The Isha Upanishad
Peter Bolland
6.79K subscribers
Subscribe
120
Share
Download
Thanks
2,075 views Jan 19, 2023
In this installment of our series on the Upanishads we dive into Gandhi's favorite, the Isha Upanishad. One of the shortest of the major Upanishads, the Isha gets right to the heart of the matter--what is ultimate reality, and what is our relationship with it? And what stance should we take in order to best realize this reality? Get your copy of the Upanishads here: https://www.amazon.com/Upanishads-2nd.... As Gandhi summarized this text, "Renounce and enjoy."
Chapters
View all
======
Transcript
Introduction
0:00
Hi everyone, it's Peter Bolland welcoming you to another in our series of inquiries into the
0:05
Upanishads, India's profound repository of Vedic knowledge, self-inquiry, life-shaping
0:14
wisdom. I'm excited about today's installation because we're going to one of the most potent,
0:21
one of the shortest, but one of the most potent Upanishads: the Isha Upanishad.
0:26
Of the Isha Upanishad the great Mahatma Gandhi wrote, "If all the Upanishads and all the other
0:34
scriptures happened all of a sudden to be reduced to ashes, and if only the first verse in the Isha
0:42
Upanishad were left in the memory of the Hindus, Hinduism would live forever." This was often
0:53
cited as Gandhi's favorite Upanishad, and when he was asked by a reporter once to sum up his
1:02
philosophy in three words he famously just said, "Renounce and enjoy." And he later explained that
1:11
was his three-word summary of the Isha Upanishad. Let's see how he managed that, how he managed to
1:17
distill this very brief...it's just three pages here, one, two, three, that's it. I'm gonna read
1:25
the whole thing. And let's pause and go into it a little more deeply and see what we discover as,
1:31
you know, with with fresh eyes and fresh minds on this fresh morning, to see what reveals itself
1:39
welling up from within each of us as we hear these ancient inquiries. So the Isha Upanishad:
1:49
"The Lord is enshrined in the hearts of all. The Lord is the supreme Reality. Rejoice in him
The Isha Upanishad
1:58
through renunciation. Covet nothing. All belongs to the Lord." So there's the first verse that
2:09
Gandhi was just referring to. You hear the word "Lord" there, and some people, some students of
2:16
Vedanta are maybe initially thrown a bit by the reference to a deity. Is this bhakti yoga? Are
2:25
we somewhere in the Bhagavad Gita? Are we talking about gods? Well, yes we are. But in the playful,
2:33
and I think this Upanishad is going to answer this question better than my stumbling comments
2:37
are here, I think what we're going to discover is that it's not either/or. You know, devotion or
2:48
agnostic, atheistic meditation. It's not one or the other. It's both/and. And so I love how
2:55
this scripture like many of the Upanishads just sort of playfully slip into theistic sounding
3:01
language and start talking about God suddenly. So what? That is a mindset, a perspective,
3:11
that is powerfully effective for many, many people so we're not going to throw it out,
3:15
but we're going to use it in a way that maybe is a little surprising to people who are steeped only
3:22
in a theistic or devotional orientation, who think of nothing but God or the gods.
3:30
So, "The Lord is..." Let me start again, "The Lord is enshrined in the hearts of all." That's your
3:35
first clue right? Whatever we're calling the Lord is actually an inner reality. "The Lord
3:40
is the supreme Reality. Rejoice in him through renunciation. Covet nothing. All belongs to the
3:48
Lord." And keep in mind that renunciation here has a specific meaning. I know for
3:55
students of Hinduism we might think of the word renunciant to refer to those people who, you know,
4:01
abandon their families, change their name, have no job, they just go live in the woods or sit on
4:06
the banks of a river and stop bathing. That's not necessarily what we mean by renunciation.
4:17
That's a sort of sensationalist understanding of renunciation. What renunciation really means is
Renunciation
4:23
letting go of my kind of default self-obsession, my constant thinking about I, me, and mine,
4:34
my constant clinging to my own thoughts and opinions and aversions and cravings. Renunciation
4:41
means letting go of all that--still showing up for work, still paying my taxes, still feeding my dog,
4:50
taking care of business--but having constant awareness of the changeless abiding divinity
4:58
within that I really am, the "I Am" as we call it in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Self
5:08
as we call it here in Hinduism. So, on to verse 2: "Thus working may you live a hundred years.
Working
5:21
Thus alone will you work in real freedom." So right out of the gate there's some advice
5:29
about orienting yourself rightly with the divinity that you are, with the divinity within,
5:37
and then go about your business and you'll be healthy, you'll be whole. Your appetites will be
5:44
moderate. You'll live in right relationship with others and with yourself. And even your ego will
5:50
be fine. It'll be one of the tools in the kit that you need. You know it's kind of like your
5:54
left hand. I need my left hand to play guitar, to to hold a plate of food, to do a lot of things,
6:03
but I don't let it run my life. And in the same way I need my ego, you know, to help me through
6:09
struggles, to keep me focused on taking care of what I need to take care of in this world,
6:15
even to be ambitious and to try to create and to build and to heal and to correct things and to
6:22
stay engaged, you know, there's a lot of Peter Bolland in all of that. That's fine. I'm gonna
6:29
wield or utilize my ego like any other tool in the box, but I'm not going to let it run my life.
6:37
It's not going to be in charge anymore.
6:42
And that's the portrait we start to get right away in the first, second, and third verse of the Isha
Atman
6:48
Upanishad. Verse 3: "Those who deny the Atman," and I'm going to say Atman every time I see the
6:55
word "Self" with capital S. In English translation of this ancient Sanskrit, Atman is always rendered
7:04
as Self. It's throughout the English renderings, whether you're reading Nisargadatta Maharaj,
7:10
or Ramana Maharshi, or contemporary teachers, or these classic scriptures, Self, Self, Self,
7:17
Self everywhere you look. And it's capital S. And it doesn't mean the individual ego. It means
7:23
Brahman-Atman. It means the presence of the ground of being within me. It's that touch point between
7:32
eternity and temporality that we are. So the Self and when I see Self I'm going to say Atman,
7:42
the Universal Consciousness that wells up through all of us, as us.
Born Again
7:48
So again, "Those who deny the Atman are born again."
7:53
Now, in Evangelical Christianity "born again" is a good thing. It's the goal right? To uh,
8:00
metanoia, you know, to have a new mind, a new way of thinking, and being, and seeing, and acting,
8:09
but here born again means staying stuck in samsara, staying stuck in the cycle, the
8:17
wheel of birth and death and rebirth. "Those who deny the Atman are born again blind to the Atman,
8:28
enveloped in darkness, utterly devoid of love for the Lord. The Atman is one.
Blind to the Atman
8:37
Ever still, the Atman is swifter than thought, swifter than the senses.
8:44
Though motionless he outruns all pursuit. Without the Atman, never could life exist."
8:56
I'm talking about something very mysterious here that is absolute stillness,
9:01
yet already ahead of everything else that's trying to move. So it's that ground of being
9:07
in which everything takes form, and to which all forms as they dissolve return.
Return
9:17
Verse 5: "The Atman seems to move, but is ever still.
9:23
He seems far away, but is ever near." (Don't be thrown by the male pronoun, I mean it
9:30
doesn't mean anything.) "He is within all, and he transcends all." So it's both within and above.
9:41
"Those who see all creatures in themselves and themselves in all creatures know no fear.
9:50
Those who see all creatures in themselves and themselves and all creatures know no grief.
Unity Consciousness
10:00
How can the multiplicity of life delude the one who sees its unity?"
10:08
What a beautiful, elegantly crafted pair of sentences about unity consciousness.
10:19
When you really embody unity consciousness fear and grief are impossible
10:28
because you cannot fear the other because there's no such thing as the other. Sure, there
10:34
are other forms around us, but we're all one, so fear doesn't have any foothold to stand on,
10:42
nor does grief, because grief implies that there's an "I" that is losing this thing
10:51
and then now I have to be without that thing or that person or that set of conditions, you know,
10:59
my youth or whatever, that's gone, and so I experience grief. But when you embody the
11:06
consciousness of oneness, grief also does not really have a foothold to stand on. Beautiful.
The Atman
11:16
Verse 8: "The Atman is everywhere. Bright is the Atman, indivisible, untouched by sin, wise,
11:28
immanent, and transcendent. He it is who holds the cosmos together." You see some
11:37
paradoxes here, you know, both immanent and transcendent, both within and without.
11:46
It's that being which binds everything together, hence the unity of all matter,
11:54
all consciousness, all forms, including you and I.
The Most Difficult
12:00
This next set of passages are sometimes referred to as the most difficult in the
12:05
Isha Upanishad. I think you'll find them quite clear. Don't be afraid. Remember,
12:09
we just got rid of fear a second ago.
12:14
Verses 9 through 11: "In dark night live those for whom the world without alone is real;
12:25
in night darker still for whom the world within alone is real." Did you follow that? So,
12:36
people who think that the outer world, the world outside of me,
12:39
right, the world of "nama rupa," names and forms, the perceptual
12:45
field, all of these so-called objects in three-dimensional space around me--those who
12:51
think that that is all that's real, you know, materialism, the philosophy of materialism,
12:57
they live in darkness. "In dark night live those for whom the world without alone is real,
13:05
but in night darker still for whom the world within alone is real." So now let's flip it
13:12
around. People who think, ah, the outer world is fake, it's all Maya man, it's all illusion,
13:18
nothing's real, only the inner world is a real, let's just sit around and meditate all the time,
13:24
well, you just got thrown under the bus y'all, they just, whoever wrote this, just told you, you
13:29
guys are more lost than the materialists are. Ah, so that's a mistake, and this is a mistake. Let's
13:38
see if there's a solution here. Well first some further problems. He says, "The first," (you know,
13:43
the materialist, outward-turned perspective), "The first leads to a life of action,
13:48
the second," (the inwardly, only the inner world is real), "that leads to a life of meditation."
13:58
But here's the solution, "But those who combine action with meditation cross the
The Solution
14:05
sea of death through action and enter into immortality through the practice of
14:12
meditation. So have we heard from the wise." Ah. There's that amazing both/and again,
14:21
to somehow, and I'm just thinking, maybe you've seen my series on the Bhagavad Gita, I just think
14:26
the Bhagavad Gita is so profound on this, and I think deeply indebted to earlier scriptures like
14:32
this one, the Isha Upanishad, in this sense--that the mystery of life is to be both simultaneously
14:43
rooted in the changeless Eternal that we are, and fully present in the field of action.
14:52
Doing our dharma. Doing our duty. And it's both/and, and that's the paradox of the mystery of
14:59
existence--being both still and active at the same time, being both within and without at the same
15:08
time. Check out this next passage. A similar false duality is set up, and then the integration. So
15:15
kind of a thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Watch what it does here in verses 12 through 14,
15:22
same format. "In dark night live those for whom the Lord is transcendent only;
15:29
in night darker still for whom he is immanent only." Transcendent means above and outside,
15:36
immanent means within. So in dark night live those who think God is some being in the sky apart from
15:48
here, outside of here, and in night darker still are people who think, 'No man, God is just it's
15:54
just within, there's no God in the sky.' So that duality is dispensed with rather handily here.
16:05
"But those for whom he is transcendent and immanent cross the sea of death with
16:13
the immanent and enter into immortality with the transcendent. So have we heard from the wise." Ah,
16:22
there it is again, that false duality of God only exists up here, or no, God only exists in here,
16:28
and the Isha Upanishad comes in and slaps you and corrects you and says, 'No,
16:35
don't be in either of those dark nights. Come into the light of the realization that what
16:41
you and I call Lord, what you and I call God--call it by whatever name you like--is
16:46
both above and within. As above so below.'
16:54
Verse 15: "The face of truth is hidden by your orb of gold, O sun. May you remove your orb so that I,
The Face of Truth
17:05
who adore the true, may see the glory of truth. O nourishing sun,
17:10
solitary traveler, controller, source of life for all creatures spread your light and subdue
17:19
your dazzling splendor so that I may see your blessed Atman. Even that very Atman am I."
17:30
A little poetry there, you know, using the image of the sun as ultimacy, as ultimate reality, as
17:38
Brahman, who is also Atman, who is also the universal consciousness welling up as you and I.
17:49
On to verse 17: "May my life merge in the Immortal when my body is reduced to ashes.
The Eternal Brahman
17:58
O mind, meditate on the eternal Brahman. Remember the deeds of the past. Remember, O mind, remember.
18:10
O god of fire, lead us by the good path to
18:16
eternal joy. You know all our deeds. Deliver us from evil, we who bow and pray again and again."
18:29
And then like so many of the Upanishads, it ends with this song-full prayer
18:37
"Om shanti shanti shanti."
18:47
And in English, "Om peace peace peace."
18:59
Look at how it ends as it began, on a somewhat devotional note, all that stuff about O God,
Conclusion
19:05
you know, deliver us from evil-- sounds sort of Biblical, like something from the Psalms.
19:11
That's the either/or, both/and resolution of the Isha Upanishad. And now we can see
19:20
why Gandhi could reduce the Isha Upanishad down to three words: "Renounce and enjoy."
19:28
Let go of your slavish attachments to your own illusions of self-importance, your own
19:37
lengthy list of opinions, and preferences, and aversions, and fears, and your own philosophical
19:43
doctrinal metaphysical opinions, 'God is only above,' 'God is only within,' 'There is no God,
19:49
'There is a God.' All that stuff has to go, and we come into the simplicity of the realized awareness
19:57
that We Are That. Go ahead and talk about it as an external deity, go ahead and talk about it
20:06
as an internal realization, a lived reality where we have our being as Paul said in the Acts of the
20:15
Apostles. "God is that reality in which we have our being, God is where we move, and breathe,
20:23
and have our being," Paul said. So right there in the Christian doctrine even we have a kind of
20:30
Vedanta portrait that aligns beautifully with the Isha Upanishad. Not that one tradition needs the
20:36
other to confirm it--they're all self-confirming. But I love it when we discover these amazing
20:45
alignments or parallelisms I guess I would say between these wisdom
20:50
traditions. So I hope today's journey into the Isha Upanishad
20:56
has encouraged you to go and get your own copy. I'll put a link in the comments here where you can
21:02
easily order this book in the Eknath Easwaran translation, beautiful, readable, and I think
21:12
some of the most important philosophical writings ever put down on paper. See you on the other side.
