By the light of brahman

[Celerity]

Ideas from classical Indian philosophy help illuminate the enigmas of selfhood, consciousness and the nature of reality

https://aeon.co/essays/how-classical-indian-philosophy-helps-us-understand-the-self





The Kaṭha Upaniṣad tells a story about a boy named Naciketas who meets the God of Death, named Yama. Naciketas is granted three wishes by Yama. To Yama’s surprise, the boy does not ask for worldly riches or great powers. Instead, he wants answers to the kind of questions that only the God of Death can answer: what happens when we die? What is the secret of immortality? Yama pleads for Naciketas to ask for something else, but the boy stands firm. He demands that Yama not renege on his word. Nothing that Yama can say will change his mind. So Yama complies.

To answer Naciketas’s questions, Yama explains that the true hidden nature of reality is that there is only one, all-pervading consciousness called brahman, which is timeless, unchanging and the only non-illusory thing that was and ever will be. And it is this brahman, says Yama, that is also immanent in all living things as ātman, the individual ego or self:



Naciketas presses Yama for clarity about the nature of the relationship between brahman and the world of experienced reality. Yama says that the way to think of consciousness is that it is the thing that ‘illuminates’ and that allows for all mental phenomena. Consciousness, in turn, is itself illuminated by brahman – the one and only source of all illumination. Without brahman there would be no light of consciousness and therefore no experience, no knowledge, no perception. ‘Him alone, as he shines, do all things reflect; this whole world radiates with his light.’

There is only one reality, brahman, which takes myriad illusory forms, but like fire it is both an individual flame and a blaze. This one reality is both the transcendental brahman and the immanent ātman. Everything else is fleeting, illusory, sprung from ignorance. Consciousness is illumination. As the light of a blazing lamp brightens a dark room, so consciousness lights up life.

snip

[Karadeniz]

1. The secret teachings in the synoptic gospels are based on this understanding.

Any true spiritual scheme must include a set up and process available to everyone and a universal "deity". Jesus tried to teach a soul/source system.
Unfortunately, the Gnostics gummed it up by demanding faith in the Christ spirit which now amounts to an obstacle between soul and source. They may not have intended that, but orthodoxy became an arm of Rome and Christ became a tool for power. Making faith in Christ's vicarious atonement meant Jesus's vision of a universal theology was lost. So now we have a Christian God and the Jews have Yahweh instead of a union which might have brought a common system that could eventually include everyone.

[LymphocyteLover]

3. Interesting thoughts. I have thought recently how some of Christ's teaching have Buddhist like aspects

to them and could easily be integrated with other major religions. The main problem I have is Jesus of Nazarus is pretty clearly a fictional character synthesized to hold an amalgam of different religious and philosophical teachings that were popular at the time.

[Karadeniz]

4. I know what you mean. The Jesus of the gospels is pretty much a literary creation. However, there are a few hints as to

the stories having been based around a real person, but even those are sketchy. It's orthodoxy that demands one believe in his actual earthly existence. "Jesus" himself said such a faith was immaterial; his teachings were what mattered. The problem is that the writers of the synoptics were just about the best writers this world has ever seen! They took his teachings and what he could do which includes astral projection and worked it all into a biography that's not a biography. There wasn't one level of members of their communities, there were at least two stated and I suspect at least one more. It took years to become a full fledged practitioner, reminiscent of the Essenes. Thus, there was plenty of time to pick apart the true significances of the synoptics. For any community to talk about its beliefs, there has to be a common lingo. The writers created a perfect device for communicating. There are the parables, events in Jesus' life, his times on the other side. All those stories provide an abundance of nuance for discussion. Where I draw the line, keeping me from churches, is the orthodox demand that I acknowledge Jesus as a god. When he taught reincarnation and karma, there is a god system to account for highly developed souls to live on earth. Having a 3-tiered level of "truths" ultimately proved the undoing of the writers' intentions. The movement became stuck at the beginner level.

[LymphocyteLover]

5. yes, well said!

there are only the faintest and probably apocryphal contemporary accounts of Jesus existing as a real person and of course there are dozens of contradictions between the synoptic gospels and even stronger contradictions with the writings of Paul. That being said, they were brilliant writers and storytellers.

[Beastly Boy]

2. Katha is my favorite upanishad.

Just about every Vedic text speaks, in one way or another, of the two states of consciousness, the all encompassing Brahman and the immanent Atman, at times in surprisingly minute and revealing detail.

Katha puts a unique twist on this canon. It is a dialogue in which a god reveals his most intimate and closely guarded secret to a man.

First, how cool is it to have a god of death as your teacher? Then, imagine that your super cool all-powerful god of death teacher who hold your fate in his hands telling you that he has no power whatsoever over you or anyone else: the first thing Yama teaches Nishikida is that there is no such thing as death. His awesome power over all living beings, Yama teaches Nishikida, is an illusion created by the attachment of those living being to their physical bodies. It takes real balls to share with a mortal the secret that takes away your one and only divine attribute, leaving you exposed and vulnerable and, in the end, impotent. No wonder Yama begged Nishikida to take back his last wish.

In the end, the great lesson in Katha turns out to be that men and gods are no different in sharing (or, more accurately, being one and the same with) the consciousness of Brahman, no matter how this all-encompassing unity gets projected onto their inner consciousness of Atman. It is only the attainment of this knowledge that separates them.

Yeah, it's a bit of a digression from the content of the article, but I think it's still one of the coolest stories in all of religious writings.

[eppur_se_muova]

6. Well, once you make up a name for something, obviously you understand it completely. That's how it works.

It's not even necessary that there be indisputable evidence of its existence. Once you give it a name, it's captured and tamed.