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

BRHADARANYAKA UPANISAD

Those are sayings no more comfortable than the hardest to be found in Indian scripture, and correspond to what is said when our Upanisad speaks of Death as the last end and meaning of our life, or when the Sinyavadin exhausts the categories of negation in defining man’s true goal. That is the Liberty of the In-finite, aditer-adititva, Brhadaranyaka Up., I, 2, 5, “ free as the Godhead in its non-existence,” -Eckhart, I, 382: “ When I go back into the ground, into the depths, into the well-spring of the Godhead, no one will ask me whence I came or whither I went,” I, 143.

This end is hidden “‘ in the darkness of the everlasting Godhead, and is unknown, and never was known, and never will be known,” Eckhart,®* being in its nature and by definition unknowable. There Self—our-Self, himSelf—both sleeps and wakes, sees and sees not, at once fontal and inflowing, modeless and modi-fied, that is all one and the same to the Supreme Indiscrimination. Though we speak of that sleeping and that waking as nights and days of supernal time, that night and day, darkness and sunshine, are not like ours in succession, but simultaneous. For there there is no distinction of unknown potentiality and conscious act: and that is precisely what, Vedic ka, we cannot understand, who proceed from potentiality to act, and think of “ being ” only in terms of consciousness.

That what we cannot understand is not therefore remote from us, “‘ Heaven is at all points equidistant from the earth,’ Eckhart, 1, 172 ; nearest and dearest, nesting in the lotus of the heart, inaccessible to knowledge, That art thou. Whether we think of That as Selfed and form-ed in Person, or of the Person as therein Self-less, name-less, form-less, it is all One Angel, One transcending knowing and unknowing, gnosis and agnosia. It is just “ as these flowing rivers that tend toward the sea, their name and aspect are shattered, it is only spoken of as ‘Sea’ ”’ Prasna Up., VI,5: “as the drop becomes the ocean . . . so the