Isha Upanishad points to Spiritual Freedom and Wholeness of inner Self Wisdom

How we live on the inside affects us on the outside world, the most potent way to change everything is change our inside first. This is a Collaborative post with Tereza Coraggio, Third Paradigm.

Inner Discipline faces both the Inside and the Outside

I have always considered there could be a major benefit gained from connecting the Individualized experience of the Spiritual seeker to the Moral essence of social interaction. The Spiritual Personality is the real Seat from which all Moral sense comes from. The Solutions for the Outside begin on the Inside.

The work that is featured here is available for download in PDF format, along with many other important works of Sri Aurobindo at the website library of Sri Aurobindo Ashram:

https://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/sriaurobindo/writings.php

If you only want to get a copy of the Isha Upanishad, use this link:

https://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/sriaurobindo/downloadpdf.php?id=32

The Isha Upanishad is very similar to the Bhagavad Gita, in the message:

Tereza later posted on the Bhagavad Gita referencing the Gaza Conflict in Palestine; this is truly seminal to what I have been saying about the Justification of Works found in Isha Upanishad. Her post has some very important conversations in the comments, here’s a link:

Bhagavad Gita & Palestine

In my first comment to this wonderful post, I said:

“I was thinking of putting more connection to the Gaza situation in my post, you tied that in here beautifully. There is no question there is no neutral position; the willingness to stand strong for life comes from deep within us all. Action must happen.”

“Pacifism [towards our tormentors] is a type of Violence our culture has become anesthetized into accepting.”

Main points:

"A Seeker" way of living is inspired by the Self within, this naturally expresses what most people would see as morality in the outward Life. Individualized Spiritual paths can be potentially beneficial to the concept of a Voluntary Cooperative Mentality. This requires the Individual to be Self Reliant and very conscientiously responsible, that is “able to respond” to the Self, unable to perform acts that contradict the Self within. Societies of people who live in this manner are generally more peaceful, more trusting, they live based on consciously and directly involving themselves in their Spiritual Evolution.

When Morality eminates from the Inner Self, there is True Freedom.

"A Believer" way of living is informed by Centralized Social and Religious cudgels, to follow assigned moral codes in outward Life. Believing in a Centralized "God" somehow separated from mankind; makes an Individual feel unworthy, leads to a Compulsory Conformist Collective. For Individuals, this causes an overall Mentality that can be trained to Follow the outside Human authority, since God has thus become “access restricted” to those few who are “Chosen,” or are in the right “Social Religious Positions.” Conditions like this, largely ignore the Natural Spiritual Freedom of inner Self, always present in each Individual.

When Morality is the product of Obedience, there can be Liberty, which is only a Leash.

This is not to say that some genuine inspiration towards an inner connection to the Self is not possible; in those who are Religious, that can and does happen in spite of Religion, it takes a lot more effort to fight that Social Tide.

What we inevitably find in difference between the Spiritual and the Religious paths are essentially Decentralized Personal experience vs Centralized Social dismemberment from Self Freedom. This only benefits those who seek power over others, as a method of extraction of obedience.

There is Morality in Fighting those who assert their Rule; your only Obedience should be to the Self and Freedom.

There’s no Moral Code, there’s only You:

Sorting out the distinctions between the Seeker way and the Believer way, as seen from the moral sense can be difficult because the view of things from the outside is of course limited to just the outside events and circumstances. Though Morality is mostly Ruled by Mind; it will vary between the two seemingly opposite ways of living, it will also vary among Individuals too. There really are no such things as opposites, that's a mind trick. Ultimately, motives for how we live come from within and that’s where the real work is.

The Isha Upanishad could be a way to show us the true element of Spiritual Freedom that is naturally always there within each of us, manifesting in unique and wonderful ways.

Truth is not found in Uniformity nor Conformity; it can be Seen as Unity manifesting through the Diverse experiences of Inner Self.

The world’s senseless Beauty mirrors God’s delight

That Rapture’s smile is secret everywhere;

It flows in the Wind’s breath, in the Tree’s sap,

It’s hued magnificance blooms in flowers and leaves.

— Savitri by Sri Aurobindo

It seems that an ever larger majority of people are beginning to see the concept of One. This aspect is what may be the most transformative for Social direction.

Isha Upanishad: Analysis by Sri Aurobindo

THE OPPOSITES

The pairs of opposites successively taken up by the Upanishad and resolved are, in the order of their succession:

1. The Conscious Lord and phenomenal Nature.
2. Renunciation and Enjoyment.
3. Action in Nature and Freedom in the Soul.
4. The One stable Brahman and the multiple Movement. 5. Being and Becoming. 6. The Active Lord and the indifferent Akshara Brahman. 7. Vidya and Avidya.
8. Birth and Non-Birth.
9. Works and Knowledge.

These discords are thus successively resolved:

GOD AND NATURE

1. Phenomenal Nature is a movement of the conscious Lord. The object of the movement is to create forms of His consciousness in motion in which He as the one Soul in many bodies can take up his habitation and enjoy the multiplicity and the movement with all their relations. (1)

ENJOYMENT AND RENUNCIATION

2. Real integral enjoyment of all this movement and multiplicity in its truth and in its infinity depends upon an absolute renunciation; but the renunciation intended is an absolute renunciation of the principle of desire founded on the principle of egoism and not a renunciation of world-existence. (2) This solution depends on the idea that desire is only an egoistic and vital deformation of the divine Ananda or delight of being from which the world is born; by extirpation of ego and desire Ananda again becomes the conscious principle of existence. This substitution is the essence of the change from life in death to life in immortality. The enjoyment of the infinite delight of existence free from ego, founded on oneness of all in the Lord, is what is meant by the enjoyment of Immortality.

1. This is also the view of the Gita and generally accepted.

2. This again is the central standpoint of the Gita, which, however, admits also the renunciation of world-existence. The general trend of Vedantic thought would accept the renunciation of desire and egoism as the essential but would hold that renunciation of egoism means the renunciation of all world-existence, for it sees desire and not Ananda as the cause of world-existence.

ACTION AND FREEDOM

3. Actions are not inconsistent with the soul’s freedom. Man is not bound by works, but only seems to be bound. He has to re- cover the consciousness of his unalienable freedom by recovering the consciousness of unity in the Lord, unity in himself, unity
with all existence. (3) This done, life and works can and should be accepted in their fullness; for the manifestation of the Lord in life and works is the law of our being and the object of our world-existence.

3. This truth would, again, be generally admitted, but not the conclusion that is drawn from it.

THE QUIESCENCE AND THE MOVEMENT

4. What then of the Quiescence of the Supreme Being and how is persistence in the Movement compatible with that Quiescence which is generally recognized as an essential condition of the supreme Bliss?

The Quiescence and the Movement are equally one Brahman and the distinction drawn between them is only a phenomenon of our consciousness. So it is with the idea of space and time, the far and the near, the subjective and the objective, internal and external, myself and others, one and many. Brahman, the real existence, is all these things to our consciousness, but in itself ineffably superior to all such practical distinctions. The Movement is a phenomenon of the Quiescence, the Quiescence itself may be conceived as a Movement too rapid for the gods, that is to say, for our various functions of consciousness to follow in its real nature. But it is no formal, material, spatial, temporal movement, only a movement in consciousness. Knowledge sees it all as one, Ignorance divides and creates oppositions where there is no opposition but simply relations of one consciousness in itself. The ego in the body says, “I am within, all else is outside; and in what is outside, this is near to me in Time and Space, that is far.” All this is true in present relation; but in essence it is all one indivisible movement of Brahman which is not material movement but a way of seeing things in the one consciousness.

BEING AND BECOMING

5. Everything depends on what we see, how we look at existence in our soul’s view of things. Being and Becoming, One and Many are both true and are both the same thing: Being is one, Becomings are many; but this simply means that all Becomings are one Being who places Himself variously in the phenomenal movement of His consciousness. We have to see the One Being, but we have not to cease to see the many Becomings, for they exist and are included in Brahman’s view of Himself. Only, we must see with knowledge and not with ignorance. We have to realise our true self as the one unchangeable, indivisible Brahman. We have to see all becomings as developments of the movement in our true self and this self as one inhabiting all bodies and not our body only. We have to be consciously, in our relations with this world, what we really are, — this one self becoming everything that we observe. All the movement, all energies, all forms, all happenings we must see as those of our one and real self in many existences, as the play of the Will and Knowledge and Delight of the Lord in His world-existence.

We shall then be delivered from egoism and desire and the sense of separate existence and therefore from all grief and delusion and shrinking; for all grief is born of the shrinking of the ego from the contacts of existence, its sense of fear, weakness, want, dislike, etc.; and this is born from the delusion of separate existence, the sense of being my separate ego exposed to all these contacts of so much that is not myself. Get rid of this, see oneness everywhere, be the One manifesting Himself in all creatures; ego will disappear; desire born of the sense of not being this, not having that, will disappear; the free unalienable delight of the One in His own existence will take the place of desire and its satisfactions and dissatisfactions. (4) Immortality will be yours, death born of division will be overcome.

THE ACTIVE AND INACTIVE BRAHMAN

6. The Inactive and the Active Brahman are simply two aspects of the one Self, the one Brahman, who is the Lord. It is He who has gone abroad in the movement. He maintains Himself free from all modifications in His inactive existence. The inaction is the basis of the action and exists in the action; it is His freedom from all He does and becomes and in all He does and becomes. These are the positive and negative poles of one indivisible consciousness. We embrace both in one quiescence and one movement, inseparable from each other, dependent on each other. The quiescence exists relatively to the movement, the movement to the quiescence. He is beyond both. This is a different point of view from that of the identity of the Movement and Quiescence which are one in reality; it expresses rather their relation in our consciousness once they are admitted as a practical necessity of that consciousness. It is obvious that we also by becoming one with the Lord would share in this biune conscious existence. (5)

4. In the ordinary view all this would be admitted, but the practical possibility of maintaining this state of consciousness and birth in the world together would be doubted.

5. In the ordinary view the Jiva cannot exist in both at the same time; his dissolution is into the Quiescence and not into unity with the Lord in the action and inaction.

VIDYA AND AVIDYA

7. The knowledge of the One and the knowledge of the Many are a result of the movement of the one consciousness, which sees all things as One in their truth-Idea but differentiates them in their mentality and formal becoming. If the mind (Manishi) absorbs itself in God as the formal becoming (Paribhu) and separates itself from God in the true Idea (Kavi), then it loses Vidya, the knowledge of the One, and has only the knowledge of the Many which becomes no longer knowledge at all but ignorance, Avidya. This is the cause of the separate ego-sense.

Avidya is accepted by the Lord in the Mind (Manishi) in or- der to develop individual relations to their utmost in all the possibilities of division and its consequences and then through these individual relations to come back individually to the knowledge of the One in all. That knowledge has remained all along unabrogated in the consciousness of the true seer or Kavi. This seer in ourselves stands back from the mental thinker; the latter, thus separated, has to conquer death and division by a developing experience as the individual Inhabitant and finally to recover by the reunited knowledge of the One and the Many the state of Immortality. This is our proper course and not either to devote ourselves exclusively to the life of Avidya or to reject it entirely for motionless absorption in the One.

BIRTH AND NON-BIRTH

8. The reason for this double movement of the Thinker is that we are intended to realise immortality in the Birth. The self is uniform and undying and in itself always possesses immortality. It does not need to descend into Avidya and Birth to get that immortality of Non-Birth; for it possesses it always. It descends in order to realize and possess it as the individual Brahman in the play of world-existence. It accepts Birth and Death, assumes the ego and then dissolving the ego by the recovery of unity realizes itself as the Lord, the One, and Birth as only a becoming of the Lord in mental and formal being; this becoming is now governed by the true sight of the Seer and, once this is done, becoming is no longer inconsistent with Being, birth becomes a means and not an obstacle to the enjoyment of immortality by the lord of this formal habitation.(6) This is our proper course and not to remain for ever in the chain of birth and death, nor to flee from birth into a pure non-becoming. The bondage does not consist in the physical act of becoming, but in the persistence of the ignorant sense of the separate ego. The Mind creates the chain and not the body.

WORKS AND KNOWLEDGE

9. The opposition between works and knowledge exists as long as works and knowledge are only of the egoistic mental character. Mental knowledge is not true knowledge; true knowledge is that which is based on the true sight, the sight of the Seer, of Surya, of the Kavi. Mental thought is not knowledge, it is a golden lid placed over the face of the Truth, the Sight, the divine Ideation, the Truth-Consciousness. When that is removed, sight replaces mental thought, the all-embracing truth-ideation, Mahas, Veda, Drishti, replaces the fragmentary mental activity. True Buddhi (Vijnana) emerges from the dissipated action of the Buddhi which is all that is possible on the basis of the sense- mind, the Manas. Vijnana leads us to pure knowledge (Jnana), pure consciousness (Chit). There we realize our entire identity with the Lord in all at the very roots of our being.

But in Chit, Will and Seeing are one. Therefore in Vijnana or truth-ideation also which comes luminously out of Chit, Will and Sight are combined and no longer as in the mind separated from each other. Therefore when we have the sight and live in the truth-consciousness, our will becomes the spontaneous law of the truth in us and, knowing all its acts and their sense and objective, leads straight to the human goal, which was always the enjoyment of the Ananda, the Lord’s delight in self-being, the state of Immortality. In our acts also we become one with all beings and our life grows into a representation of oneness, truth and divine joy and no longer proceeds on the crooked path of egoism full of division, error and stumbling. In a word, we attain to the object of our existence which is to manifest in itself whether on earth in a terrestrial body and against the resistance of Matter or in the worlds beyond or enter beyond all world the glory of the divine Life and the divine Being.

6. This is the stumbling-block to the ordinary philosophies which are impregnated with the idea of the illusoriness of the world, even when they do not go the whole way with the Mayavada. Birth, they would say, is a play of ignorance, it cannot subsist along with entire knowledge.

THE JUSTIFICATION OF WORKS

(I had this posted “Bhagavad Gita” it’s worth revisiting)

This freedom [from Karma] does not depend upon inaction, nor is this possession limited to the enjoyment of the inactive Soul that only witnesses without taking part in the movement.

On the contrary, the doing of works in this material world and a full acceptance of the term of physical life are part of its completeness.

For the active Brahman fulfills Itself in the world by works and man also is in the body for self-fulfillment by action. He cannot do otherwise, for even his inertia acts and produces effects in the cosmic movement. Being in this body or any kind of body, it is idle to think of refraining from action or escaping the physical life. The idea that this in itself can be a means of liberation, is part of the Ignorance which supposes the soul to be a separate entity in the Brahman. [Self]

Action is [often] shunned because it is thought to be inconsistent with freedom. The man when he acts, is "supposed" to be necessarily entangled in the desire behind the action, in subjection to the formal energy that drives the action and in the results of the action. These things are true in appearance, not in reality.

Desire is only a mode of the emotional mind which by ignorance seeks its delight in the object of desire and not in the Brahman [Self] who expresses Himself in the object. By destroying that ignorance one can do action without entanglement in desire.

The Energy that drives is itself subject to the Lord, who expresses Himself in it with perfect freedom. By getting behind Nature to the Lord of Nature, merging the individual in the Cosmic Will, one can act with the divine freedom. Our actions are given up to the Lord and our personal responsibility ceases in His liberty.

The chain of Karma only binds the movement of Nature and not the soul which, by knowing itself, ceases even to appear to be bound by the results of its works.

Therefore the way of freedom is not inaction, but to cease from identifying oneself with the movement and recover instead our true identity in the Self of things who is their Lord.

Personal Reflection by Nefahotep

I have had the Isha Upanishad in my life since I learned to walk. This sacred teaching is for me, especially inspiring and has been at the center of my Life’s Spiritual Journey. The Isha Upanishad has many qualities that enabled me to pick up the intended meaning, while also allowing me explore how knowing it, affects both the inner and outer life. Symbolism found in Vedic writing led to being able to See what my own life was about, without any formal assertion of programed mentality, replacing that with meditativeness and inner balance. The Real Guru is found inside you.

The importance of Symbolism in these studies:

Just like the Isha Upanishad itself, Sanskrit has been a part of my life since early on; however, I had only begun to take up serious study of it about 15 years ago, with a goal of developing it into a conversational language, within my own family. One of the difficulties was the fact that Sanskrit words have many layers of Meaning that reside with them through Symbolism.

When I began to study other ancient writing, particularly Ancient Egyptian, I began to notice the similarity of Symbolism and Mystic knowledge that these ancient cultures had in common. I have come to think of Ancient Egypt as a sister culture to India; as it turns out, nearly every ancient culture had this type of Meaning wrapped in Symbolism.

The more I have learned, the more the “Ancient Mind” has become endeared to me, thus allowing me to see through the Academic fog of Sciences like Archeology and appreciate the message our ancestors have left for us. The Isha Upanishad is a true treasure, not just for me but for anyone who would choose to study it.

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For those who would like to see the original Text and Analytical Approach by Sri Aurobindo:

Below is the original Isha Upanishad with Sanskrit Text as it appears in the Book

1 There are three possible senses of va ̄syam,“tobeclothed”,“to be worn as agarment” and “to be inhabited”. The first is the ordinarily accepted meaning. Shankara explains it in this significance, that we must lose the sense of this unreal objective universe in the sole perception of the pure Brahman. So explained the first line becomes a contra- diction of the whole thought of the Upanishad which teaches the reconciliation, by the perception of essential Unity, of the apparently incompatible opposites, God and the World, Renunciation and Enjoyment, Action and internal Freedom, the One and the Many, Being and its Becomings, the passive divine Impersonality and the active divine Personality, the Knowledge and the Ignorance, the Becoming and the Not-Becoming, Life on earth and beyond and the supreme Immortality. The image is of the world either as a garment or as a dwelling-place for the informing and governing Spirit. The latter significance agrees better with the thought of the Upanishad.

2 Kurvanneva. The stress of the word eva gives the force, “doing works indeed, and not refraining from them”.

3 Shankara reads the line, “Thus in thee—it is not otherwise than thus—action cleaves not, to a man.”He interprets karma ̄ni in the first line in the sense of Vedic sacrifices. Which are permitted to the ignorant as a means of escaping from evil actions and their results and attaining to heaven, but the second karma in exactly the opposite sense, “evil action.” The verse, he tells us, represents a concession to the ignorant; the enlightened soul abandons works and the world and goes to the forest. The whole expression and construction in this rendering become forced and unnatural. The rendering I give seems to me the simple and straightforward sense of the Upanishad.

4 We have two readings, asurya, sunless, and asurya, Titanic or undivine. The third verse is, in the thought structure of the Upanishad, the starting-point for the final movement in the last four verses. Its suggestions are there taken up and worked out. The prayer to the Sun refers back in thought to the sunless worlds and their blind gloom, which are recalled in the ninth and twelfth verses. The sun and his rays are intimately connected in other Upanishads also with the worlds of Light and their natural opposite is the dark and sunless, not the Titanic worlds.

5 Ma ̄taris ́van seems to mean “he who extends himself in the Mother or the container” whether that be the containing mother element, Ether, or the material energy called Earth in the Veda and spoken of there as the Mother. It is a Vedic epithet of the God Vayu, who, representing the divine principle in the Life-energy, Prana, extends himself in Matter and vivifies its forms. Here, it signifies the divine Life-power that presides in all forms of cosmic activity.

6 Apas, as it is accentuated in the version of the White Yajurveda, can mean only “waters”. If this accentuation is disregarded, we may take it as the singular apas, work, action. Shankara, however, renders it by the plural, works. The difficulty only arises because the true Vedic sense of the word had been forgotten and it came to be taken as referring to the fourth of the five elemental states of Matter, the liquid. Such a reference would be entirely irrelevant to the context. But the Waters, otherwise called the seven streams or the seven fostering Cows, are the Vedic symbol for the seven cosmic principles and their activities, three inferior, the physical, vital and mental, four superior, the divine Truth, the divine Bliss, the divine Will and Consciousness, and the divine Being. On this conception also is founded the ancient idea of the seven worlds in each of which the seven principles are separately active by their various harmonies. This is, obviously, the right significance of the word in the Upanishad.

7 The words sarva ̄ni bhu ̄ta ̄ni, literally, “all things that have become”, are opposed to Atman, self-existent and immutable being. The phrase means ordinarily “all creatures”, but its literal sense is evidently insisted on in the expression bhu ̄ ta ̄ ni abhu ̄ t “became the Becomings”. The idea is the acquisition in man of the supreme consciousness by which the one Self in him extends itself to embrace all creatures and realises the eternal act by which that One manifests itself in the multiple forms of the universal motion.

8 There is a clear distinction in Vedic thought between kavi, the seer, and manı ̄sı ̄, the thinker. The former indicates the divine supra-intellectual Knowledge which by direct vision and illumination sees the reality, the principles and the forms of things in their true relations, the latter the labouring mentality which works from the divided consciousness through the possibilities of things downward to the actual manifestation in form and upward to their reality in the self-existent Brahman.

10 In the inner sense of the Veda Surya, the Sun-God, represents the divine Illumination of the Kavi which exceeds mind and forms the pure self-luminous Truth of things. His principal power is self-revelatory knowledge, termed in the Veda “Sight”. His realm is described as the Truth, the Law, the Vast. He is the Fosterer or Increaser, for he enlarges and opens man’s dark and limited being into a luminous and infinite consciousness. He is the sole Seer, Seer of Oneness and Knower of the Self, and leads him to the highest Sight. He is Yama, Controller or Ordainer, for he governs man’s action and manifested being by the direct Law of the Truth, satya dharma, and therefore by the right principle of our nature, ya ̄tha ̄tathyatah. A luminous power proceeding from the Father of all existence, he reveals in himself the divine Purusha of whom all beings are the manifestations. His rays are the thoughts that proceed luminously from the Truth, the Vast, but become deflected and distorted, broken up and disordered in the reflecting and dividing principle, Mind. They form there the golden lid which covers the face of the Truth. The Seer prays to Surya to cast them into right order and relation and then draw them together into the unity of revealed truth. The result of this inner process is the perception of the oneness of all beings in the divine Soul of the Universe.

11 Vayu, called elsewhere Matarishwan, the Life-Energy in the universe. In the light of Surya he reveals himself as an immortal principle of existence of which birth and death and life in the body are only particular and external processes.

12 The Vedic term kratu means sometimes the action itself, sometimes the effective power behind action represented in mental consciousness by the will. Agni is this power. He is divine force which manifests first in matter as heat and light and material energy and then, taking different forms in the other principles of man’s consciousness, leads him by a progressive manifestation upwards to the Truth and the Bliss.

13 Sin, in the conception of the Veda, from which this verse is taken bodily, is that which excites and hurries the faculties into deviation from the good path. There is a straight road or road of naturally increasing light and truth, rjuh pantha ̄h, rtasya pantha ̄h, ..... leading over infinite levels and towards infinite vistas, vı ̄ta ̄ni prstha ̄ni, by which the law ... of our nature should normally take us towards our fulfilment. Sin compels it instead to travel with stumblings amid uneven and limited tracts and along crooked windings (durita ̄ni, vrjina ̄ni).

14 The word vidhema is used of the ordering of the sacrifice, the disposal of the offerings to the God and, generally, of the sacrifice or worship itself. The Vedic namas, internal and external obeisance, is the symbol of submission to the divine Being in ourselves and in the world. Here the offering is that of completest submission and the self-surrender of all the faculties of the lower egoistic human nature to the divine Will-force, Agni, so that, free from internal opposition, it may lead the soul of man through the truth towards a felicity full of the spiritual riches, ra ̄ye. That state of beatitude is intended, self-content in the principle of pure Love and Joy, which the Vedic initiates regarded as the source of the divine existence in the universe and the foundation of the divine life in the human being. It is the deformation of this principle by egoism which appears as desire and the lust of possession in the lower worlds.