The Aitareya Upanishad - 7. Swami Krishnananda

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21/04/2020.
Post-7.
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1.

*"We live in a world of untruth," says the Upanishad very, very poignantly.

#We are involved in the untruth of our physicality, our individuality, our sociability, our isolation of ourselves from other things and the compulsion that we feel to see things only as present outside us.

**We are very much concerned with things outside and concerned very little with our own selves.

***When we open our eyes, we see only that which we are not.

##The Aitareya Upanishad briefly mentions to us, "A sorrow struck the individuals, as if a thunderbolt fell on them, and they cried and wept."

###When you lose yourself, you begin to cry. If you lose anything else, it does not matter, but if it is a question of losing yourself, you can imagine what it could be for you. Your sorrow becomes unimaginable when it is a question of the negation of your existence itself, but you would tolerate any other negation.

****"If all property goes, it does not matter, but why do I also go?"

*****Here is a big question mark before you – and, you have really gone.

####Therefore, you are perpetually in a state of anguish and agony in this world, and not a moment of peace can you have here. The reason is that the Universal, which is your real nature, has been obliterated from your experience and you see a false presentation of externality, division, and an inverted form of perception.

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2.

#Allegorically, mythological, in the fashion of an Epic or a Purana, the Aitareya Upanishad tells us that the individuals cried for food because they appeared to be dying of hunger. Here 'hunger' means the absence of the Universal Principle in the particular. To the extent to which the Universal is absent in our particular individuality, to that extent we are full of appetites – hunger, thirst and what not. 

##When we are hungry and thirsty, we are actually hungry and thirsty for the Universal which we have lost. 

###But the fallen individual cannot expect to gain the valuable thing once again; as the scriptures tell us, "A flaming sword is kept at the gate of heaven," so that we may not go back. What is given to us is only labour – hard work, sweat and suffering, by which we appear to be somehow or other getting over the sorrow of this headlong fall.

To be continued ....

 

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