The Aitareya Upanishad-2. Swami Krishnananda

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03/01/2020.
POST-2.
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1.

The Upanishad begins by telling us,

"The Universal Atman alone was."

We should not say that the Atman was or will be, and so on; such a way of putting things would not be in harmony with what the Atman actually is.

"The Atman was" is not the proper way of putting it because It also is, and shall also be in the future.

But the word 'was', in the past tense, has been used often in the Upanishads from the point of view of our understanding of the process of creation, because we seem to feel that this world is a present condition, and the condition prior to the condition of the world prevailing now should be considered as something past.
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2.

We see this world that has been created, manifested or revealed; and this world, which is now before our sense organs, is presently an object of our consciousness. The world is a present; it is not something that was. It is, but it was put in this fashion to imagine that the world of perception is something that is present.

Thus, the condition prior to the creation of the world would be a 'past'. "God created the world"; this is what we generally say. We use the past tense, as if it took place many, many years back. Actually, God is not living in time.

The Supreme Being is a timeless Existence and, therefore, to use the words 'is', 'was', 'will be', etc. – which have a meaning only in the world of time – is inappropriate in the case of a timeless and non-spatial Existence. Yet we, thinking in terms of time only, and absolutely unable to think in any other way, say "the Atman was" or "God created the world".
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3.

Inasmuch as time also is something that has been created, the creation itself could not have taken place in time itself. Space and time, which are also the evolutes of consciousness and which manifested from the Atman, could not be regarded as a condition of creation itself.

The idea of time is involved in any statement like :-

"God created the world in ancient times. Many, many years back, centuries back, millions of years back, as it were, this world was created by God."

When we say this, we imply that God created the world sometime. The word 'sometime' means time, but God is not in time. He is timeless, so we cannot think how creation actually took place.
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To be continued ....



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