Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Looking Through Limited Eyes: The Upanishads and the Disguise of the Self

Though attaining knowledge of self is, in the Upanishads, the greatest of rewards, it is also at the end of the most difficult of quests. In this post I wish to discuss the predominant theme of hidden things in the text, and discuss how the metaphors used to describe the challenges of finding the soul directly relate to physical actions of perception and their ultimate futility as a method of self-understanding.

I will begin with Chapter 8, and quote:

"In that space there is something [...] that's what you should seek to perceive" (Upanisads, "Ends", Chapter 8, Page 167, first paragraph).

Perception is no easy task in the Upanishads. Perception is a sense form of knowledge, a way to reach out to teachings and scour them for meaning, or even to seek comprehension with physical sight. It is a tool of uncovering things. And the self is hidden in both intuitive and tangible ways.

Consider the common refrain, that the self "lies hidden in the cave of the heart." (Katha Upanishad, Chapter 1, paragraph 14). It is repeated, in different forms, "the self that lies here hidden in the heart" (Katha Upanishad, Chapter 2, paragraph 20), "hidden in all the beings" (Katha Upanishad, Chapter 3, paragraph 12), "the cave of the heart" (Katha Upanishad, Chapter 4, paragraph 6), many times. The body is a physical space, the heart tangible, and in fact concealing spaces within it. Even considering this refrain literally, no one can look into their heart and live to do it--a great challenge to perception, and a barrier to understanding.

Ignorance is also described as a physical barrier. Those that are ignorant, rather than properly seeking knowledge, are, "staggering about like a group of blind men, led by a man who is himself blind" (Katha Upanishad, Chapter 2, paragraph 5). Here is an example of a bodily impairment to perception. Seeing with blind eyes is equally as impossible as looking inside of the heart.

These two examples show that the body, even the physical world itself, is a distraction and an obstacle from true enlightenment. Physical perception of the self is impossible because the physical world, with its pleasures and its falsehoods, is, in entirety, unable to approach the self. Furthermore, the physical world is unable to understand the soul not because the soul is too small to notice, but that the world is too limited to understand what encompasses it entirely, "his appearance is beyond the range of sight, no one can see him with his sight; with the heart, with insight, with thought, has he been contemplated" (Katha Upanishad, Chapter 6, paragraph 9). It is the, "immense, all pervading self" (Katha Upanishad, Chapter 4, paragraph 4), and "with the mind alone, you must understand [the nature of the soul]" (Katha Upanishad, Chapter 4, paragraph 10).

The uses of physical metaphors of sight and sightless things are one of the methods that the Upanishads show how to understand the soul--by looking away from the world which cannot help you, and inward.

(A note: I decided not to use The Concealed Art of the Soul because it makes its own argument about the same thematic elements. I thought it would be more original if I attempted to make my own interpretation. Thanks for reading!)

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