Upanishads

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I would like to share with you comments on the Upanishads made by Swami

Abhishiktananda, or Father Henri LeSaux, who was a Christian Benedictine

monk who went to India in the '40's (died 1973) to convert Hindus to

Christianity -- and was swallowed by the Upanishads. (He did not disavow

devotion to Christ, but called for realization of the One.) This is

from his book " The Further Shore " .

Edith

 

" As was said above, the age of the Upanishads is actually very close in

spirit to our own times. It was a period of questioning like ours --

questioning of the value of outward rites, of myth, even of theological

reasoning if it is not related to intuition and experience.

 

" ... The fact of the growing interest of the West in the East...

 

" Unfortunately those who are searching for spiritual experience are all

too often attracted by mere substitutes, like the European versions of

Zen or Yoga, the Hare Krishna movement, or the psychedelic cult. All

that has very little in common with the genuine Upanishadic

experience... However, behind these substitutes, what the younger

generation in its search for truth is seeking, without always realizing

the fact, is surely that ultimate experience, properly so called.

 

" However, as long as this experience retains its exotic character, not

unmixed with esoteric aspects, it cannot be truly understood, and very

often the search for it ends with misleading and dangerous substitutes.

For example, only too often one finds that this experience (or rather

the simplified version of it popularised by Neo-Vedantic teaching, which

is much more philosophical than mysticlal or spiritual) is identified

with a kind of super-religion, in which all the different religions of

humanity are supposed to be absorbed. This is once more to repeat the

mistake of objectifying atman-brahman, making of it a 'thing', an

object, which would then take its place in the sphere of human

experience alongside other things, even if at a higher level.

 

" The Upanishadic experience has nothing to do with any religion

whatever, and still less is it a matter of mere logic or epistemology.

It is of a different order altogether. It is the ultimate awakening of

the human spirit, with which religions are now being confronted, as they

were confronted in the past with the categories, first of mythoical, and

later of logical thought. The ultimate experience stands to logos as

logos stands to myth, and to structure as structure stands to

unorganized raw material...

 

" The Upanishadic experience is neither exotic nor esoteric. It is not

exotic, because it is absolutely universal. The forms in which it is

interpreted, the mental, linguistic, cultural, and even the religious,

context in which it occurs, may vary to an infinite extent. It is not

bound to any culture or to any language...

 

" No more is the Upanishadic experience esoteric, reserved for initiates,

or for a caste of self-styled 'spiritual' persons... In the beginning,

no doubt, this experience seems to have been handed on within circles of

initiates, but those who lived it were not only men who had run away

from the world and were living in the forest. There were also kings

among them -- Janaka, the disciple of Yajnavalkya, Ajatasatru, and other

who reproached those brahmans (sic)

who were unable to see anything beyhond the performance of the cult and

academic discussons about brahman.

 

" Furthermore, in order to share the experience of the Upanishads, it is

no more necessary to know their original language, than it is to know

Greek in order to share and pass on the Biblical experience of

Christianity. The Christian knows by experience that it is practically

impossible for him to acquire a Jewish mind and spirit... It would be

even more difficult for him to acquire a brahmanical soul, that of a

priest devoted to Vedic rites and living by Vedic mythology... "

(The Upanishads, An Introduction,

Ch. 4 " The Relevance of the Upanishads " p.98)