The Essence of the Aitareya and Taittiriya Upanishads

by Swami Krishnananda

There is something in us that is different from, superior to, and transcending the sensory diversifications. We cannot see God with the eyes, cannot hear Him with the ears, touch Him with the fingers, taste Him with the tongue, or smell Him with the nose. That which is transcendent is not an object of these senses. That means to say that the recourse to spiritual practice is not a sensory activity. It is not anything that is done by the eyes or the ears, the fingers, the nose or the tongue. So the chanting of the holy text, the Udgitha, which is an invocation of the glory of God, cannot be undertaken except by that which is divine in us. And the senses are the undivine henchmen which force us to go contrary to the righteousness of the Kingdom of God.

So all the senses were defeated. The gods had to take recourse to that which is superior to all the senses, viz., the Prana, which has a variegated meaning. We do pranayama, control the breath, by withholding inspiration and expiration, and we speak of the restraint of the prana. We are also told that there are various functions of the prana—prana, apana, vyana, samana, udana, etc. Actually prana is the vitality in the whole human organism. It is not located in any particular sense organ, but the sense organs move on account of this dynamo that is working inside. This dynamo is the power generator, and the energy can be utilised for any purpose—to move a train, light a bulb, power a refrigerator or heat a stove. We can do anything we like, but the generator is not concerned with that. Likewise is the Prana Sakti. We can use it for seeing with the eyes or hearing with the ears, smelling with the nose, tasting with the tongue, etc., but it has no concern with all these, even as electricity has no concern with light and movement, etc.

So there is a super-sensory integrating vitality in us, which was the thing that finally succeeded in chanting the holy invocation and quelled the Asuras. How could it be done? Because the integrating force is the only power that can put down the distracting force. The impulse of the senses in terms of or in relation to objects is the evil spoken of as the Asuras here in this battle. This sensory impulse cannot be overcome by employing the senses themselves. It would be like employing a thief as a policeman to catch the thief. He will not succeed in that, because he is a friend of the thief. Therefore, the senses are not good instruments in the practice of yoga. They have to be withdrawn in pratyahara, and this is done by various ways, as we all know. So the Udgitha, the divine invocation, was the recital by that integrating vitality which sung the chant; and the concentration of this force, which is the total energy of the system, melted the impulses of the senses, and there was a retention of the activity of the senses. A true pranayama-kumbhaka took place, in yogic parlance. The senses ceased from operating in their own ways.

The Asura spoken of is not a human being or something like a human being, but it is a power. Finally, everything in this universe, in all this creation, is a force moving in this direction or that direction. The Deva, the angel, the god, the celestial, the power divine is the impulse towards cosmic integration, divine experience. The Asura, the demon, the Rakshasa, the evil that is spoken of is the counter-energy that rushes towards the periphery of creation, away from the centre, to the farthest gross form of objects of sense; it recognises a drop of honey there and licks it, like a dog licking a broken bone. The spiritual practice of yoga is the union of the powers of the senses together and the centralising of this force in the great vitality in us, which is indescribable, finally. This energy, or Sakti, is in every one of us. This Sakti is not a physical power merely; the physical power of ours is only an expression of this internal Prana Sakti. The Udgitha mantra was chanted thus by the Prana, and the Asuras were quelled, and the gods assumed their original positions.

What is the meaning of gods assuming their original positions? It means that the gods went to heaven. Otherwise, they were banished as exiles and they were wandering anywhere, helplessly. When the Asuras were defeated in battle, the angels got back their original positions. The angel is a limb of the Virat who visualises everything as a subject rather than an object. There is no object for the Virat, or the Supreme Universal Consciousness; and we were all parts of it. We are all parts of it even now, but we are blindfolded and afflicted with some kind of evil, as the Upanishad mentioned already, and so we have lost our positions. We have been thrown out as exiles from this relation that we had with the Cosmic Virat or the Hiranyagarbha. The origin that we aspire for, the position that we have to regain, is that position in the limb of the Almighty.

Everything was visible in that Cosmic Form described in the Mahabharata, particularly in the Bhagavadgita. Everything is found there. Even the one who sees it is there, already included. The seer of the Virat is also inside the Virat. That means to say that there is nothing outside it. So the so-called outsideness and the running after the things that are outside is something totally undivine. And the practice of yoga, the living of the spiritual life, is the chanting of the Udgitha. It is the Divine Name for all practical purposes. It means the invocation of the Divine Principle in our practical lives, implanting God in our hearts and seeking the blessing of the Almighty.

This is a hard job, because when we visualise the Divine Being, or when we invoke the divine into us, the senses persist in their action; the Asuras attack us, as the Upanishad tells us again and again, and we do not succeed in our attempts. Because there is always a tendency in us to objectify everything, we cannot think in terms of the angel’s vision; that is out of question. But we have to succeed in doing it. Otherwise, there is no entry into this Divine Kingdom. “A flaming sword is placed at the gate, and an angel guards it that no mortal may enter.” It means to say, no sensory appetite may be permitted there. Not only appetite, even an activity of a sensory type will not hold water. “Straight is the gate, narrow is the way.” The gross objects of sense cannot enter that narrow gate. It is so narrow that even this body cannot go. We cannot carry this body there; we have to shed it.

The angels have no physical body. The angel is an ethereal existence, which can penetrate through walls and pierce through everything. It is not physicality; it is rarified angelity. That is the Spirit within us. The angel is still speaking within us; it is not dead. The Spirit within us is the angel. But the whisper which compels us to divert the attention of this angel to the body and all its external relations is the Asura, the Satan speaking. The voice of the divine is the voice of pure divine subjectivity in affiliation with God’s omnipresence; but this is not the way in which we are working in the world. We have a different way altogether. We are not in the Kingdom of God; we are in a mortal world of birth and death. The process known as transmigration is consequent upon this divine impulse, stifled by the urge for sensory contact, struggling to regain its original position but getting defeated again and again. Birth and death are processes of the struggle of the spirit to regain its original position. But in every attempt, it gets defeated. And so it is born and it dies, it is born and it dies, and there is no end to it. So the gods fight and get defeated, fight and get defeated again and again, because they have not employed the proper means in the battle with the Asuras.

After ages of struggle, we awaken ourselves to the proper means. We have to know the tactics of the enemy in order to meet the inimical forces. Already we have been told that the angels are lesser in number and the evil forces are more, and they can threaten us. The quantity of the world always surprises us. And the quality of our Spirit seems to be a little spark before this mighty magnitude of the physical world. We are awe-stricken even by looking at this world. We do not know whether we can do anything here at all. Such a mighty giant is this world before us. So the quantity engulfs the quality; the Asuras overpower the gods. But, the gods have their own strength; quality is superior to quantity, as we all know. Yet, we are frightened by the quantity of things because of the incapacity of this little quality of the spark to assert its pure independence in its primitive originality.

This is the meaning behind the Upanishadic story of the Devasura Sangrama, very interestingly told us, though not in much detail. But it becomes a large epic like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the Puranic stories later on, all meaning finally the agelong struggle between the divine and the undivine forces. It is a conflict between Spirit and matter, Light and darkness, the Subject and the object, the Seer and the seen, the ‘I’ and the ‘you’, and so on. For this purpose, we have to conduct a very incisive analysis of our position and engage ourselves in the very same discipline which was contemplated by the gods in heaven after receiving several kicks and blows and getting defeated. We have been defeated many a time. We have passed through many, many forms of earthly existence. We are told that we have passed through 84 lakhs of species of living beings, etc.; and now we have come to the end of it, as it were, by assuming human form.

It is not really the end, but it is the end in the sense that we have a consciousness of the future or the destiny of ours. So the purpose in existence has awakened itself in man, while in the earlier species this consciousness of the purpose is supposed to be completely obliterated in sleep and there is only a kind of instinctive action without the consciousness of a higher purpose or a destiny in life. But even though man’s existence is not the finale in creation, in a way it is a great achievement indeed. It is a kind of pass mark that we have obtained in an examination, but it is not complete. A pass mark is not an entire success. It is only a patting on the back that we are well, and it is good. But there is a lot to be done further, above the human level, to reach that original position which we have lost.

We have to traverse a long distance, but we have the consolation that we know how much time it will take, what are the means that we have to employ, where is the destination, etc. Even to have this consciousness of purpose is an achievement, though this is a meager achievement because, though we have a consciousness of the purpose of our existence and the nature of the destiny ahead, it has not yet been realised and achieved. So while we are aware of the fact, we have not yet come to possession of this fact. This effort towards the coming into direct contact and realisation of the great purpose of existence, and to regain our original position as angels, is the art of yoga.