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Brahma Knowledge, by L. D. Barnett, [1911] - Complete Book

English

fragment 5, "thought (of being) and being are the same," fragment 6, "speech and thought must be real, for being exists and a naught does not exist," fragment 7, "non-being can never be proved to exist." Except in his view of Being as a sphere, Parmenides is in perfect accord with the Vedanta. The similarity of Plato's doctrines is well known. Brahma Knowledge, by L. D. Barnett, [1911], at sacred-texts.com section 15. PHASES OF THE SELF.--The highest existence is thus Thought without thinking, the state in which the soul has no consciousness of any external object, or indeed of any object at all, strictly speaking, for it is itself in conscious identity with the sum of all being or Universal Idea; "whilst he seeth not a thing, yet doth he see, though he see not the thing erstwhile to be seen. He that hath sight loseth not his sight, for it is imperishable. But there is naught beside [p. 36] him, naught apart from him, that he may see" (B.A. IV. iii. 23). The only analogy that experience furnishes for this supposed condition of soul is that of dreamless sleep; and it was inferred that in such sleep the soul is actually in this transcendent state. Besides this, the earlier Upanishads recognise two other states of the soul, waking and dreaming. When awake the soul puts forth out of itself a world of sense and organs of sense and empirical thought, and renders itself the subject of the experiences conjured up by them. In dreaming sleep the sense-organs swoon away and are absorbed into the manas, the organ forming the centre of empirical cognition and will ( section 18), which thus has now the vision of the world as it is reflected from the waking state; at the same time the "life-breaths," pranas, are active as in waking. The later Upanishads assume yet another phase, which they call the "Fourth" (turiya, chaturtha). In this the soul, transcending dreamless sleep, is absolutely wakeful in its union with the universal subject of thought, and exercises in perfect stillness an infinite real consciousness of all in the Self which is different in kind from the "unconscious consciousness" ascribed to dreamless sleep. The waking, dreaming, and dreamless phases are respectively termed Vais'vanara ("common to all mankind"), Taijasa ("luminous," for in [p. 37] dreams the soul is its own light, B.A. IV. iii. 9), and Prajna ("intelligent," for in deep sleep the Self is one with the Universal Idea or "intelligent Self," prajna atma, B.A. IV. iii. 21); these terms do not occur until Mand. iii. ff. On dreaming sleep see also B.A. II. i. 18 (soul wanders about within the body), IV. iii. 9-14 (two accounts, in one of which soul leaves the body, while in the other it remains in it), iii. 20 f., Ch. VIII. x. 2, Pra. IV. 2 f. Dreamless sleep, B.A. IV. iii. 19-33, Ch. VIII. vi. 3, x.-xi. Fourth State, Mand. VII., Maitr. VI. 19, VII. 11, Mandukya-karika I. 12-16, III. 33 f. See also S'ankara on Brahma-sutra I. iii. 19 f., 40 f., III. ii. 1 f. S'ankara, following Ch. IV. iii. 3, holds that in deep sleep, in which the soul is in temporary identity with Brahma, the functions of sense, together with the manas, in which they are absorbed, are merged in the "breaths" travelling through the pericardium and veins (cf. section 18), while the soul becomes one with the Brahma residing under "determinations" in the heart (in B.A. II. i. 19, it rests in the pericardium, in Ch. VIII. vi. 3 in the veins). The statement of Ch. VIII. xii. 3, that "the Calm (samprasada), rising from this body, wins to the Supreme Light, and shows itself in its own form; this is the highest spirit (purusha)" is taken by S'ankara (on Brahma-sutra IV. iv. 1 f.) as referring to the soul not in dreamless sleep, but in its final release from the body after enlightenment (see section 24); this "own form" is the existence [p. 38] of the soul in its absolute selfhood, where there is no longer a distinction between individual and universal soul. For the theories of the Vedanta after S'ankara see above, section 12. Brahma Knowledge, by L. D. Barnett, [1911], at sacred-texts.com section 16. MaYa.--The word maya, magic illusion, is commonly used in the later Vedanta to denote the phantom character of the phenomenal world; and in this sense it does not appear in the Upanishads until the S'vetas'vatara (IV. 10). It is not found in the Brahma-sutra; and hence the question has often been raised whether the idea denoted by it was actually present in the minds of the authors of the older Upanishads. That phenomena, even to the first principles under which they are cognised (space, time, and causality), are unreal relatively to Absolute Being, is a cardinal doctrine not only of the Upanishads but of all metaphysics. Even the Vedic poets assert a real being of primal unity concealed behind the manifold of experience; and on this is founded the Upanishadic principle that the universe exists only in and by virtue of a World-Idea essentially identical with the individual consciousness. This, however, is still far from the maya-theory of the later Vedanta. The authors of the older Upanishads were still much influenced by the realism of the Vedas, and it is therefore doubtful whether they could have agreed with the Vedantists who treat the world of experience as absolutely unreal, a mere phantom [p. 39] conjured up by the Self for its own delusion. As typical of the Upanishadic attitude we may regard the theory of the Five Atmas ( section 12) and the long passage of the Brihad-aranyaka (III. vii. 3 f.) where the Self is described in detail as the antaryami, or "inward controller," functioning as soul within matter as its body. Their view was in the main somewhat as follows. Phenomena are evolved from the Self, and hold their existence as intelligibilia in fee from the Self; with the knowledge of the Self they become known as phases of it; hence they are, to this extent, and no further, really existent (satya, B.A. I. vi. 3), provisionally true, although it is only ignorance of the Self that regards them as really independent of the Self and manifold. The Upanishads on the whole conceive the empiric soul's ignorance as a negative force, an absence of light; with S'ankara and the later Vedanta it is positive, a false light, a constructive illusion. Brahma as cause of phenomena is in the Upanishads a real material, in S'ankara's school an unreal material. The difficulties besetting S'ankara when he endeavours to bring logical order into the vague idealism of the Upanishads are very serious. On the one hand he maintains that the whole phenomenal world is unreal (avastu). As a magician (mayavi) causes a phantom or wraith to issue from his person which has no real existence and by which the magician himself is entirely unaffected, [p. 40] so Brahma creates from himself a universe which is an utter phantom and nowise modifies his absolute existence. His creative "powers" (which are real only when regarded from the standpoint of his creation, the world of finite subjects and objects) constitute the demiurgic principle of an empiric universe, which is, from its own standpoint, coextensive with him, whereas absolutely speaking it does not exist at all (see commentary on Brahma-sutra, II. i. 6, 9, etc., and above, section 9). On the other hand, the universe, phantom as it is, nevertheless is a fact of consciousness. Illusion though it be, the illusion is. This predicate of existence is the bond uniting it with its source, the truly existent, Brahma (on II. i. 6). Brahma is absolute thought, the world is false thought; but the subject in both cases is the same, the thinking Self. Thus Maya denotes the sum of phenomena--or, as more narrowly defined by some later Vedantists, the sum of matter--as illusively conceived by the Self; it is the Ignorance which creates the phantom of a universe and of an individual ego by imposing its figments upon pure Thought ( section 12). Brahma Knowledge, by L. D. Barnett, [1911], at sacred-texts.com section 17. RELATION OF UNIVERSAL TO INDIVIDUAL SOUL.--It is a first principle of the Upanishads that the numberless individual souls are really one with the Universal Self. But how is this relation conceivable? To this question no answer is vouchsafed. The older texts instead give us [p. 41] cosmogonic myths, which realistically depict a Universal Spirit creating the phenomenal world and then animating it as world-soul; and the latter they simply identify with the self of the individual, sometimes more pantheistically (Ch. VI. iii.), sometimes more idealistically (B.A.II. iv. 5, III. iv. 1, v. 1, etc.). But why should there be this division between the one Absolute Soul and the innumerable individual souls condemned to suffer the intellectual darkness and physical sorrows of embodied life? The Upanishads find a solution in their theory of karma, the acts done in previous births requiring further embodiment to work away their influence upon the soul. This implies a regressus ad infinitum, as every act is the resultant of a former act; and this conclusion is cheerfully drawn by the later Vedanta, which thus avoids the necessity of explaining the "origin of evil." The older Upanishads, whose cosmogonies contradict this theory, simply avoid the question. The theory which begins to appear in a somewhat late Upanishad (the Maitrayaniya), that the Soul conceives division and plurality in consequence of the delusive attractions of physical Nature, and hence assumes embodied form and comes under the influence of "works," is partly connected with the dualism of the Sankhya school, and partly with the theory of "illusion" developed in the later Vedanta (see section 16). S'ankara generally regards the universe itself, i.e. the [p.