S1E3 Mystical Realization in the Upanishads
This episode focuses on a body of sacred literature known as the Upanishads, which represents a clear shift away from the traditional Vedic sacrificial rite, which becomes internalized within the individual human for the first time in Indian history. Internalization of the sacrifice ensues due to an elevation in the status of the human body as a worthy object of meditative inquiry, and the new place of mystical realization. Elevation in the status of the body leads to innovations in disciplines ranging from Ayurvedic physiology to Hatha Yoga. The Upanishads also show clear examples of practices that prefigure modern practices, particularly pranayama.
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Edited Transcript
In the last episode, we talked about the Brahmanas as a shunned body of literature that still involved the original Vedic sacrificial triad, but modified in a subtle way. They are positioned in history just before the emergence of the Upanishad. The Upanishad are one of the great bodies of spiritual literature in all of human history. Scholars usually group them together in a similar way to the Vedas: early and late.
The early Upanishads are said to be composed somewhere between 504 - 100 BCE. Some of these early Upanishads of note are the Brihadaranyaka, the Chandogya, and the Kaushitaki. At this time in history, we're close to the life of the Buddha: Siddhartha lived sometime between 483 and 410. When we get to the later Upanishads, we're at 400 BCE to 1200 CE, so their composition continues into the common era. Some of the later Upanishads are the Katha, the Svetashvetara, and the Mundaka.
According to Dr. Wendy Doniger, just as the Brahmanas are, among other things, footnotes to the Vedas, so too the Upanishad began as sort of footnotes to the Brahmanas: that is meditations on the meaning of the Vedic rituals and myths. So, whereas the Brahmanas summed up and ritualized the details of the earlier Vedic revelation, the Upanishad is doing something similar for the Brahmanic literature, but importantly they steer the discourse in a new direction.
Here's something from Dr. Edwin Bryant to help us focus our inquiry: “the Upanishads reveal a clear shift in focus away from the conventional outer sacrificial rite, which is relegated to an inferior type of religiosity, replacing it with an interest in philosophical and mystical discourse, particularly the quest for the ultimate underlying reality, underpinning the external world, Brahman, which is now localized also in living beings as Atman.” So the Upanishads mark a shift away from the conventional sacrificial rite. We saw a hint of this thematic change in the last episode with the story of Prajapati’s self creation, and the idea that through his own toil - rather than through the power of an external fire - he began to produce heat, which caused his own transformation. So the Upanishads really mark a time when a moving away from traditional ritual structures and procedures is becoming more clear and distinct in an overt way.
Axial Age
In his book The Origin and Goal of History, the historian Carl Jaspers calls the period in which the Upanishads emerged, the Axial Age. This is a time of radical cultural and philosophical change. What's interesting is that this change happens simultaneously in many cultures that don't have a lot of contact with one another. He speaks of it almost like a spontaneous evolution in the collective consciousness of humanity. Here's a quote from Jaspers that lists some of the cultural material that reveals a new philosophical direction during this time:
“Confucius and Lao-Tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo Ti, Chuang Tse, Lieh Tzu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to materialism, scepticism and nihilism; in Iran, Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Ancient Israel the prophets made their appearance from Elijah by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers—Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato—of the tragedians, of Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India and the West.”
This is very interesting, and I have seen other offshoots of the theory which add nuance. For instance, there is a scholar named Karen Armstrong who wrote a book about the Axial age called The Great Transformation, in which I first really started learning about the Vedic sacrifice and the movement away from it. Armstrong suggests that this movement illustrates an evolution of human consciousness as it struggled to retain something of the original importance of ritual sacrifice, but at the same time evolve it in a different direction.
She speculates that the move away from conventional sacrifice resulted from being exposed to its violence, such that we began to understand, even if only in an intuitive way, what we had to do to our own consciousness to witness this and interpret it positively. The examples that I just gave from Jaspers are all examples of movements toward less violent forms of ritual. Specifically, in the Hebrew prophets we begin to see this trend in places like the book of Amos:
“I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them, and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (5: 21 - 24)
And again in the book of Isaiah: “When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you; even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood! Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong.” (1: 15 - 17)
Apparently, these sorts of sacrifices are not what the God of Abraham wants. In this light, the Upanishads represent another instance of the movement away from violent sacrifice, and into the mystical, in ways that start looking a lot like what we call yoga today. We can sum up this radical shift in focus by stating an idea, still so near and dear to our hearts, that emerged during the axial shift: look within in order to discover the answers to problems and to find salvation.
Vedanta: Atman and Brahman
What is the central teaching of the Upanishads? I think there is a diverse teaching across all the Upanishads, and there are many of those. But the tradition that is clearly discernible in all of that material has generally been called Vedanta. What does this mean?
The word vedanta is composed of veda, which refers of course to the early sacred literature, and means knowledge, and also the suffix anta, which means “end”. So the Upanishads are called the end of the Veda. This is significant in two ways: historically they are the tail end of the Vedic literature, but also, philosophically, they are the end of a certain faith in external sacrifice as a means to liberation. As such, they are the beginning of faith in the value of an inward, mystical journey as a means of realizing freedom from ignorance and suffering.
What's Vedanta about? Dr. Wendy Doniger says: “the person is the individual soul, the atman or the self. And this is identical with Brahman, the world soul. Just as salt becomes identical with water into which it is dissolved. So the individual soul becomes identical with the world soul upon realization.” Now we could of course say much more, but basically, this is one of the most commonly understood themes in the Upanishads: they are grappling with the relationship between the individual soul, the created world and the source of all things. Donniger has called the basic doctrine they express panentheism. What does that mean?
Panentheism describes the relationship between the creation and its source as one of immanent transcendence: God is immanent in the creation, that is, all pervading, but at the same time, is transcendent of the created order. This is different from pantheism, which states that everything is divine, and so the divine is equated with the creation. This is unsatisfying to the writers of the Upanishad because their experience of the creation is patently impermanent: it’s always traveling through birth and death, arising and passing away. This cannot be the case with the source of all things, because if that were so, the source would have the character of a created thing, and one would then have to ask, “what created the source?”
This line of questioning eventually ensnares us in an infinite regress, until we realize that the source must be radically transcendent of the creation. Such is the notion of Brahman in the Upanishads. However, at the same time, the radically transcendent source must be in some kind of relationship with the creation, or it remains aloof and unknowable, hence the prefix pan in the term panentheism, which means all, every and whole. So, the panentheistic God is in the whole of the creation, but not captured or limited by it.
In grappling with the task of realizing the subtle nature of this relationship, the Upanishads land in a place where conventional knowledge ends, and mystical union is central. The idea that the individual soul and the source are related in a union that can be realized mystically is stated in a very famous passage from the Chandogya Upanishad: tat tvam asi, which means “you are that”, or “thou art that”. This relationship is gnoseological in its character, meaning that it is realized in a powerful, precognitive insight that emerges at the edge of ultimate knowledge. This classifies the Upanishads as a branch of jnana: the yoga of knowledge/insight. So the doctrine of Vedanta relies heavily on the experience of seeing things so clearly that nothing false can survive in that realization. Vedanta is therefore less about action as it is traditionally conceived (i.e. in the Veda), and more on meditative/contemplative stillness.
One classic metaphor that illustrates the dawning of radical realization, is suddenly seeing that the snake in the corner of the room is actually a rope when you turn the light on: just like that, we see, and once we see, we can't unsee. In this context, sudden awakening means we know who we are: we know we are intimately related to the source at our deepest, most essential level. As a result, we are no longer liable to the cycle of rebirth because we've realized, and this life becomes the last incarnate life, at the end which - like salt into water - we will be dissolved into the source.
There is a group of sayings called the Mahavakyas that come from several of the Upanishads, namely the Itaratra, the Mandukya, the Chandogya, and the Brihadaranyaka. Each is a statement of the gnoseological realization that's at the center of Vedanta’s teaching:
prajnanambrahma: insight is Brahman, or Brahman is insight. This means realizing is the same as the experience of the source, a direct experience of our never-not-connectedness, or again, of our always- already-connectedness.
ayam atma brahma: the self, the Atman, is Brahman.
tat tvam asi, “thou art that”
aham brahmasmi, “I am Brahman”.
Sacrificial Triad
Throughout the series so far, we've been examining the Vedic sacrificial triad as it moves through time and subtly changes its formal presentation, while retaining its centrality of function. The sacrificial triad is again found here in the Upanishad, and its three primary materials show the signs of having been transformed in a truly revolutionary way, which produces a revision in sacrificial ritual, and new investigations into areas that lead to the practice of modern yoga.
We should recall that the structure of the sacrificial triad is a fractal of the trinary cosmos: the upper world of heaven (wind), the middle world of sacrificial action (fire), and the lower world of earth (soma). This structural-functional dynamic is present in the Upanishads, but in a transformed way: it becomes prana, tapas, and rasa. So whereas we have vayu (wind) in the original, we now have prana (breath), and agni (fire) in the original becomes tapas (ardor), and finally soma in the original becomes rasa (essence, body). Let's go through these one at a time.
Vayu, or wind, in the Vedic context is a symbolic representation of heaven or the invisible force from on high that moves all things. In the context of the newly internalized sacrifice, vayu becomes prana, the breath that moves in and out the body, and in the Upanishads we begin to see indications of how the breath needs to be worked specifically in order to fan the flames of tapas, or the internal fire.
Agni in the Vedic context is the sacrificial fire, whose home is the agni chayan, or the formal fire altar. In the newly internalized sacrifice agni becomes tapas, the internal heat, or ardor of fervent spiritual effort.
The ardor that generates tapas is a combination of renunciation of worldly desire and action, and intense concentration coupled with focussed breathing. The authors of the Upanishad are called the “aranyakas”, which means forest dweller. They are ascetics - people who have left traditional Vedic society - and have chosen to live on the fringe, in the forest, practicing solitary meditation, eating very little etc. So you're starting to see the emergence of a particular kind of aspirant, trying to deal with the existential problems of human life via ascesis and contemplation. These are the prototypical yogins whose orientation to liberation, and whose techniques pave the way for many modern practitioners.
Rasa is the Indo European root for the word resin. It signifies the essence of a thing. We should notice its form: it’s a liquid and also means something like “juice”, or “sap”. So, like the soma, rasa is conceived of as the liquid oblation in the sacrificial ritual. What’s interesting here is that in the internalization of the sacrifice, rasa can be conceived of in two ways: as the juice inside the body (as in Ayurveda), but also as simply the body itself.
The oblation is the liquid that's poured into the fire. Robert Colosso makes a lot out of this moment in his book, Ardor: when the oblation enters the fire, the sacrifice has reached a point of no return called tyaga. Tyaga is the true beginning of the sacrifice because at this point, there is no turning back: liquid cannot be removed once it’s poured into the fire - something is lost forever. This is the essence of true sacrifice: what once existed disappears and is made invisible. If this happens in an authentic sacrificial context, the disappeared element is going to be absorbed and reconstituted at a higher level, but if not, it is lost forever.
That the oblation is the human body in the new ritual context is truly sublime: the ardor of practice means pouring the body into the fire. Because the fire is also in the body, it means pouring the body into itself, cooking it in its own juices, closely controlling the heat via focussed concentration, breath and the renunciation of action in the stillness of profound ascesis. In this way, ignorant desire is transformed into something that facilitates liberation.
R&D
With the internalization of the Vedic triad, the elements of the new sacrificial structure are localized entirely in the space of the human, and this confers a new status to the body itself. David Gordon White emphasizes that, “once the bodily microcosm was transformed into the seat of the sacrifice, interest in the internal workings of the body became greatly expanded.” (The Alchemical Body) This expansion leads to research and development into two areas which we're going to call the mystical and the medical.
Mystical
R&D in the mystical domain leads to the orientation of yoga practice as we know it today, and some of the techniques that are still used. David Gordon White notes that in the later Upanishads, there are vague references to yogic techniques by which to generate transformative inner heat in tandem with meditative, gnoseological (knowledge) realization. Notice here that two things are important - a kind of one, two punch: the heat of tapas, a burning, spiritually motivated ardor, and profound knowledge. When combined, these two things facillitate liberation, which is called moksha.
In the Upanishads, heat and knowledge work in tandem to burn up accumulated karmic baggage from many, many lifetimes of ignorant action: the “fruit” of action, or karma phalam. Common action is ignorant because it arises out of ignorance, or avidya. Specifically, we are suffering a case of mistaken identity: we believe we are something impermanent, something that is born and therefore dies, and we act accordingly. This means we waste tremendous time and energy ensnared in a fear of death; we develop harmful desires and attachments to things to try and deal with our sense of empty dread, and we get trapped in the cycle of birth and death as a result. But the Upanishads say no to this orientation. They declare that we are simply seeing things from the wrong perspective: in truth we are the atman, the eternal soul, and we are always already in a relationship with the ultimate source. This is what is to be realized.
If we jump forward in history, this orientation, along with the techniques of concentration, meditation, and pranayama, are all preserved in Patanjali’s classical system outlined in his Yoga Sutras. It too asserts that ignorance is the cause of rebirth, specifically because of samyoga: wrong conjunction/relationship of the Purusha (soul), and Prakrtti (material nature). He gives two broad orientations to practice to remedy the situation. First kriya yoga, or the purifying practice of tapas (spiritual ardor), svabyaya (study of the sacred literature revealing the true nature of the self) and ishvarapranidhana, devotion of surrender to the source of all things. Second, the famous eight limbed path (ashtanga yoga). Through these, the practitioner can realize her true identity as eternal, and free herself from the round of birth and death (samsara) back into the soul’s original, pristine state (kaivalya).
Medical
In order to do R&D into the nature and functioning of the body, we need to assume that it has something very profound to tell us, and the internalization of the sacrifice along with the status this confers on the body provides the context for these assumptions. As a result, Ayurveda expands its diagnostic and healing repertoire.
In Ayurveda, one of the expressions of the Vedic triad is tridosha, or kapha, pitta and vata: kapha is the earth and water data point; pitta is the water and fire data point; and vata is the air and space data point. These three forces govern all of our metabolic activity. This theory arose directly out of the body gaining new status in spiritual discourse, and the internalization of the Vedic sacrificial triad.
Ayurveda also appropriates and expands the notion of wind or vayu, which in the Upanishads becomes prana. So in the new context, the wind from heaven becomes understood as our own breath. When the heavenly wind takes up residence in the body, it's called prana-vayu, and in Ayurvedic medicine there are five primary vayus that govern our physiology, all of which are forms of vata dosha: all motion, all diastolic and systolic pulsation, all intake and output, is governed by these five winds. So Ayurveda generates a sophisticated diagnostic system and the basis for many subtle treatment strategies centered around human breathing patterns, both of which result from the revaluation of the body and the internalization of sacrificial triad.
Further, the practices of Ayurveda actually begin to serve in the place of the sacrifice because of these developments: whereas the traditional sacrificial ritual mediated between heaven and earth, now, Ayurvedic interventions - specifically those of the Vaidya (the Ayurvedic physician), intervene in the relationship between the human microcosm, which is our internal doshic metabolism, and the macrocosm, or influences from the external environment, specifically the movement of time and the change of the seasons. Again, all of this grows out of developments in the late Vedic matrix in the Upanishad.
The Yogin
Let’s finish up with direct material from the Upanishad, with images for the imagination, to help enliven this work of trying to understand and integrate the things discussed here. We’re hoping to perhaps begin seeing ourselves as the alchemist, the yogini, the sacrificer, the eater, the one being eaten, and so on. Here's a quotation from the Svetashvatara Upanishad:
“When he holds the body steady with the three sections erect and withdraws the senses into his heart with the mind, a wise person will cross over all the frightening rivers of embodied existence by means of the boat of Brahman. His breathing, restrained here within the body and his energy under control. He should breathe through one nostril when his breath is depleted. A wise person should control the mind, just as one would a wagon yoked to unruly horses, and engage in the practice of yoga, when, by means of the true nature of the Atman, which is like a lamp, a person perceives the truth of Brahman in this world, he is freed from all bondage because he has known the divine, which is unborn, unchanging and untainted by all things.
This is an image of the sacrificial ritual, with all of the elements of the original Vedic triad in their newly transformed aspect. Recall that the ancient Vedic ritual is a fractal of the triple tiered cosmos of heavenly wind above, sacrificial fire in the middle, and earthly oblation below. In the Upanishad, the body is a fractal of this same cosmological structure, with the head as heaven above, the heart as the space of the sacrificial fire, and the pelvis/genitals, as the earth below.
In this image, the “three sections” of the body are held “erect”: that is, in a precise alignment of above, middle and below, or head, heart and gut. The emphasis on posture marks the sacredness of the event, which must be performed with a precise ceremonial gesture (asana) toward effective communication between the higher and the lower, or between knowledge in the head, and desire/creative potential in the gut/pelvis/genitals. The wind from heaven is prana, channeled in and down through the nostrils into the space of the heart where the fire is now located. And the oblation is rasa, a combination of the sense-body’s impressions, emotions, and common desires (appetitive/sexual), all of which are “food”, drawn upward and inward into the fire in the heart. As such, heaven and earth meet in the sacrificial space of the heart and are transformed into insight into the true nature of the self and reality.
This new sacred ritual is an act of wisdom, and is symbolized as the skillful driver of a wagon/chariot. This is probably one of the most famous images of the yoga practitioner (sadhaka) and the unique challenge of harnessing the body-mind-soul complex for transformative purposes. Like unruly horses, the senses are powerful, dangerous, and difficult to control. If the driver is not skillful, both he and the wagon can easily be destroyed. But with skill and dedication, the power of the horses is captured and profound creative potential is unleashed. So yoga here, even in its earliest beginnings, is a kind of fettering of wild energies and habits that move through the human and compel it in various ways: the senses are going to get us in trouble if we're not careful, but if harnessed with skill, they contribute to the work of liberation.
This yoga of taming the horses/senses happens by means of “the true nature of the Atman”, which is like a “lamp”, or a shining light. Yoga practice really begins when the soul becomes the primary object of the senses: when they see the light. When this happens, they begin to turn inward, toward the self, or the Atman. When perceived directly, the truth of Brahman in this world is known: that is, the source’s relation to the creation is clear, and we're freed from all bondage, because all bondage results from believing that we have been born, that we will continue to change, and eventually die. What we realize is that we are unborn, that we are unchanging and untainted by all things.
So in the passage we see breath control, sense withdrawal - away from ignorance, toward realization. We have concentration and meditation, and finally realization. Those of us who have had any contact with Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra immediately recognize important elements of the eight limbs here: pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, and Samadhi - absorption into the self. So there are clear connections in the Upanishad’s revelation with the classical yoga of the common era, and all of it in a transformed configuration of the ancient sacrifice.
Let’s make a quick summary to bring this to a close, the Upanishads shift us away from the external formal, Vedic sacrifice, which is revitalized and reinterpreted as it is internalized within the human being herself. The identity of the human soul with the divine begins to be taught in the most beautiful of ways, along with the idea that once this is realized, we will escape the ignorance and suffering of this world. New discourses on the body as the sacrificial oblation lead to research and development in both mystical and medical areas, and this generates an intense interest in internal physiology, for instance, and also an intensely deep inquiry into the nature of meditative experience. Lastly, all of these revolutions are conserved in practices that define much of the future yoga that we all love and practice.
So I hope this has been interesting to you. We really appreciate you listening. God bless you, and we'll see you next time.
