The Secret of Sadhana
Divine Life
Society Publication: The Essence of Aitareya and Taittiriya Upanishads by Swami Krishnananda
We hear in the scriptures that
when creation was complete, a war took place between the Devas and the Asuras,
the celestials and the demons. The gods
who are lesser in number, sometimes had an upper hand, but mostly they were
defeated by the Asuras.
The evil forces are larger in
quantum than the beneficent forces in the world. Acharya Sankara, while
commenting on the Upanishad, tells us that it is quite obvious because the
impulse towards evil, which is the urge towards contact with the objects of
sense, is more powerful than the impulse towards God. Rarely people turn to
God; mostly they go down to objects of sense. So the number of spiritual
seekers moving towards the light of God, perhaps, can be counted on the fingers
of one hand. But the downward forces rejoicing in contact with senses are
plenty, and therefore their number is more. So the war went on for ages and
ages.
The gods conferred among
themselves. “This state of affairs cannot be for a long time. We must find out
a means of overcoming the Asuras. We shall chant the holy Udgitha Saman, which
is a Veda mantra, and some of us will be engaged in doing this work of holy
recitation to quell the Asuras.” So the deities, who were all implanted in the
sense organs such as the eyes, ears, etc., and even the mind, were all
requested to undertake this discipline of chanting the Udgitha. The deity of
the speech was told: “You chant the Udgitha for us, and with the power of this
great force, we shall overcome the Asura forces.”
The Asuras got wind of it. So
the Asuras thought, “We shall not allow this to happen. We shall not permit
this spiritual discipline to go on. We shall attack it.” When speech was
chanting the holy mantra, the Udgitha, Asuras came and attacked, and speech was
quelled and thrown down. The Upanishad says that this is the reason why often
speech that is uttered by people is not beneficent, not worthy, not delicate,
but is harsh, barbaric, cruel, cutting and insulting to others. This
detrimental negative attitude adopted by speech often is the effect of the evil
influence imprecated upon it by the Asura forces. So the deity of speech was
defeated.
The Devas told the other sense
organs, one by one, to chant the mantra, and all had the same fate. They were
all overcome. The Upanishad tells us that every sense organ has, therefore, a
double activity. It can do good and it can do bad; it can receive what is good
and it can receive what is bad. We can hear nice things and we can hear bad
things also. We can smell bad odor and fragrance too. The mind also was
defeated. The mind was inflicted with the evil by the Asuras when it chanted
the mantra. So it can think right and it can think wrong. Thus the gods were defeated repeatedly. They
were utterly helpless.
When they were all thus
defeated, they joined together and considered as to what could be done under
the circumstances. They thought that they had made a mistake in choosing their
agents for chanting the Udgitha. So they asked the vital force, the Prana
Sakti, which is prior to the operation of the senses, which impels the senses
to act—as the sun impels all activity in the world, himself not doing anything.
They said: “O Prana, chant the
Udgitha for us.” And the Prana, the unifying force, the vital energy, chanted
the Udgitha. And when the Prana started the chant, the Asuras were powerless by
the force of the Udgitha chant conducted by the vital force, Prana Sakti—a
thing which the senses could not undertake, and could not succeed in doing.
Then the Devas won victory over the demons. The lost kingdom was regained. “One
who knows this secret also regains one’s own position,” says the Upanishad.
The meditational process, or
spiritual discipline, is described here in the form of a story. The sense
organs are not our friends in the practice of spirituality. They succeed in
making an attempt only, but really they do not succeed in the end.
Philosophically conceived, the
Asura is the impulse towards sense objects. The desire for anything other than
one’s own self is the Asura, or the demon. One who desires anything other than
one’s own Self is the Asura. The angels have no such desires. They are
self-satisfied, self-contained, self-complete, radiant sparks of divinity. Nobody
knows the mystery of creation. So we do not think like angels. We think like
men and women, like human beings. What is the difference between the vision of
the celestials and the vision of the mortals like us?
Aitareya Upanishad gives the
description of the descent. When the angel, the celestial or the god becomes
the mortal, the subject becomes the object and the object becomes the subject. In
the beginning of the creation process, the universe remains as an inseparable
body of the Almighty. Since God revealed Himself as this creation, all things
in creation are inseparable from God’s Being; and since God cannot be regarded
as an object, nothing in this world can be regarded as an object. Since the
world is the body of God, it is an appearance of the glory of the Almighty
Himself.
The practice of yoga, the
living of the spiritual life, is the chanting of the Udgitha. It is the Divine
Name for all practical purposes. It means the invocation of the Divine
Principle in our practical lives, implanting God in our hearts and seeking the
blessing of the Almighty.
The process known as
transmigration is consequent upon this divine impulse, stifled by the urge for
sensory contact, struggling to regain its original position but getting
defeated again and again. Birth and death are processes of the struggle of the
spirit to regain its original position.
We have to know the tactics of
the enemy in order to meet the inimical forces. We are frightened by the
quantity of things because of the incapacity of this little quality of the
spark to assert its pure independence in its primitive originality.
This is the meaning behind the
Upanishadic story of the Devasura Sangrama, the long struggle between the
divine and the undivine forces. It is a conflict between Spirit and matter,
Light and darkness, the Subject and the object, the Seer and the seen, the ‘I’
and the ‘you’, and so on. We have been defeated many a time. We are told that
we have passed through 84 lakhs of species of living beings, etc.; and now we
have come to the end of it, as it were, by assuming human form.
It is the end in the sense
that we have a consciousness of the future or the destiny of ours. So the
purpose in existence has awakened itself in man, while in the earlier species
this consciousness of the purpose is supposed to be completely obliterated in
sleep and there is only a kind of instinctive action without the consciousness
of a higher purpose or a destiny in life.
Though we have a consciousness
of the purpose of our existence and the nature of the destiny ahead, it has not
yet been realized and achieved. So while we are aware of the fact, we have not
yet come to possession of this fact. This effort towards the coming into direct
contact and realization of the great purpose of existence, and to regain our
original position as angels, is the art of yoga.
Excerpts from:
The Essence of Aitareya and Taittiriya Upanishads by Swami Krishnananda
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