The Mandukya Upanishad -3. Swami Krishnananda

 ============================================================

==============================================================

Sunday, March 13, 2022. 20:00.

Discourse -3.

===============================================================

We have heard that Sri Krishna manifested the Viratsvarupa before Arjuna. In the Purusha Sukta we also have some sort of description of the Cosmic Being conceived as animating the whole physical cosmos. 

By 'physical cosmos' we have to understand here not merely this physical earth, but all the layers of externality which are computerised, as it were, into fourteen categories known in Sanskrit as Bhurloka, Bhuvarloka, Svarloka, Janaloka, Maharloka, Tapoloka and Satyaloka.

 The whole cosmos, in all the levels of its manifestation, is at once an object of the awareness of this Cosmic Being. Such an awakened, waking state, as it were, of the cosmic consciousness is Virat, also known as Vaishvanara in the language of the Upanishads. Individually, the microcosmic aspect of this Virat is visva – your own or my own waking experience as it is available just now, for instance.

Through nineteen mouths we experience objects of the world in this waking condition. We can conceive for our own intellectual satisfaction that the universe operates also in this manner, and God-consciousness, imagined to be operating through this waking condition everywhere, is an expanded form of our individualised consciousness. While we in our waking state know only certain things, God as the universal consciousness knows all things at the same time. This is briefly a description of consciousness involved in the waking state; a total physical perception in which the consciousness is involved is the objective world of waking state of consciousness.

In the dream state something else happens. The actual physical world which is seen and contacted through the sense organs in the waking state is absent, but by an action of the mind it looks as if it is present even in the dream state. Without the assistance of the gross senses and the organs of action which are active in the waking condition, the mind alone concocts, imagines, projects a world of its own in the dream state, and we see a world in dream. We exist there in the same way that we exist in the waking state. We can see ourselves now, seated here, in the waking state; in a similar way we can see ourselves observing certain things in the dream state also. 

There is a dream 'me' in the same way as there is a waking 'me', and there is a dream world. 

We see all sorts of things in the waking state – mountains, rivers, sun, moon, stars, and people of all kinds. We can see all that in the dream world also. There is space, time and externality in dream, as we have also in the waking state. The difference between the waking and the dream is that the mind has created this entire world of external cognition and perception of its own accord, without the existence of physically external objects or the physical sensations. 

There, also, nineteen mouths are operating. We have dream eyes, dream ears, a dream nose, a dream tongue that tastes, dream touch; and dream legs, dream hands, dream organs of every kind. We run in dream with the legs, we eat a good meal in dream, we can even live and die – even that experience is possible in dream. One can feel that one is born, or one can feel that one is dead. One can observe one's own cremation in dream. All kinds of fantastic things can be experienced in dream. A new world is projected by the mind – space, time, causation, objects, people, all blessed things. They are in the dream world because the psyche is operating through the vital energy, the mind, the intellect in a diminished form, not in an active way. 

The only difference is that the physical body is not there as an object of awareness. Sometimes people sleep with open mouths. If a few particles of sugar are put on the tongue of a sleeping man, he will not feel the taste of it, because his mind is withdrawn. The mind is the main operative organ which causes sensations of seeing, hearing, tasting, etc. Even the ego will react in dream. If somebody calls us, either in dream or in sleep, by a name that is not ours, we will not listen to it. We will not wake up. If John is sleeping and he is called as Jacob, he will not wake up. John must be summoned as John only. That is, the ego is so intensely identified with this particular name-form complex that it is acting even there in a submerged condition of dream and sleep.

So, the nineteen mouths of the waking condition are psychologically projected by the mind in the dreaming state also, and there also we have all these experiences, every blessed thing, as we have in the waking state. The Mandukya Upanishad is a study of these states. It is said that if one properly understands the Mandukya Upanishad and its implications, one need not read any other Upanishad afterwards. 

Mandukyam ekam eva alam mumukshunam vimuktaye : For the sake of the liberation of the soul, one Upanishad is sufficient, the Mandukya Upanishad, provided it is understood properly in its deep connotations. 

We should not just read it only to understand of the lower meaning of it. The suggestion given by the Mandukya Upanishad is to take one's consciousness deeper and deeper into the very root of one's personality – from external sensations, from body etc. to what one really is in one's deepest essence.

To be continued ......

================================================================