The Individual Soul, One with the Universal

ya imam madhvadaṁ veda ᾱtmᾱnaṁ jīvamantikᾱt,
īśᾱṅam bhῡtabhavyasya na tato vijugupsate etad vai tat. (5)

This atman it is that makes you feel that you are the enjoyer of the fruits of action. We are under the impression that we are individual doers. Madhu means honey. For us, experience in this world is sweet like honey, and so we cling to it. Existence is itself joy, even with all the suffering it involves; even with all the miseries, because the atman reflects Himself in our lives. The taster of the honey is the atman, and the taste comes from Him, too. This joy of life does not come from a distant place. The consciousness of our being alive comes not from outside. Our life is identical with our existence.

Once you enter into the state of the atman which is the nearest and so the dearest, you become the knower of the past and future. The very same eyes that saw the Kurukshetra Battle peep through us even today.

The Purusha Sukta gives us the highest example of this fact. It says that all these eyes, all these heads, are His. Omniscience is the mark of this universal being and seeing. We shall all become like this, provided we are able to break through the wall of personality. If, instead of limiting our consciousness to a single body, we are able to go beyond it, there is immediately a flood of omniscience, if only we are able to sink into the subconscious level of our being. This going beneath can be experienced internally or externally. You can sink into the ocean near New York or Bombay; you sink into the same ocean. The atman-ocean is everywhere, and when you once enter into Him, you will not shrink away from Him. This is so strange!

Though we try to want God, there is only a try and not the want. When God begins to look at us we are terrified, because He will not make any concession to the senses and their actions. We do not want Him to be critical about us, and so we shrink away. God’s face burns like a blazing fire, and he who enters Him, does not return. But we want to return after God-realisation. See Him, and then become powerful to enjoy the objects of the world, or transform it. You do not go somewhere to see God and come back afterwards. You do not move even a single inch to see Him. You are not travelling to any place in God-consciousness; don’t forget that He is everywhere.

He is omnipresent Indivisibility. Indivisibility relieves you from space and time, and because He is omnipresent, He is not somewhere, nor is He someone. You enter the same God wherever you are, and in whatever time. “He is spaceless and timeless existence. When this stage is reached, you do not turn away from anything, nor do you crave for anything. The senses are withdrawn automatically, the mind ceases to be and you do not exist as a thinker or senser, but as being—a being of omnipresent indivisibility. This is what you experience, and this is God-consciousness. It does not take time. It is not future, or past, but an Eternal Presence. This mysterious something is That, O Nachiketas!”

yaḥ pῡrvaṁ tapaso jᾱtamadbhyaḥ pῡrvamajᾱyata,
guhᾱm praviśya tiṣṭhantam yo bhῡtebhirvyapaśyata etad vai tat. (6)

This ishvara, Brahman, God, atman, is externally visible and internally experienced. He is far and near. Externally, to the senses, He is the most distant, and yet, being your own Self, He is nearest. Cosmically speaking, He was even prior to the idea of creation. It was by tapas that ishvara created. But His tapas is different from ours. For us, tapas is self-control and mental effort to subdue the senses. But for Him, it is concentration of consciousness—universal being taking the shape of space and time. The substance of the world is the will of ishvara, just as the substance of a dream-object of yours is your own thought. Your dream-fire, your dream-water and so on are your own creations. For God, there is no hard or liquid substance, but only His will of which all elements are constituted. Prior to the manifestation of the five elements, say the Puranas, there was only universal water and the Spirit of God brooding over it. This water is the cosmic condition, and the Spirit is Narayana. He is so called because He gives life, spirit, to the original condition of things. This potentiality becomes will; Brahman becomes ishvara. Prior to the will of hiranyagarbha’s concentrated thought is the Absolute. Also, It is the deepest Reality in your own heart. That Narayana is in you even now, and He broods over creation both microcosmically and macrocosmically. He becomes the elements and the jivas.

In dream, you are the objects and also the subject. You yourself are the experiences of the dream-content. Likewise, ishvara is present objectively in the cosmos, and subjectively in you. So there need not be any worry as to how to approach this Universal Being who is far. “He who was born of old from austerity, from the waters—He is in your own heart, as the bottom of your being. By diving deep within, you can operate the whole universe. This inaccessible Reality is the most secret Being in your own being. Nachiketas, this verily is That.”

What is that which is beyond the destruction of everything, was the question. This is That. That which is far, far from the ken of our senses, yet is our being. It is the most distant, unreachable, and the most inward. This is the difficulty in God-realisation: you have to become everything or nothing. This is your sadhana. There are three kinds of ego: ‘I am something’; ‘I am everything’; ‘I am nothing’. The latter two are capable of bringing liberation. But the ego ‘I am something’ binds.

The process of creation is being described in a graduated series: Brahman is the supreme Existence. It becomes ishvara, and then the will to project, hiranyagarbha, and as such, cosmic prana. Universal life vibrating everywhere—a gross form of which is electric energy, a part of which is our breath. Universal prana is hiranyagarbha. He is also the abode of all gods. Every God of every religion is one phase of this God. All gods hang in the universal Tree of hiranyagarbha like leaves, fruits, flowers hang in the same tree. This universal tree is what is described in the fifteenth chapter of the Gita. All Gods are appearances or shapes of this One God. This God, in which all gods exist, exists in your own heart. So you can see all gods of all times, anywhere, sitting in one place: Krishna, Rama, Shiva, Christ, Buddha. That which is without is also within: Tat tvam asi. That cosmic reality is the subjective reality also.

God is above as well as below. Cosmically, He is ishvara and hiranyagarbha. Individually, He is our own Self. We usually are under the impression that the sky is very far, that space is above and that stars are in space. But we forget that we are in space, in the sky; hanging in mid-air. If the moon and stars are far off in the skies to us, similarly the earth is in distant space to them. Just as they seem to be hanging in space thousands of miles away, we too seem hanging in space to them. We feel we are on the earth, and space is far, far away; but the fact is that it is everywhere. It is in this indivisible, conscious space that we feel God. The ideas of below and above, of distance and nearness, and finally, the conditions we impose on space have affected us so much that even in universally existing Reality we make the distinction of below and above, and philosophically we distinguish between Brahman and ishvara, ishvara and jiva, macrocosm and microcosm, this and that, tat and idam—which are all notional differences.

The omnipotent Reality has centres everywhere. You can think through any point in space, for each is as good as any other. One circle has only one centre because it has only one circumference. But this is not a circle with a boundary. It may be a circle from the point of view of boundless existence, but it is filled with Selfhood and as such cannot be differentiated into good and bad, just as oneself cannot become an object. The Self is ever a subject, and inasmuch as It is the centre, It has centres everywhere. This God, Reality, which we seek, is the universal Creator, prior even to the manifestation of the five elements, tanmatras, and the cosmic causal condition, and yet, mysteriously enough, at the same time this most distant Being is the bottommost Existence in our heart.

yᾱ prᾱṇena sambhavatyaditirdevatᾱmayī,
guhᾱm praviśya tiṣṭhantī yᾱ bhῡtebhirvyajᾱyata etad vai tat. (7)

“This Supreme Being is not merely the transcendent presence called Brahman, He is not merely the Supreme called ishvara, He is also the cosmic prana, the life of all beings.” The life we breathe, the energy that we breathe, is all the expression of this hiranyagarbha-prana. It is the cosmic prana that is breathed, by all—by people, plants, animals etc., all move because of the prana that enlivens them. Life does not mean living in a world. It is not activity of any kind. To live is itself life, not merely to do something, or to speak or execute a deed. Life is the capacity to exist as different from manifested matter. It is not protoplasm; it is not thought. Prana and life are only different words meaning the same. And it is difficult to explain how a human being or animal differs from inanimate matter, just as it is difficult to prove that we exist. All that is connected with God is mysterious.

When you cross the logical limits of the intellect, everything becomes inexplicable. If externally there is no limit to the horizon, internally there is no limit to wisdom. Wisdom is endless as space is endless. God is limitless externally and internally. One of His expressions is this mysterious something which we call prana, through which living bodies move from place to place and recognise themselves. To recognise oneself as living is life. Even plants have a self-direction: they grow and move towards the light of the sun. It may not be a thinking principle, but a tendency of self-recognition which is called life or prana. “This cosmic life is hiranyagarbha-prana, in which all gods are clustered together. This mysterious hiranyagarbha is in your heart also. And this Being was prior to manifestation, and It entered the beings. This verily is That.”

In the earlier mantra we were told that He was prior to the manifestation of the physical elements, the tanmatras, to all that is conceivable. Now He is said to have entered all. The body is made up of elements, and the life in it is due to prana entering them. This way, hiranyagarbha is That reality behind all forms of life.

araṇyor nihito jᾱta-vedᾱ garbha iva subhṛto garbhiṇībhiḥ,
dive diva īḍyo jᾱgṛvadbhir haviṣmadbhir manuṣyebhir agniḥ etad vai tat. (8)

“This hiranyagarbha, called vaishvanara-agni in the aranyakas and nachiketas agni here, hidden in fire-sticks like the embryo in pregnant women, should be daily adored; this verily is That.” It is the jatharagni that digests the food in our stomach. It is the fivefold fire that functions through the five sense organs. The nabhi is supposed to be the centre of it; a living force. This mystical fire is hidden in the two aranis. In a sense you may say fire is hidden in a matchstick. In olden days it was created by the ignition of two sticks—the upper and lower aranis are the two sections of the mathava which ignites fire and keeps it hidden in them. One stick is not enough; two are necessary. Jatavedas is agni. Just as rubbing or friction is necessary to ignite fire, some sort of igniting force is necessary to manifest hiranyagarbha. We have Him in us; we carry Him with us always; just as pregnant women carry the foetus in their wombs wherever they go, we move about with Him, and we cannot live without Him.

This Supreme That Is within us, we worship It, though unknowingly. We cry for It, every day. We long and die for It—but unconsciously. Our searches in the world indicate that we cannot live without this Being. Our suffering, our complaints indicate that we cannot live without Him. Our wealth and possessions indicate that we cannot live without Him. Hiranyagarbha is the Infinite in us, and the many finitudes we collect from this world cannot make us happy. Likewise, all the visible material things collected by us cannot be equated with the Universal we are carrying. With this treasure within, we seek for It outside.

What we need is an awakening! Awakened ones recogise this Being within, and unawakened ones search for It outside. What is needed is not a possession of the treasure, but a realisation of the fact that we possess it. If an emperor dreams that he is a beggar, what are we to do to make him rich? Are we to give him riches in the dream? No—he is only to be awakened and told that he is an emperor. And the very same instruction is for us: We possess the universal treasure in us; we have enough. To become rich in the universal sense we need not acquire many things. The universal wealth must be made part of our consciousness. This is how awakened ones worship It, while unawakened ones worship It as sense objects.

The distorted worship performed by the ignorant by searching for happiness in these is not going to help them in any way; just as a beggars’ wandering in the dream world is not going to help him to become rich. Awakening, and not contact with things is the way to possess universal wealth. To wake up into another consciousness is the solution. This fire of awakening has to be ignited. Ishvara-sakshatkara or the awareness that one is the Universal—that conflagration which is in every matchstick—is what is necessary. This awakened Reality is verily That.

This agni is symbolically worshipped by the householders as the fivefold agni, even today, but it has become only a ritual. People mistake this earthly fire as the real, instead of recognising it as the universal fire. But the agni that we worship is a symbol of the vaishvanara-agni. Life is prana manifesting itself as energies of various kinds, just as electricity can be manifest as heating or freezing force, and so on.This mysterious living Being within individual bodies is That answer to Nachiketas’ question about hiranyagarbha.

yataś codeti śuryo astam yatra ca gacchati,
taṁ devᾱḥ sarve ‘rpitᾱs tadu nᾱtyeti kaścana etad vai tat. (9)

Yama continues: “The sun sets there, the sun rises from there; the propelling force behind the sun which makes it rise and set is that force which all the gods worship daily. No one goes beyond That. This verily is That.” All gods are fixed in this one God, like spokes connected to the hub of a wheel; it can also be compared to, radii connected to the centre of a circle. This Energy is the cause of all movement, not only in this world, but even in the stellar system. This mantra is the description of the controlling Power of the physical cosmos. Gravitation is the force that acts between bodies. We are stunned by its mysterious laws working in the heavenly bodies, causing their motion through aeons and aeons. If ‘A’ is attracted by ‘B’, and ‘B’ is conversely attracted by ‘A’, we say they are mutually attracting each other. If there are three bodies involved, we cannot say which attracts what. If there are ten such bodies, the problem is more complicated. If there are innumerable bodies, how can we explain the gravitational law? This mutual attraction among bodies, which yet keep their courses, indicates the existence of a central governing Power. Otherwise, there would be no mutual attraction and planets would run helter-skelter. There would be no centripetal force which pulls everything to the centre, keeping all in their track. The planets are seen, but not the force that keeps them moving. By the term, ‘sun’, we have to understand all heavenly bodies.

What is the law that keeps all cells in the body intact? Why do they not run away? We have never seen cells in the body fighting with each other. Why do they react chemically and otherwise? Why should there be a relation between effect and cause? All this is due to this central Force or Energy on which everything is hung and on which everything depends. This is the God of all gods. Everything valuable in this world and the celestial one is determined by This. No one can break Its Law. No one can exceed It. There is no such thing as violation of It. This Reality is that Supreme Being.