A new approach to the Vedas : an essay in translation and exegesis

BRHADARANYAKA UPANISAD

It will be seen that no real distinction can be drawn in principle between the Fall of God and that of Man: both are the necessary consequences of a divine nature common to both. The sin and shame, the virtue and glory of existence are hisas muchas ours.!® The difference between us is that he knowingly remains within at the same time that he comes forth Self-ishly, we are conscious only in our “self.” He is a tide at once fontal and inflowing: we are its waves, oblivious that wave is water too. Our only error is to see distinction here: the Comprehensor, ya evam vidvan, knowing himself no more as wave, but as the sea him-Self, returns with the tide to itssource, which neither he nor the Supreme Self have ever really, but only logically, left.

The Will proceeds as Love, “‘ by way of the Will as Love,’ St. Thomas, Sum. Th., I, Q. 36, A. 2; that “ mutual outpouring of love . . . isthe common spiration of the Father and the Son,” Eckhart, I, 269. “‘ We desire a thing while as yet we do not possess it. When we have it, we love it, desire then falling away,” Eckhart, I, 8217: but as there is nothing that he does not possess in himself, who does not proceed from potentiality to act, but is all act, his will is his love, “ Eternity is in love with the productions of time,” Blake, cf. Rg Veda, VII, 87, 2. That is his affirmation and delight, kam, ananda, ‘‘ God enjoys himself in all things . . . finding his reflection most delightful,” Eckhart, I, 243 and 425, cf. pramudam prayati, Sankaracarya, Svdimaniriipana, 95.

Veda neither asserts a beginning in time, nor a creation ex nililo.4* “ In the beginning ’”’ does not mean “at a given time,” nor eventfully, but in an ever-present now, of which empirical experience is impossible, human knowledge being only of the past, and human expectation only of the future : agve is first in order, primordial, in principio, rather than first in time. “In the beginning, this world was merely Water,’ Byhadaranyaka Up., V,5,1: that is to say all the possibilities of existence, not yet existence,