The Essence of the Aitareya and Taittiriya Upanishads 1.4. - Swami Krishnananda.

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Monday, December 19, 2022. 08:00.

Chapter 1: Introduction -4.

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With this introduction, we may now turn to the message of some of the Upanishads, the great legacy not merely of this country but of mankind as a whole, one should say. The Upanishads are the record of the experiences of superhuman thinkers, those who had risen above the level of ordinary mankind and beyond the limitations of sensory knowledge. It is the Upanishads that will guide us in answering these questions which we raised at the beginning. We cannot independently walk with the strength of our own legs in this arduous task of solving universal questions.

The Upanishads, among which we are to take up here one or two for the purpose of the analysis of the subject, are documents left by people who, by the power of their meditations, soared above the ordinary level of human thinking. They could plumb the depths of this Total Mind, to which we made reference just now. For us, the Total Mind of mankind is only a theory; it is a logically deduced, abstract something. We are inferring that there should be a Total Mind on the grounds that mankind seems to be moving towards the realisation of a common purpose.

But these masters were not merely theoreticians. They were those who thought in terms of that single Mind only. As I think through my mind, you think through your mind and each one thinks through one's mind, these masters were able to think through this Total Mind, so that their thoughts were not individual thoughts; they were thoughts of all people blended together into an amalgam of completeness. These are the Upanishads.

The reason why we feel like taking the aid of these thoughts of the Upanishadic masters in answering our questions is that they have gone to the very roots of the cause of all causes of these effects manifested as this world, this society, mankind, the efforts of mankind, etc. We speak of human life, human duties and human purposes and so on, without properly paying sufficient heed to the conditioning factors that underlie these phenomena behind mankind. Our minds work in a particular fashion, being conditioned by certain factors.

Now, we gradually move to a philosophical realm from the ordinary social and empirical level of thought on which we have been traversing up to this time. Philosophy is a study of causes, rather ultimate causes, and an explanation of everything in terms of these causes. Sometimes they call it metaphysical thinking. Whatever be the name we give to it, it is the study of ultimate causes and an explanation of everything through these.

The ultimate causes should be such that there should not be causes behind these causes; else they would not be the ultimate causes. The meaning of an ultimate cause is that it stands by its own right, and it does not need an explanation or a cause precedent to it or prior to it. If every cause has a cause behind it, naturally there should be a final cause which is an explanation of every other cause. Otherwise, we would land in an infinite regress of causes behind causes without coming to any decision whatsoever. But we know very well that our minds are averse to any kind of infinite regress. We strive for a final conclusion.

But, this would not be possible unless there is an ultimate cause of causes, the causeless cause. This causeless cause we call the final cause. The ultimate cause should be capable of containing in itself every effect. And before we try to understand the nature of this cause which is ultimate, we also have to understand the effects which are contained in the cause. The effects are what we are capable of thinking about anything which we confront in our life.

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To be continued

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