THE KENA UPANISHAD

AND

SAVITRI

by Rod Hemsell

A series of lectures delivered in August, 2013

THE KENA UPANISHAD AND SAVITRI (Lecture 1)

(A series of lectures by Rod Hemsell, August 2013)

Day 1 (afternoon session)

Kena Upanishad, Part One1. By whom missioned falls the mind shot to its mark? Bywhom yoked moves the first life-breath forward on itspaths? By whom impelled is this word that men speak?What god set eye and ear to their workings?2. That which is hearing of our hearing, mind of our mind,speech of our speech, that too is life of our life-breath andsight of our sight. The wise are released beyond and theypass from this world and become immortal.3. There sight travels not, nor speech, nor the mind. We knowIt not nor can distinguish how one should teach of It: for Itis other than the known; It is there above the unknown. Itis so we have heard from men of old who declared That toour understanding.4. That which is unexpressed by the word, that by which theword is expressed, know That to be the Brahman and notthis which men follow after here.5. That which thinks not by the mind, that by which the mindis thought, know That to be the Brahman and not this whichmen follow after here. (Complete works, Vol.18, p. 5-6)

Day 1- Introduction

I would like to say something about the purpose of a workshop on KenaUpanishad and Savitri. This is something that I have been working on for a few months, and actually since February. We did some seminars in Auroville in March on Kena Upanishad. And I did six lectures here in Crestone in May, and two workshops in California. All of this process has the purpose of contextualizing Savitri in a certain way. The last thing I just wrote in this short introduction says: for me to point out to you, as I will be doing, the close parallels between the Kena Upanishad and the five cantos of Savitri that I will be reading (Book 2, Cantos 11-15), may seem like just a kind of academiccontextualizing that is not really worth much. Like, “so what?”. Knowing the fact that there are parallels between those five cantos of Savitri and the Kena Upanishad does not change anything. You might say that if that is what it is, then it is just a foolish pastime of

the intellect. And all of this contextualizing Savitri is a waste of time. Why don’t we just read Savitri as we have done for a couple of decades? Let me try to answer that question, because I certainly do not intend to indulge here in academic comparisons.

Sri Aurobindo explains to us in his commentaries on the Kena Upanishad, and not just the ones that were formally published in 1914, but prior to that in various earlier commentaries, which you can read a little bit of in your handouts, he explains that he heard and saw and remembered the wisdom, the truth, that was communicated in those Upanishads. He heard the full illumined truth that they convey. And he then explains that this kind of hearing, and seeing and remembering, is a faculty and a technique that was known to thoseseers who conveyed the Upanishads. And those faculties and techniquesare known as sruti, drishti and smriti. Sruti means hearing the divine truth which is usually spoken. Drishti means seeing that truth in itsfull glory as what it is. The absolute truth-vision. And Smriti meansa kind of remembrance that you knew all along that that was what it was but it was not clear to your mind, and you never heard anybody say it before. So these faculties and techniques, put together in theform in which they are spoken and heard is called mantra. And then Sri Aurobindo comments that no age of humanity since that time has produced anything like that. And ours in particular is the farthest from being able to hear and say and remember those truths. What has intervened in the meantime is a high level of development of the rational mind.

This was the beginning of Sri Aurobindo’s career, his Yoga teaching. The teaching of the yoga of transformation began with that hearing, seeing, remembering of the divine truth. And he then became committedto conveying that divine truth. And not only that, but transmitting it directly as a mantra, as a Sruti and Drishti and Smriti. He realized that that divine truth can’t be known by the mind. It can’t be understood intellectually. That truth-vision is beyond the rational mind. So it can only really be conveyed through another power of communication, which conveys that other level of truth. And the result of all of that career is ultimately Savitri. There were several phases that were intermediate. The first was the commentarieson the Rig Veda and the Upanishads. These commentaries are not ordinary academic commentaries. Someone pointed out to me last night a paragraph in the commentaries that made almost no sense at all.

There may be four or five sentences in a paragraph or verse and they all say the same thing. So what is going on there? They are sentenceswith subjects and predicates, and the mind kind of feels like it understands something, but it is not certain what exactly it means. But in fact that little paragraph conveys an extraordinary truth. If you read it aloud it has power. But that power is not easily accessible to the rational mind; it is another level of mind that gets stimulated and sees something. So when that happens, a seed has been planted. Mantras are known as seed-sounds. So this Kena Upanishad conveys the seeds of all the rest that Sri Aurobindo wrote.And there are several elaborate commentaries, and yet, as we will hear this week, they are not commentaries on the Upanishad at all. There is one chapter on the necessity of supermind, and in that he lays out the whole argument of The Life Divine. In The Life Divine he elaborates, over hundreds of pages, what he says in that commentary on what he heard in that mystical language that nobody else can hear.And finally we come to these five cantos in Savitri that we will read, which reformulate all of that which was the seed of this highest formulation possible through speech. A bold assertion! The five cantos we are going to hear are the highest formulation through speech of the highest truths of existence! The absolute truths. So inorder to come to that point, a lot more is involved than just sittingand listening to Savitri and feeling the Mother’s presence. If we thinkabout what is being conveyed in those chapters throughout all those decades and finally in those late cantos of Savitri (even though it is Book 2, it was written toward the end, in the 40’s), what is conveyedat every stage of that development is the methodology of the transformation of consciousness. The yoga of transformation is what is being conveyed. That’s another methodology than the sruti; it’s themethodology of transformation, which is conveyed by the methodology of mantra. And that methodology entails practice.

So one of the things that you will read in the handouts is an early commentary on yoga and the Upanishads in which he says that yoga, theprocess of transformation, is integral to the Upanishads. They are not just metaphysical poems that tell us about existence. He says in fact that nothing is more useless than metaphysical doctrine. So, what we want to grasp and receive and put into practice is the seed-knowledge for the transformation of consciousness. Sri Aurobindo tookthe pains to cultivate that bit of spiritual gardening in many different forms and stages. My belief, as a result of my study and

reading of Savitri for decades, is that to reconnect Savitri with its seeds, and to trace the development (not only the mental development)of Sri Aurobindo, to trace the development of yoga from sruti to sutra to tantra, and then to hear the mantric transmission of that which wasalready taught in the form of sutra, and was already heard in the form of Upanishad, enables us to embrace and identify with this yoga of transformation in a much more comprehensive and substantial and realizable manner. I hope that that is the case because I have been watching people for all of these decades receiving the energy of the Mother and not understanding very much what to do with it, how it useit, what it means, why it is there, how it came to be there. This energy that we enjoy in this atmosphere got to be here through the recitation of the mantra. Plain and simple. That Ray, that energy that is coming down, that we just heard about in those few lines, gets grounded and established by the mantra.

But then what? And how does it work? What’s its purpose? Can we know?Is it worthwhile to try to know the answer to these questions? It is a phenomenon, but what’s its potential? There are plenty of spiritualtraditions that have mantras and people sit in relative bliss for a few minutes or hours, regularly. And that is the divine presence, no doubt. But is that it? So Sri Aurobindo figured out something else. When he touched the seed-sounds and he realized that they had the power for the transformation of consciousness he also realized something else simultaneously. He realized the answers to the questions of evolution. He solved the problem of evolution. He found a solution there. And when you read the first page of your handouts, he states it, he got it from the Sruti. He was able to do that not because the Upanishad said anything about evolution. There is absolutely nothing about evolution in the Kena Upanishad. Sri Aurobindo came to that point as a result of a very high level of intellectual development in England when evolutionary theory was the most talked about theme in academia. He came back from England with knowledge of Greek and Latin, and Darwinian theory, and Platonic philosophy, and he entered into the Indian ethos, and mythos, and pathos, and deeply into Sanskrit, and he had all these questions about evolution already in his mind, as did every thinking person in those times. And he put the two things together.

In many of the chapters of The Life Divine where he talks about evolution, he never contradicts Darwinian theory but he explains it

in another dimension, he accounts for it, for the process of nature, by a kind of spiritual embrace of that which is and that which is not. And that which is includes that which can be. And nothing is notpart of that oneness, that being, which is all, and nothing happens that is not the result of that energy of the all which is one. Some of that energy takes the form of atomic particles, and molecules, andcells, and organs, and life force, with intention and purpose, and systems, and some of that energy takes the form of words, and ideas, and understanding, and measurement, and explanation, and planning. But those are just three levels of that original All. He then concluded that there must be a next level that emerges, just like those three levels emerged, if in fact at the origin of the processesof nature an all-knowing luminous being first of all expresses itselfmentally, and vitally, and physically, it has the possibility of expressing itself spiritually, supramentally, in a level of structurethat is a kind of absolute of all those prior structures. A more powerful physical, a more lasting and enjoyable and blissful vital, and a more comprehensive total understanding of the meaning of the whole. And finally a consciousness structure that acts in the individual from the point of view of the whole. Whereas we act in thewhole from the point of view of the individual. And thus we always feel separate because we all have a different point of view, degree of resonance, disagreement as a result of that, or at least a lack ofunderstanding, completion, satisfaction, that ends up in frustration,and finally the whole system breaks down and we suffer and die.

So this arc of humanity, Sri Aurobindo decided was a temporal phase, and not the whole. And just like everything else has its cycles, thisone also belongs to a greater whole, and eventually speciates, and the whole manifests a higher level of consciousness and force that isactually supramental, and eventually a new species. He decided that all of that possibility of understanding was contained in the Upanishad even though it doesn’t say anything about any of that. So that is why I say sometimes that everything is there in the Kena Upanishad. If you understand that the development of Sri Aurobindo’s ideas comes from that, then in a sense it contains everything. What we will hear more about this week is Sri Aurobindo’s commentaries on the Upanishad. Those really do contain everything. To start with, to connect the Upanishad with the problem of evolution that still persists, the evolution of consciousness, the Upanishad, according to Sri Aurobindo’s translation and interpretation, asks this

question: how is it that the mind knows what it knows? Let us just think about that for a minute.

We know many things, most of which we do not even need to think about, we know them so well. We know how to solve problems, analyze situations, make plans, do what we have to do to achieve goals. How is it that the human mind (and animal mind to some extent) gathers information through perception and experience and on the basis of that information understands what to do and how to do it in order to achieve its goals. How is it that the mind is shot like an arrow to its mark? We experience it all the time. It’s the most natural thing.How is it that in this material-vital organism, a process like mind works the way that it does? It produces consciousness. And it acts accordingly. By what or by whom does this mind think? By what is the mind’s thinking thought?! In other words: what is the principle behind mind?

And then he asked the question, what is the principle behind life. How is it that life-force organizes all this material for the sake ofsurvival? How can organisms fulfill their potential? This is also a kind of consciousness: there is intention, purpose, development, fulfillment of the vital energies of existence. Which we experience all the time. How is it that this organization of life is possible, especially considering that molecules have no life or mind. They are not living organisms or mental beings, just elementals. By what forceare these elementals driven to produce all these structures of life, and then all these structures of meaning? And how does the mind emerge on that basis and reflect on it and understand it. These are questions that are raised by the Upanishad. They were thinking about the meaning of existence, and the questions that are not easily answered by sensation, perception or rational speculation. The mythological structure of the Upanishad has got the God of physical energy doing everything that it can to try to solve this problem, andit disappears from its grasp. And the God of life, of dynamism also fails, it eludes its grasps. And Indra, the most illumined possibility of mind tries and it evades its grasp. It is a mythological formulation of the question of consciousness. Sri Aurobindo thought that was a good way to approach the problem of evolution. Today we analyze the physical, the vital, the mental and still we do not understand purpose, and conscious organization. We describe them, but we do not really explain them. There is something

inherent in existence that obviously takes these various forms. Thereis a tendency towards these forms and processes in nature. How is it that such a thing is there, in those levels, and achieves these forms?

Try it! Observe your observation and conclusions. And then ask: how does that happen? How is it that my sensations (hearing, sight, taste... and that which unifies them: mind) give me the information? We come to phenomenology: how do we explain these phenomena of consciousness? They are so natural, we take them for granted. We are human beings and that is how we function. Why would we ask those questions then? 99% of human beings will think: what a silly question. But in the context of evolution we notice that this mind does not always function adequately. And in fact through the whole spectrum of evolution there is a vacillation between failure and success. It seems that organisms improve in the quality of their conscious structures from one-cell organisms to human beings, there is a development of faculties which results in an extraordinary degree of ability to anticipate problems, avoid catastrophes, have a comprehensive grasp of things that you cannot see at all, but yet youare able somehow to know. Sri Aurobindo says that the answer to this question about the mind is an underlying pervasive all-comprehensive self of consciousness that has produced all these because it containsall these potentials in principle. Sight, taste, smell,... are all faculties of consciousness. Sight cannot be explained by analyzing the eyeball and its connection to the brain. The principle of Sight throughout the animal kingdom, with many different structures evolvedin different ways, implies that sight is a principle of consciousness, and in each of its manifestations guarantees the survival of the organism through obtaining information about the environment and itself. So Sri Aurobindo comes to the conclusion fromthese speculations of the Upanishad that there is this principle of consciousness, which is a principle of the principles.

His interpretation of the Upanishad is that the Gods are the universal principles that serve the supreme consciousness. The life force, mind, physical body are expressions of Consciousness which is the principle of the principles. So Consciousness is then prior, and the force of evolution is its emanation in time and space in little energy packets that come about through vibrations, which come about by the Will of the Supreme in the form of sound, initially, and sound

carries a meaning. Each increment of sound means a certain element ormolecule or wavelength of energy transfer and communication, and those essential sounds interact and create vibrational forms, and they keep repeating because they have a meaning, and that meaning is an emanation of the containing Absolute whose will is to unfold itself in forms and qualities in time and space.

That is the Upanishad’s answer to the problem of existence, which SriAurobindo interprets as the answer to the problem of evolution. Now in Savitri we will hear that he is invoking those Gods as Principles inthe same way that the Upanishad does. He is invoking the Gods to reveal the central truths of existence. He is creating an imagery of Consciousness that can be identified with the universal principles, or Gods, and through them shift out of the analytical perspective to a more universalized cosmic perception of why things are what they are, which our mind cannot perceive. He is trying to bring about thatSight (drishti), following the formula that is already there in the Upanishad, using the same technique of rhythmic speech, the mantric technique. This is not a reasoning, it is a transmission of a realization, of perceiving and seeing, that he has attained and that is meant to plant seeds in us also. Then we come to the big question,a personal one: Are we individually ready to accept that imagery of consciousness that shifts us out of our familiarity with our mental, vital, physical habits into another realm of perception and understanding? Each person has to answer that question.

What we will hear during the week is a description of the path of themind into the Supermind, and it will not be an easy path. It is not an easy path. There is nothing in Savitri that sounds particularly easy. In fact, we will hear things that we cannot either do or imagine. So to be able to choose this path already implies a shift ofenergy, purpose, intention… a transformation of consciousness from the human to the superhuman. This is the evolutionary arc that Sri Aurobindo is trying to show us and instigate and initiate. But he says it is the most difficult thing imaginable to do. And as we will hear in Savitri, it implies a kind of walk along the edge. You will hear that image: between extinction and transcendence. So this is pushing the boundaries.

The Upanishad does not go there. It solves the problem easily: the Gods are themselves emanations of the Supreme and can focus their

energy on that which is beyond them, on the Supreme energy and light,the all bliss, the source. Now, Sri Aurobindo at this point does a turn. He says, Yes, that is the way to go to the source. But then, whereas the Vedantic tradition often ends there, you have to make yourself a deliberate conscious receptacle of that higher energy, andallow it to eliminate the mind, displace the mind, and displace the vital force, and replace it with the permanent Ray, the immortal Ray.It is unchanging, and can be realized in the body. That is the yogic task of Sri Aurobindo. So we will hear this path laid down very systematically and powerfully. And then, we will have to answer the question for ourselves.

The Kena Upanishad and Savitri (Lecture 2)

Day 2 (morning session)

Kena Upanishad, Second Part1. If thou thinkest that thou knowest It well, little indeed dostthou know the form of the Brahman. That of It which isthou, that of It which is in the gods, this thou hast to thinkout. I think It known.2. I think not that I know It well and yet I know that It is notunknown to me. He of us who knows It, knows That; heknows that It is not unknown to him.3. He by whom It is not thought out, has the thought of It; heby whom It is thought out, knows It not. It is unknown tothe discernment of those who discern of It, by those whoseek not to discern of It, It is discerned.4. When It is known by perception that reflects It, then onehas the thought of It, for one finds immortality; by the selfone finds the force to attain and by the knowledge one findsimmortality.

Last time I started with an introduction to this week of teachings which are coming from the Kena Upanishad and Savitri. There is an oral teaching that has been transmitted from the Upanishads throughout theages, through mantric verse, that culminates in Savitri. It is always the same teaching. So, the introduction that I gave will be repeated in different forms along the way, and it will be the same teaching asin the Upanishad and Savitri. What I pointed out was that it begins, and it began for Sri Aurobindo, with a hearing. And that hearing brings with it a seeing. And that hearing and seeing bring a remembrance. These faculties are known as sruti, drishti and smriti which are of a quality that is not rational, it’s not of the rational mind.What they bring for us to hear and see and remember is not accessibleto our rational minds. Therefore, there is a methodology, a technique, for transmitting them that is called mantra. Mantra is thetransmission of the sruti, drishti and smriti. And when Sri Aurobindo heard, saw and remembered that, it became the only thing that he had to do! Because it is not possible anymore in Sanskrit. Sanskrit is dead, in the sense that we cannot recover that level of seeing and hearing through Sanskrit anymore. Only the most highly gifted, claivoyant yogis can hear that truth in Sanskrit. Plenty of people are referring to Sanskrit, but they generally do it rationally.

The mission for Sri Aurobindo was to transmit that knowing and its particular objects through a language that is revelatory. And so he used English for that purpose. In his commentary you will read him saying that this kind of transmission has not been done to that extent since the Upanishads. Especially, in our age, after 400 yearsof print based rational development, we do not even know what this means; this kind of seeing, hearing and remembering of the truths of being. It is not something that our culture has access to. Moreover, the difficulty is that this evolutionary yoga of Sri Aurobindo intends for us not to just see and hear and remember the truth but totransform our rational minds into the supermind through the ray that this mantra brings in. We feel the Ray, we call the Ray the divine, or the Mother’s vibration. But that in itself is only the very minimal beginning of what is conceived in this teaching. That comes in response to the mantric force. That presence, that Ray. And one has then the opportunity to decide whether to allow that to replace the mental and vital habits that we have and are, or not.

There is an aspect of this teaching that we hear, which we understand, it makes sense to us, and then one minute later we forgetabout it completely, because we enjoy the common knowing that we know, saying it to others, relying on it to get through life day by day, our mental representation of what we knew yesterday. And we hangon to it. So, everything that passes between us in the kitchen and the living room is our narrative, and it is human, useful, nice, good. Why do we not want to just enjoy that forever? That is what we know, what we are, what we can do. So, that is enough, right? Why would anyone want to change that?

There is a question that was asked last night: What have we to do? Well, this is a question that we can keep in our minds during the week, and we have the opportunity to put it into practice. Let us tryto remember what we hear, and visualize it, and minimize the personalnarrative. This does not mean necessarily not speaking or sharing thenarrative, but what it means is a distance in the consciousness from that narrative that allows us to see beyond it something else, which is what we are going to be hearing about. To make a deliberate effortto see beyond the narrative. One important step is to minimize the narrative. I opened a book on yoga by a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Tenzin Wangyal, and on the first page it said: if you really want to

tune in to the pranic medium, you have to let go of your story, because it is what we always put in front. We do not even select whatpart of the narrative, it just comes. It is the modus vivendi of the 21st century human being. This yoga teaching, like the Upanishad, is asking us to do something else in order to open a passage for a further evolution of the human being beyond itself, which is an intellectual idea that we all understand perfectly. But that is not it. The Upanishad upon which Sri Arobindo has based his teaching, says: “That which thinks not by the mind, that by which the mind is thought, know that to be the Brahman and not this which men follow after here.” This last phrase ends a whole series of slokas regardingthe eye’s seeing. What we follow after here is what the eye sees, butthat which sees the eye’s seeing, that principle of sight, we never think about. All we think about is whether it looks good, whether it is pretty, or strange or familiar. Our mind is constantly indulging itself in the objects of perception, and we do not think about how there is perception and sight in the first place. They give us information about our world, but how is that possible? How is it thatwe have a consciousness of things, that is realized through our mental perceptions? Through or by what is the hearing heard? This SriAurobindo decides is really the fundamental question, What is consciousness? This question so far has not been answered by science,which is currently very preoccupied with it.

Sri Aurobindo gathered two important things from this Upanishadic hearing. One is the idea of the kind of knowledge which opens to a universe that we are normally not familiar with, but which we belong to, beyond the barrier of the rational mind. And then, this also solves the problem of evolution. His whole philosophy of spiritual evolution comes from this idea of seeing consciousness-force as what is evolving through all these forms and structures of evolution. Consciousness is not a product of mind, or sensations; they are its products, its instruments. Then, what is it?

The Upanishad asks, “By whom or what is the mind missioned and sent on its errand so that it falls on its object like an arrow shot by a skillful archer to its predetermined mark?” This is our life. It’s what we are doing all the time. Our mind tells us everything and we act accordingly. But by whom or what is this mind able to do that, which is such a familiar activity for us? What is it within or without us that sends forth the mind on its errand? What is the

principle of mind, its purpose? Why does it exist in this form? What guides it to its object? Is the object just to put more petrol in thecar so that we can shop for food to eat, etc. Is that the business of the mind? Or does it have some other purpose, and this is just itscurrent temporal manifestation? Is its ultimate purpose to create allthe necessary military power to have enough petrol to satisfy our needs? Is that the purpose of the mind? Or is that a temporary stage of evolution? And is there some other possibility for the mind than those practical destructive purposes?

We can also see the question of petrol differently, more universally:it is moving people around from where they are to where they need to be. It is survival, mobility, development of human being into a more sophisticated, productive, expressive entity. There are people here this week from all over the world. Fuel is very beneficial. We can see through that the principle of universal power at the service of consciousness, working through fuel-driven, jet and mechanical means to bring people to a point which they had an intuition would be valuable. And this enhances the quality of life. So this Mahakali principle is driving the jet engine and all of those cars on the freeway, to enable there to be a product of consciousness that is progressive, able to resonate aesthetically and spiritually with the higher purposes of life. She is there. Many of these activities that she enables produce well-being. Mahalakshmi, the provider, riding thematerial vehicle to bring the food to the market. We start then to look through the forms of things to the universal principle. And thenit is much nicer. There are so many things in the world that have an aspect that is destructive and that have an aspect that is productive. If we do not look only at the particular, we begin to shift our view from the rational to the higher mind, from the particular to the universal, and if we do as the Upanishad is going to recommend, we move our consciousness through the form to the principle, and then from the principle to the source of the principle! If we begin to feel and see and resonate with Mahakali herself in the universal processes of power that are necessary for every single form to be what it is, then we begin to resonate with a higher Consciousness. In this teaching the principle of consciousness-force is moving in that direction, it begins where it has to begin, with the form, and ends at the source.

“The eternal question has been put which turns man’s

eyes away from the visible and the outward to that whichis utterly within, away from the little known that he hasbecome to the vast unknown he is behind these surfaces andmust yet grow into and be because that is his Reality and outof all masquerade of phenomenon and becoming the Real Beingmust eventually deliver itself. The human soul once seized bythis compelling direction can no longer be satisfied with lookingforth at mortalities and seemings through those doors of themind and sense which the Self-existent has made to open outwardupon a world of forms; it is driven to gaze inward into anew world of realities.” (p.23)

Well, is it really driven to do that or is that just a kind of idealistic postulate? Let us not take it for granted. And this is why: “Here in the world that we know we posses something which however imperfect and insecure, we yet value.” We value all those little mortalities and seemings, and they are the substance of our narrative, that is who we are, we think.

For (we) aim at and to some extent procure enlarged being, increasingknowledge, more and more joy and satisfaction and thesethings are so precious to (us) that for what (we) can get of them(we are) ready to pay the price of continual suffering from theshock of their opposites. If then (we have) to abandon what we herepursue and clasp, there must be a far more powerful attractiondrawing us to the Beyond, a secret offer of something so greatas to be a full reward for all possible renunciation that canbe demanded of (us) here. This is offered, (says Sri Aurobindo)—not an enlarged becoming, but infinite being; not always relative piecings of knowledge mistaken in their hour for the whole of knowledge,but the possession of our essential consciousness and the floodof its luminous realities; not partial satisfactions, but the delight.In a word, Immortality. (p.23)

That Delight (always and in eveything) is virtually unknown to us. But there is the possibility that through the sruti, drishti, smriti, that wewill recall it, and then be attracted to it so one pointedly that we will begin to allow all those vital mental powers to be transformed by that delight itself. It is a possibility. It is the teaching of the yoga of transformation.

I want to mention an important feature here. Sri Aurobindo points outthat the Kena Upanishad's teaching emphasizes three levels of realityknown as “adhibhuta, adhidaiva, and adhiatma...”. The first is the world of matter, sensation and form, and energy: the mind, the senses, the

drives, the world that we know through perception and analysis of itsfruits, that world of facts and processes that are known through the senses. This is called adhibhuta, the plane or principle of perceptualexistence. Then, there is the adhidaiva plane, the plane of universal energies that are expressed through all of the forms of the adhibhuta plane. Adhidaiva pertains to the gods. In this material there move non-material powers manifesting through the mind force and life forcethat work upon matter and these are called gods or devas; and that plane of universal forces that work through matter, life and mind is called adhidaiva, the plane of the gods. Then, above the non-material powers, greater than them but containing them is the Self, or Spirit,Atman. This is the plane of adhiatma. Anything which has to do with that higher existence is called the spiritual. (Maybe you thought that spiritual meant using the right lotion and eating the right foodfrom the whole foods store. But that's the adhibhuta.)

Now, is that plane of gods and principles the cause? Is that the ultimate reality to be known or not? Is there something beyond even the universal principles and powers? This is the question that the Upanishad asks. In this mythological formation, he says, “The Upanishad is not concerned with the elemental, the adhibhuta, but withthe relations between the subtle existence, adhidaiva, and the spiritual, adhiatma. The mind, the life, the speech, the senses are governed by the cosmic powers; the gods. The principle of sight, for example, governs the formation of the eye. These principles are knownas gods, and they have names like Vayu: the life force, the wind behind desire, and behind processing energy and thriving and blossoming, there is Vayu, the principle of life. In this mythological formulation, Agni, the fire, the electrical and mechanical and combustible forms of energy, Agni, is the basis of everything physical. This energy tries to answer the question. Is it ultimately a physical energy that causes everything? Vayu tries to answer the question,whether the life force is the cause of everything. The gods in us are asking the essential questions of existence, and this is a kind of transition from the mythological to the psychological: the drive in us to answer these questions comes first from the life force until we find that it can't answer the question of its own existence, then mind, in the form of Indra, triesto answer the question, and all of these gods come up with a negativeanswer. They are very powerful universal principles of consciousness who ultimately must look beyond themselves to their own source. So,

then, in Yoga, the translation of all this into Yoga, goes like this.

The way forward to the source is to use our mind rightly. We have to know the form of the Brahman, the Master-Consciousness ...throughand yet beyond the universe in which we live. But first we mustput aside what is mere form and phenomenon in the universe;for that has nothing to do with the form of the Brahman, …Our first step therefore must be to get behind theforms of Matter, the forms of Life, the forms of Mind and goback to that which is essential, most real, nearest to actual entity.And when we have gone on thus eliminating, thus analysing allforms into the fundamental entities of the cosmos, we shall findthat these fundamental entities are really only two, Selfand the gods. (p.75)

...if we recognise that our mental perceptions are simply so manyclues by which we can rise beyond mental perception and ifwe use these fundamental idea-symbols and the arrangement ofthem which our uttermost thought makes in order to go beyondthe symbol to that reality,

so that we are perceiving the universal forces themselves in things

then we have rightly used the mind andthe higher discernment for their supreme purpose. (p.77)

The purpose of the higher discernment, the vivek buddhi, is exactly this: to look through the forms, the idea-symbols – Vayu, Agni, Mahalakshmi, Mahakali – to the gods themselves. Now let us listen to the canto that enables us to see the gods in forms.

(Excerpt from Savitri, Book 2, Canto 11)

In front of the ascending epiphanyWorld-Time’s enjoyers, favourites of World-Bliss,The Masters of things actual, lords of the hours,Playmates of youthful Nature and child God,Creators of Matter by hid stress of MindWhose subtle thoughts support unconscious LifeAnd guide the fantasy of brute events,Stood there, a race of young keen-visioned gods,King-children born on Wisdom’s early plane,Taught in her school world-making’s mystic play.Archmasons of the eternal Thaumaturge,Moulders and measurers of fragmented Space,

They have made their plan of the concealed and knownA dwelling-house for the invisible king.Obeying the Eternal’s deep commandThey have built in the material front of thingsThis wide world-kindergarten of young soulsWhere the infant spirit learns through mind and senseTo read the letters of the cosmic scriptAnd study the body of the cosmic selfAnd search for the secret meaning of the whole.To all that Spirit conceives they give a mould;Persuading Nature into visible moodsThey lend a finite shape to infinite things.Each power that leaps from the UnmanifestLeaving the largeness of the Eternal’s peaceThey seized and held by their precisian eyeAnd made a figurante in the cosmic dance.Its free caprice they bound by rhythmic lawsAnd compelled to accept its posture and its lineIn the wizardry of an ordered universe.The All-containing was contained in form,Oneness was carved into units measurable,The limitless built into a cosmic sum:Unending Space was beaten into a curve,Indivisible Time into small minutes cut,The infinitesimal massed to keep secureThe mystery of the Formless cast into form.Invincibly their craft devised for useThe magic of sequent number and sign’s spell,Design’s miraculous potency was caughtLaden with beauty and significanceAnd by the determining mandate of their gazeFigure and quality equating joinedIn an inextricable identity. (p. 266-267)

(audio recording of reading from Savitri currently not available)

The Kena Upanishad and Savitri (Lecture 3)

Day 2 (afternoon session)

In the Kena Upanishad that we are considering, a great deal of attention is given to the notion of prana. By what is the mind or the speech or the life breath moved forward inits path? This moving forward, praithi, is the action of the prana. Themovement is carried forward by the prana. Like many terms that appearin this Upanishad, throughout the history of Vedic, Indic, Hindu psychology and yoga, there are many stages of development of these ideas. When Sri Aurobindo comments on the Upanishads, he is commenting at the same time on Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta. He is bringing that whole tradition of psychology and spirituality and yogaknowledge forward through the commentary on this text that is near the origin of that tradition. So he is not just commenting on Kena Upanishad. All these yoga teachings are acknowledged in the commentary on this text. The way that he deals with it is not linear and systematic: we find a little bit on the prana here, there. So to study the text and put together all the lines of thought that are here, seminal to the yoga of knowledge, requires a great deal of concentration and attention. This is not something that we read once,and go on to the next thing, saying “Oh, I’ve read that,” as of course we have all done. And then at some point we realize that we did not understand anything; but we realize that it sounded so good. Everything that Sri Aurobindo writes is like that: it sounds good butwe often do not understand anything.

What he is speaking about here is what he is transmitting in Savitri and we can hear the difference. The passages about the supreme Word of the Brahman being translated into forms by the Devas through the prana and eventually becoming accessible to the analytical mind through the perceptions of the senses, by which time they have moved worlds away from their essential truth,Sri Aurobindo communicates vividly in Savitri in a way that prose writing and philosophy cannot reveal. That is the demonstration of the difference between mantra and shastra, or sutra and tantra; it is sruti, the hearing/seeing of inspired truth. The Sutra teaching is something we can understand mentally: it is about the separation of

Purusha from Prakriti, the purification and silencing of the mind andthe vital so that the self steps back from its attachments and realizes that it is something still and pure and free, and all of thethings that it normally attaches to are Prakriti. And that attachmentis illusory, because even Prakriti is much more than that. This is the yoga teaching we get from Patanjali, Mahayana Buddhism, and Sri Aurobindo in The Synthesis of Yoga. Behind that there is this basic idea of Purusha and Prakriti. We heard that there are only two principles in reality: the Self and the Gods. But through hearing Savitri we come to understand that the supreme Self (Purusha) is the unknowable eternal reality, and its supreme emanation is the Divine Mother (Prakriti) and her emanations are all of the gods, and through them the manifest temporal tangible world of becoming is mediated.

So the gods do what they do, they translate the eternal word into representative structures, but even they do not know the source of their own inspired vision and universal power. That is what we heard in that canto this morning, and it is the theme of the Kena Upanishad. In spite of all that they do, they still do not know theirsource; it is hidden from them. We get a glimpse of their source at the end of the canto when it is revealed by the mahashakti, Divine Mother. We come to understand that if the gods are using an energy that is not physical to move physical things (because they are not physical), then what means do they use? A less subtle energy than their own called prana, which is able to move physical energy and manifest physical energy. So Sri Aurobindo says a lot of things in his commentary about the prana. Moving from the concept of adhidaiva, and adhiatma, the plane of the gods, and the supreme Self, downwards towards adhibhuta, manifest nature, we get the prana. The prana of the Upanishad is the life energy itself which is supposed to act in the body with a fivefold movement: in, out, throughout, up, and out…, thepranic movement is a movement like breathing in, taking in sense impressions, vision, words, energy and information, which is then distributed in the system as perception, and gathered into a concentrated knowledge, then elevated to the will that creates the response; and then the energy is evacuated through the breath and dissipated through the movement forward in action, or through dissolution. So there are these five simultaneous directions. Not just the breath, but energy flowing through the nadis in us, and the will power of the gods flowing through all the forms of existence. This life force is not physical, Sri Aurobindo says. So it is not the

breath, not the sensations, the smells, the sights and sounds. But the sense of smell and the odor, and the perception of the odor through the sense of smell and the imaging mind, are all movements ofthe prana, which also creates the sense apparatus that receives the odor, and knows what it is in the object by the mind, and in the knowing they are not separated. Knowing, knower, and known are one pranic field.

The prana is what Plato called the soul or the unifying principle in the relational field; the essence that makes something what it is, and it is also the ability of the mind and senses to perceive and know what it is. The relational field can also be called consciousness, prana, psuche in Greek, loong in Tibetan, chi in Chinese.So again, the Self and the gods, two fundamental principles. Prana isan emanation of the gods, which are an emanation of the Shakti, the Divine Mother. Prana in itself, in its essence, is desire, as Sri Aurobindo says. He means that the will to be is embodied in that subtle energy, which becomes desire to realize whatever it needs to become. There has to be a force of intention, a need, a goal. Desire is a word that can mean a very high level of energy of intention to produce a form, and to enjoy producing the form, creating it, being it, so that the essential energy in things is a desire to be those things, and each thing can only be what it essentially is; the soul is the essence that wants to be realized in the form and its relations. The pranic field contains all of that: the will to be, the form, the relational position of the form in the whole field, its consciousness in the knower. Separate essences all together constitute the meaning of life, the beauty and power of processing the energy which makes it possible for the flower to shine, the bee to fly and buzz and suck the sugar, and spread the pollen to ignite in another flower, and for the cycle to continue. All of that is the physical-vital-mental sheath that covers the prana.

Sri Aurobindo says this is not material, not physical, but a different principle supporting matter and involved in it. “Without itno physical forms could have come into being or remain in being. It acts in all material forces and it is nearest to self-manifestation in those forces that are nearest to pure force. All material aspectsare only field and form of the Prana which is in itself a pure energy, their cause and not their result: it therefore cannot be detected by any physical analysis. Physical analysis can only resolve

for us the combinations of those material happenings which are its results and the external signs and symbols of its presence and operation. How, then, do we become aware of it?” That is Sri Aurobindo’s question. And he answers, “By that purification of our mind and body and the subtilisation of our means of sensation and knowledge which become possible through yoga.” The word Yoga suddenlytakes on a very vast meaning. “We become capable of analysis other than the resolution of forms into their gross physical elements and are able to distinguish the operations of the pure mental principle from those of the material, and these from the vital or dynamic, which forms the link between them and supports them. We are then ableto distinguish the movements of the pranic currents, not only in the physical body but in the subtle frame of our being which yoga detectsunderlying the vital and the physical. But the pranic energy supportsnot only the physical but also the mental operations of the mind in the living body. Thus, by controlling the pranic energy it is not only possible to control the physical and vital functioning and transcend their ordinary operations, but also to control the operations of the mind and to transcend its ordinary operations.”

What then is this life of our life, this pranic energy? It helps to also visualize not only that distinction between the supreme self (the eternal) and its supreme force (the shakti), which becomes in usthe Jivatman (small purusha), and the ordinary movements of energy (small prakriti); the two hemispheres. He says he glimpsed the intersection of the two hemispheres: Sachidananda and Mind-Life-Body,and the Supermind is the intermediate joining principle between them.This is one way to visualize Purusha and Prakriti. We can also visualize the movements of the nadis; the left and the right brain. The structure of the movement of the prana corresponds to these ideasof the subtle energy channels. Then there is that one central channelwhich becomes the two: the in and the out, up and down movement. All of these physical structures we are so familiar, which come about as a result of the principle of duality: Purusha and Prakriti: the still Self and the dynamic force of Nature. The balance between them creates movement; that movement is a vibration, which originates as the word of the Brahman. That vibration multiplies itself and becomesa form; each form has an essential sound vibration, a center of being, which sustains itself in that form for as long as the materialconditions allow it to. And then the petals fall and the seed becomesanother form.

So this is the eternal perpetual dynamic of life force and it is a product of the principles of Purusha and Prakriti, Self and Nature. And nature is, we know now, these universal forces, the gods. Natureis constantly changing its forms and does not last, and we consider there to be two principles of reality, as Sri Aurobindo points out: universal forces called gods which are emanations of the supreme, and the Self, which is the supreme. It has a corresponding form in usknown as the psychic being or the soul, which is eternal, free and empty, and without personality, genes, heredity: a spiritual being inus. The Mother said in the first article of To be a True Aurovilian it is necessary to discover who you really are: not your personality,genes, heredity, cultural conditioning, etc. It is a vast and free being. That self in us corresponds to the supreme Self, and it has noform; it is formless. Formlessness means the absolute of every quality; it is the spiritual essence of everything but in itself it has no expression; it is only by taking on a body that it has an expression, and that body changes all the time.

This is the essential theme of the sanatana-dharma, the Hindu shastra, the essential theme that runs through all its teachings is the idea of Purusha, Self, and Prakriti, Nature, and their relationship, which is one of union at some point and division at another point. It is not really either dualism or monism. The clever idea of Dwaitadwaita means integral non-dualism; that is a philosophical game that is interesting. We canbecome conscious of the oneness of the still Self and its dynamic Nature at once.

So then, this energy is the product of a duality. It is the one, but it is the many. “The self-existent.” I am sure nobody can imagine what that means. The self-existent: another of those philosophical terms that is supposed to baffle us. Something which is not dependentupon anything, that exists by virtue of itself, so it is not caused. “The self-existent is luminously aware of itself, and full of its own delight.” So, the self-existent is the formless, which is in factthe delight of everything, the absolute of everything, it has no second, it is the One. So if you read your handouts, the first paragraph says that this is the essential thing to know: all forms inevolutionary nature come from the One, the one is not the result of all the forms added together. “And that self-awareness is a timeless self-possession which in action reveals itself as a force of infinite

consciousness, omnipotent as well as omniscient: all-powerful and all-knowing being is revealed through forms. For it exists between two poles: one of eternal stillness, and pure self-identity; the other of eternal energy, and identity of all with itself.” The stillness eternally supporting the energy. This is Yoga. This is the true existence. “Therefore, the object of the wise must be to pass intheir illumined consciousness beyond the false and phenomenal terms of life and death to this immortality. And this immortality is known as the delight: the delight of the self-existent being, eternally still, supporting all the dynamic qualities of existence, and enjoying them, without losing its identity.” Not easy, but it sounds good.

So, what is this stillness? Can we seriously contemplate it? Like I said, this is a seed of Sri Aurobindo’s writings. In The Synthesis of Yogahe elaborated this idea, and it is really the fundamental teaching ofthe Upanishads. So when you are reading The Synthesis of Yoga, these paragraphs do not necessarily grab your attention but they are extremely significant. If you understand this you do not need to readthe whole book:

“Obeying the necessity to withdraw successively from the practical egoism of our triple nature (body, life and mind) and its fundamentalego sense, we come to the realization (if we obey that necessity) of the spirit, the self, lord of this individual human manifestation, but our knowledge is not integral if we do not make this self in the individual one with the cosmic spirit and find their greater reality above in an inexpressible but not unknowable transcendence. The Jivatman must give itself up into the being of the Divine. The self of the man must be made one with the Self of all. The self of the finite individual must pour itself into the boundless finite and thatcosmic spirit too must be exceeded in the infinite....This cannot be done without an uncompromising abolition of the ego-sense at its very basis and source. In the path of knowledge one attempts this abolition negatively by denial of the reality of the ego; positively by a constant fixing of the thought upon the idea of the one and the infinite in itself or the one and the infinite everywhere.”

That is what he was suggesting: that we make an effort to see behind the forms, ideas, etc. Step back and try to perceive the universal

entities behind those forms, and to see beyond them their source, which is the One. And when we get close to that, through meditation and practice, and surrender and stillness, we actually feel the Ray -not only coming down but moving out and in, horizontally. Because energy in that state of stillness is more powerful and continuous andsensible as an unbroken permanent radiance which is everywhere all the time without break. In that state we have no inclination to reactor respond to anything, but we can if we choose. That is samata, perfect equality, an energy; not a concept or moral virtue: a concrete spiritual state of being that is in fact an energy field that is equal in all, to all, without break.

Sri Aurobindo tells us: “This, if persistently done, changes in the end the mental outlook on oneself and the whole world, and there is akind of mental realization; but afterwards by degrees or perhaps rapidly and imperatively and almost at the beginning the mental realization deepens into spiritual experience - a realization in the very substance of our being. More and more frequent conditions come of something indefinable and illimitable, a peace, a silence, a joy, a bliss beyond expression, a sense of absolute impersonal Power, a pure existence, a pure consciousness, an all-pervading Presence. The ego persists in itself or in its habitual movements, but the place ofthe one becomes more and more loosened, the others are broken, crushed, more and more rejected, becoming weak in their intensity, limp or mechanical in their action. In the end, there is a constant giving up of the whole consciousness into the being of the Supreme. In the beginning, when the restless confusion and obscuring impurity of our outward nature is active, when the mental vital physical ego sense is still powerful, this new outlook, these experiences may befound difficult in the extreme. But once that triple egoism is discouraged or moribund and the instruments of the Spirit are set right and purified, in an entirely pure, silent, clarified, widened consciousness, the purity, infinity, stillness of the One reflects itself like the sky in a limpid lake.”

So the subject here is 'the stillness'. And the duality. The duality of energy and stillness, of Purusha and Prakriti. And the transition from the normal habitual patterns of the mind-life-body into that other state which is energized completely, not negative but very positive as a result of the negation of the usual patterns of sensation, perception, response, opinion, desire. So the positive is

a result of the negative. Unfortunately..., perhaps, but we will hearthis pattern in Savitri repeatedly. A canto, or a part of a canto, which insists on absolute negation and then another canto or part is about the total divine positive affirmation of everything. This corresponds to the duality of existence itself, but it becomes a process in Yoga. He says: “We see that there is an infinite pure status and immobile silence of the Spirit; we see too that there is aboundless movement of the Spirit, a power, a dynamic spiritual all-containing self-extension of the Infinite. Our conceptions foist uponthis perception, in itself valid and accurate, an opposition between the silence and status, and the dynamis and movement, but to the reason and the logic of the Infinite there is no opposition. ...The silence, the status are the basis of the movement, an eternal immobility is the necessary condition and foundation of the vast action of the Force of being. It is when we arrive at something of this silence, stability, immobility, stillness, that we can base on it a force and energy which in our superficial restless state would be inconceivable.” The challenge is always: are we willing to sacrifice the superficial restless state, which is so habitual and which everyone expects of everyone else, and so is mutually and universally reinforcing; are we willing to sacrifice that in order toattain an illimitable energy and force of true effective action?

(In the excerpt that follows from Savitri, Book 2, Canto 12, the bi-polarity of the stillness and energy, Purusha and Prakriti, soul and spirit, are powerfully symbolized by the Yogi's inner experience of “the deathless Rose” and the “house of Flame”.)

Above the spirit cased in mortal senseAre superconscious realms of heavenly peace,Below, the Inconscient’s sullen dim abyss,Between, behind our life, the deathless Rose.Across the covert air the spirit breathes,A body of the cosmic beauty and joyUnseen, unguessed by the blind suffering world,Climbing from Nature’s deep surrendered heartIt blooms for ever at the feet of God,Fed by life’s sacrificial mysteries.Here too its bud is born in human breasts;Then by a touch, a presence or a voiceThe world is turned into a temple groundAnd all discloses the unknown Beloved.

In an outburst of heavenly joy and easeLife yields to the divinity withinAnd gives the rapture-offering of its all,And the soul opens to felicity.A bliss is felt that never can wholly cease,A sudden mystery of secret GraceFlowers goldening our earth of red desire.All the high gods who hid their visagesFrom the soiled passionate ritual of our hopes,Reveal their names and their undying powers.A fiery stillness wakes the slumbering cells,A passion of the flesh becoming spirit,And marvellously is fulfilled at lastThe miracle for which our life was made.A flame in a white voiceless cupolaIs seen and faces of immortal light,The radiant limbs that know not birth and death,The breasts that suckle the first-born of the Sun,The wings that crowd thought’s ardent silences,The eyes that look into spiritual Space.Our hidden centres of celestial forceOpen like flowers to a heavenly atmosphere;Mind pauses thrilled with the supernal Ray,And even this transient body then can feelIdeal love and flawless happiness

And laughter of the heart’s sweetness and delightFreed from the rude and tragic hold of Time,And beauty and the rhythmic feet of the hours.This in high realms touches immortal kind;What here is in the bud has blossomed there.There is the secrecy of the House of Flame,The blaze of godlike thought and golden bliss,The rapt idealism of heavenly sense;There are the wonderful voices, the sun-laugh,A gurgling eddy in rivers of God’s joy,And the mysteried vineyards of the gold moon-wine,All the fire and sweetness of which hardly hereA brilliant shadow visits mortal life.Although are witnessed there the joys of Time,Pressed on the bosom the Immortal’s touch is felt,Heard are the flutings of the Infinite.Here upon earth are early awakenings,

Moments that tremble in an air divine,And grown upon the yearning of her soilTime’s sun-flowers’ gaze at gold Eternity:There are the imperishable beatitudes.A million lotuses swaying on one stem,World after coloured and ecstatic worldClimbs towards some far unseen epiphany. …

Onward he passed to a diviner sphere:There, joined in a common greatness, light and bliss,All high and beautiful and desirable powersForgetting their difference and their separate reignBecome a single multitudinous whole.Above the parting of the roads of Time,Above the Silence and its thousandfold Word,In the immutable and inviolate TruthFor ever united and inseparable,The radiant children of Eternity dwellOn the wide spirit height where all are one.

(audio file of reading from Savitri not currently available)

The Kena Upanishad and Savitri (Lecture 4)

Day 3 (morning session)

Kena Upanishad, Third Part11. Then they said to Indra, “Master of plenitudes, get thou theknowledge, what is this mighty Daemon.” He said, “So beit.” He rushed upon That. That vanished from before him.12. He in the same ether came upon the Woman, even upon Herwho shines out in many forms, Uma daughter of the snowysummits. To her he said, “What was this mighty Daemon?”Fourth Part1. She said to him, “It is the Eternal. Of the Eternal is thisvictory in which ye shall grow to greatness.” Then alone hecame to know that this was the Brahman.2. Therefore are these gods as it were beyond all the othergods, even Agni and Vayu and Indra, because they camenearest to the touch of That...

One could say a few things about the very temporary and human activity that goes on, while we are in an environment which is currently full of another kind of energy completely. And it is that which is important. And the fact that it is here is extremely important. That we are here with it is inexpressably important. We have the opportunity to learn something from that energy, that presence, that stillness, which could be lasting - Much different from an hour of speaking or reading. Here definitely it is something accessible. But the message is that it can be permanent in every environment and little by little influence the way speech, thought, relations, practical actions, take place, in ways that we cannot predict. The question is always: do we dare to allow those things to be done differently? The stillness which comes through Savitri, which some have really entered into and everyone has had a taste of, - the challenge of this Yoga is to go through that stillness to another kind of energetic, another kind of activity.

We are talking and that is what we always do: people this morning were all obviously involved in their personal narratives. Some peoplepracticed asana diligently. Last night there was a demonstration of aprofessional healing art; quite informative and sensitive, and there was a conversation about that. And in all of those activities that weare experiencing there is something we have heard about – the pranic

field, but we can see that in all of those activities there was no consciousness of the pranic field really. SA has told us that the only way to be conscious of it is to be in a state of yogic stillnessthat is completely other than the states that we are so practiced in.So, basically we cannot be conscious of it unless we endure a kind oftransformation and become other than human. That is to say, other than in our habitual, well-established, well-known, proficient way ofliving. All of that is good, but it is not what we are concerned withat this point. We re concerned with a transition into another field and consciousness which is different from all of that. It underlies all of that in a mysterious way, but to become conscious of it implies a transition into what I think may be called the higher intuition. The higher intuition is capable of knowing directly the pranic field. And in that field, I have an intuition that there is not this drawing back into a relationship between the self and the other. The self and the other is an extraordinarily unique formation of that field, but as long as we are conscious of that difference - and are from our own point of view expressing it, when we are preparing the fruit or massaging the muscles or speaking about our professions and habits and problems – those are all individualizations or forms of that field, but in the material-vital-mental constructs that are so familiar to us already. But the idea ofYoga is that we can step back entirely from all of those structures, and constructs, and dynamics and enter into the pranic field itself and have access to unlimited energy and a direct perception, and response that is precisely appropriate to the object. The idea of theprana that we have heard is thatthe information of the field comes in to all of us all the time, getsorganized as the inner consciousness of that object in the field, andthat awareness is integrated in our whole being (we are physically, vitally, mentally receptive of the food, forms, beauty, smells), those become part of us because we are in that field and we are not really different from their reception, and that distribution of energy gets raised to a point of the possibility of the will responding appropriately to the field. That response becomes speech, or anger, or healing energy, or whatever is appropriate to the field.I believe that if we are connected in that way with the field there is no longer healer and object to be healed, since both the art and its object disappear in the field. This would be an intuitive consciousness. Nothing has to be known about that! It is, the field.

In the teaching of the Upanishad, we are told that this is still not really it. What really is, is the universal, divine principles that create the field itself. That field we are talking about is the adhibhuta, which is not what the Upanishad is speaking about. That is the adhidaiva: the plane of pure principles of energy that create thatfield. They emanate the prana, which forms the objects (of knowledge,sight, smell, hearing, speech) which are the outer expressions of thepranic energy field which is an emanation of the universal divine principles that are rays of the supreme. This Yoga is asking us to move beyond the field of senses and beyond the field of prana to the perception of the divine infinite universal energy of life, or of beauty, or truth, or proportionality and mutuality, and meaning, thatare necessary principles for all the forms of existence to be what they are.

The way toward that is the stillness, which is not simply stillness but the Brahman itself, from which the gods emanate. Through the forms to the essences to some kind of intentionality that sees the universal symbols, making possible that detailed perfection in all ofour activities. A principle and potential in us. We would not be whatwe are if that was not in us. From the appearance of what we are to the universal power of what we are. By doing that we are connected tosomething which is eternal and immortal. And in everything. So we enter in the superfield. In that presence of Savitri, this energy of speech and light, and seeing and remembering,we are in the field of the goddess. All ceases to be hypothetical, mythological or whatever structure of knowledge we are familiar with and becomes a concrete Presence.

We have a demonstration here, of the ability of the goddess and the human being to interact. The human being is a close enough kin to that flame, Sri Aurobindo says, which we heard yesterday described asthe Overmind plane, which gives us the possibility of the deathless Rose or the house of Flame, which are gifts of the gods! This year the Ashram's message from the Mother, last February was: “Agni is the psychic being”. A very radical statement. There is a passage in the commentary that is very pertinent in this context of the idea of a god being the ultimate nature of ourselves. There are only the Selfand the gods. The nature of ourselves is the gods.

“Agni is the heat and flame of the conscious force in matter, which

has built up the universe. It is he who has made life and mind possible. ... in the material universe where he is the greatest deity.” That principle is somehow the very basis of our human existence: it is a vibration in us, a direct emanation of the supremein the material that we are made of. In us it reaches a very high level of organization: life and mind. It is the will in the physical,the will in the vital, the will in the mental, and the pure will itself, the psychic being. These are all energies of Agni. And what is his job? He flames up in us and reconnects with his source.“Especially he is the primary impeller of speech, of which Vayu is the medium.” This subtle energy of communication that is ableto formulate symbolically what the senses perceive. And Indra is the master of that activity. So Agni, Vayu and Indra are all involved in this activity of speech. One as the illumined mind, one as the relational field, and one as the essential energy. The pranic field is the gift of Vayu, and the illumined mind is the gift of Indra. Theheat of conscious force in matter is Agni Jatavedas, the knower of all births. That principle is not only the bringing to birth but the knowing bringing to birth of each thing. “He knows the law of each being.” This is symbolic language after all, but it conveys the idea that there are these universal principles in matter, life and mind, which are much vaster than the temporal formations of matter, life and mind that we perceive: they are the universal divine emanations of truth, power, relationship, perfection, beauty, utility, healing, teaching, learning, growing. All of these activities that we indulge in all the time, superficially, are not superficial at all, they are deeply driven forms of activity through which it is possible to know their essences and to be in the presence and knowledge of their divine essences. There is some supreme divine force that is cutting that fruit or stretching that muscle or saying those words. Then, thequestion is, Can we become conscious of that through those forms and dwell in it? Not just knowing it hypothetically, but consciously dwelling in that field. That field is the adhidaiva plane.

He says then, in the commentary on Kena Upanishad, to the question, What is the speech of our speech, the life or our life, it is answered in Yoga when, “the gods in us are turned towards their source”. As we pursue these thoughts and energies, the gods become turned towards their source. And in the last lines of Savitri that we heard, as we pursue these questions, we find that all the gods are one in that divine source. In the Overmind plane they become separate

individual powers and through their manifestation in forms each one creates an individual world: the worlds of power, beauty, truth, geometric relationships of perfection, in the adhibhuta plane. And thehuman being is the house of sacrifice to them! We burn those energiesand produce the offerings.

To make the transition from our mental, vital, physical evolutionary structures, there is this teaching of Yoga. The essential teaching of the Kena Upanishad comes in the chapter titled “The Parable of theGods”. And another essential chapter called “The Supreme Word” contains the explanation of sruti, drishti, smriti and conveys the idea that above the silence and the thousand-fold word, which is the causal vibration of the manifestation of the cosmos, there is the Supreme. That chapter is very interesting on language and its relationship to mantra and the gods, and the supreme conscious force. The whole idea here in the Kena Upanishad is that we can actually know that highest supreme divine force in which all the powers of existence are contained! Not know it theoretically but directly, we can actually perceive and experience it. “The attainment of the Brahman is our escape from our mortal status into immortality”. There is an undying aspect of existence that we can participate in which annuls our mortality, annuls death. It becomes something else, then, “By which we understand not the survival of death but the finding of our true self of eternal being...” Death and birth will still be there, but weenter into the dance of the undying and unborn essence.

“...our true self of eternal being and bliss beyond the dual symbols of birth and death. By immortality we mean the absolute life of the soul as opposed to the transient and mutable life in the body which it assumes by birth and death and rebirth, and superior also to its life as the mere mental being who dwells in the world subjected helplessly to this law of birth and death, or seems at least by his ignorance to be subjected to this and to other laws of the lower Nature. To know and posses its true nature, free, absolute, master ofitself and its embodiments is the soul's means of transcendence, andto know and possess this is to know and to posses the Brahman. It isalso to rise out of mortal world into immortal world, out of a world of bondage into a wold of largeness, out of finite world into infinite world. It is to ascend out of earthly joy and sorrow into a transcendent beatitude. This must be done by the abandonment of our attachment to the figure of things in the mortal world. We must put

from us its death and dualities if we would compass the unity and immortality. Therefore it follows that we must cease to make the goods of this world or even its right, light and beauty our object ofpursuit; we must go beyond these to a supreme Good, a transcendent Truth, Light and Beauty in which the opposite figures of what we callevil disappear.” Well, if we cease to make the light and right of this world the object of our pursuit, what do we do?!

By that abandonment of our mental-vital-physical notion of things, westep back into the pure universal energy of light; the source of light, beauty, right, and we dwell in the source itself instead of our temporal ideas and attachments to forms that we already know are distant reflections of those eternal powers and principles. We can dwell in them, not just glimpse them; in that larger energy field of delight and power and right and beauty, by the transformation of the mind, first of all. Because mind is the lower region of that higher energy field. There is universal mind, but above there is universal Overmind, which is here also in this room. And then there is universal Supermind, which is part of the same region. So, Sri Aurobindo says we are kin to the beings of that region, we are mental beings able to ascend by our will into that higher universal field, which is created by the Mahashakti, where all of those energies are one.

Now the really amazing thing that we hear in the Upanishad, and also in Savitri, is that when all the gods are turned towards their source (it's a possibility for us to turn the gods in us toward their source, when we abandon attachment to what is here, not by stopping to do what we do, but we can learn to do them so differently that it amounts to something else - moving from the stillness into an action that still remembers the stillness) which is possible through the Raythat we are becoming familiar with, that we feel in this space. That Ray is something that we can tune into anywhere any time: this is thegift of Sri Aurobindo's Yoga: Sri Aurobindo refers to the Ray frequently in Savitri, which is not a book or a poem; it is the creative word - vibration - that descends from the Overmind plane into the mental and we feel it, it becomes a Ray and becomes a tangible, liberating universalizing energy in our evolutionary field.By participating in the Ray, by practicing these principles of Yoga, we start to allow that intuitive Ray to replace our mental-vital-physical ordinary behavior. And the Ray becomes more integrated into

the mind and life and body.

Savitri is a child of Agni also. In the Lakshmi Tantra we find these powers of the Divine Mother, Surya, Soma, Savitri, Agni. They have different relationships and mantras in different traditions. And they are all emanations of the supreme Mahalakshmi. By inducing this Ray into our lives we become familiar with the other gods: soma the delight, agni the flame. Savitri is mediating this transformation. InSri Aurobindo's Yoga, this is the direct link to the source. For a long time, it's a relationship between us and her. And then eventually when that Ray is fully integrated it is a relationship between the Ray and its source. There is this wonderful movement in the Kena Upanishad where the gods are turned towards their source andthey first find Uma Hemavathi, another name of Mahalakshmi, and she points them to the source. They can't find it themselves. So mythology becomes psychology and that becomes how we comport our lives (...in the Ray or not in the Ray...). In the vital, or the mental, or in the higher intuition which is the connection with the Ray. Through that we can do all our activities without thinking too much about it, because the Ray is the intuitive connection with things. But the transition entails entering the stillness and abandoning systematically a lot of habitual behaviors and risking, daring, to do that!

There is a problem that arises here, which Sri Aurobindo has dealt with: it seems that if Brahman is unknowable, and the Beyond, and we abandon everything and enter into the stillness, and the Brahman is that stillness, don’t we lose contact with the world completely and disappear into the zero totality of all? Sri Aurobindo points out that the Vedantic tradition after Buddhism turned more and more towards that ultimate disappearance but, if you look back to the Upanishads and Vedas, that disappearance is not there: it is about realizing that here! The Yogi is invoking the descent of Savitri to reinforce and enhance the possibility of realizing that Brahman here.It is a yogic phenomenon, it's not theoretical, it's the invocation of the divine Shakti into the stillness. But there is this risk, entering into the stillness and emptiness, the fullness and bliss of the emptiness. And yet it is a risk we have to take, because it is the only way!

If we are really willing and able to enter into the stillness, Savitri

teaches us that we have to be willing to dwell in that stillness for as long as it takes, because somehow it is the key! “In absolute silence sleeps an absolute power, Awaking it can wake the trance bound soul, And in the Ray reveal the parent sun.” And then all the energy flows in. We see this pattern in Savitri repeating itself all the time: the more cantos of Savitri we read, the more often we hear it. It is the paradox of the stillness and then the energy.

In our temporal spatial life it turns into a sequence. In itself it is one, beyond time. The timelessness and time are one. This sounds like a paradox, and for the mind it is, this yoga is a paradox, an enigma. We can't make up our minds whether we want the ordinary involvement in everything or whether we want to get out of all that into the purity and peace and light and freedom. In life it turns into this constant cycle which is linear in a sense. In Yoga also it has a kind of linear sequence: Sri Aurobindo is always narrating theabsolute stillness as a precursor to the absolute force. At some point we are going to learn this! We've heard it so often. And the Ray becomes more and more present for us, which makes the risk less and less risky, actually. At some point we will enter into that Ray deeply and become completely still and its energy will shine forth. And we won’t feel that it is our personal knowledge, or expertise, orlack, or gain, it will just be that!

(An excerpt from Savitri, Book 2, Canto 14 which presents a close parallel to the Upanishad's depiction of Indra's encounter with the Divine Mother)

Along a road of pure interior light,Alone between tremendous Presences,Under the watching eyes of nameless Gods,His soul passed on, a single conscious power,Towards the end which ever begins again,Approaching through a stillness dumb and calmTo the source of all things human and divine.There he beheld in their mighty union’s poiseThe figure of the deathless Two-in-One,A single being in two bodies clasped,A diarchy of two united souls,Seated absorbed in deep creative joy;Their trance of bliss sustained the mobile world.Behind them in a morning dusk One stood

Who brought them forth from the Unknowable.Ever disguised she awaits the seeking spirit;Watcher on the supreme unreachable peaks,Guide of the traveller of the unseen paths,She guards the austere approach to the Alone.At the beginning of each far-spread planePervading with her power the cosmic sunsShe reigns, inspirer of its multiple worksAnd thinker of the symbol of its scene.Above them all she stands supporting all,The sole omnipotent Goddess ever-veiledOf whom the world is the inscrutable mask;The ages are the footfalls of her tread,Their happenings the figure of her thoughts,And all creation is her endless act.His spirit was made a vessel of her force;Mute in the fathomless passion of his willHe outstretched to her his folded hands of prayer.Then in a sovereign answer to his heartA gesture came as of worlds thrown away,And from her raiment’s lustrous mystery raisedOne arm half-parted the eternal veil.A light appeared still and imperishable.

(audio file of the reading from Savitri not currently available)