding between them and the reader, we concentrate our attention on detecting the internal dynamism of the Vedic Revelation, leaving the rest to personal meditation. If the reader is wise he will take the advice of living masters, not only because to swim in the waters of realization is an arduous internal adventure, but also because there are many external crocodiles infesting the rivers that flow to the ocean of release.
Our exposition profits from traditional wisdom and takes as signposts on our path toward the goal the four great Upanishadic dogmas or Sayings, classically known as mahavakyas. While resisting the scholastic temptation of justifying our choice by some more or less artificial device according to which a fifth mahavakya corresponds to a fifth Veda, we would like, without swerving from the tradition of four mahavakyas, to place them between two other no less great Utterances, thus presenting a total of six Utterances as the supreme embodiment of Indian wisdom. 9
An orthodox view may take exception to our extension of the title of mahavakya beyond the hallowed number of four. Yet all will agree that our first utterance is not only in harmony with the four classical mahavakyas but even centers them. Om, our last utterance, could be taken as the paramavakya in the sense of an elliptical sentence; it is certainly a vac, a word that in the simplest way “speaks” all reality and thus Brahman. It will be recalled that the purport of the great utterances, according to tradition, is to disclose Brahman. Our two additional sentences do not have any other purport. Be that as it may, we present the four mahavakyas enframed by our first and sixth utterances.
We divide this part into three sections, each containing two subsections. Each subsection has as its title the corresponding mahavakya and presents the relevant texts of each of the six Utterrances, together with related texts. Needless to say, although we have emphasized the different kairological moments in the sections and subsections, they should not be considered as independent insights. They are simply different dimensions of one and the same Advaitic intuition.