The first freedom you need to attain is freedom from fear—that is the message of the Upanishads.
Such suggestions affect your life. From morning until evening every day, you receive suggestions from others, and your whole life is affected by these messages. This means you are only a reactionary in life. Modern people are reactionaries; they don’t have time to really think, understand, or feel. The world expects them to think and feel what others want them to think and feel; they are expected to behave the way others want them to behave. We all lead such lives in the modern world. In this way, we have created a vast whirlpool for ourselves, and we do not know what to do. The great Upanishads say, “O human beings, you can enjoy the things that you enjoy today in a better way. Learn to enjoy everything, but understand that there is a particular way to enjoy these things.” Thus, the Ishopanishad begins with the invocation: “Om purnam-adah” (all this is full and complete). “Purnam-idam” (this entire universe, whatsoever you find, has come from Brahman, which is perfect and full and complete). “Purnat purnam udacyate” (what comes from that which is perfect and full and complete? Only perfection comes from perfection). “Purnasya purnam-Adaya, purnam eva-vashishyate” (all this is full and complete in the beginning, in the intermediate state, and in the end). However, in our daily life, we may feel that nothing is perfect in the world. Let us examine why this is the case. What is the Hiranyagarbha projected by maya? Maya is only an instrument through which Brahman projects itself. That Absolute Brahman becomes many. The Vedantic Upanishads do not use the word creation because no God or power has ever “created” the world; rather, this world came into existence through manifestation. In mathematics the number “one” manifests itself, and eventually it accumulates and becomes a hundred. A hundred is a manifestation of one, because if you count “one” a hundred times, you will have a hundred. But the number “one hundred” will no longer have any existence if you destroy the number “one.” The existence of each of us lies in one Brahman, and if we are not aware of that self-existent reality, then we are reduced to dust. Why are you so afraid of death and dying? This fear exists because you have not yet fully understood life. You have not understood the truth that life is a line, and the two ends of the line are birth and death. Death is a change; death is a habit of the body, but death should not terrify you, provided you understand this reality. Modern people are often afraid of the word non-attachment. Non-attachment is a powerful concept to understand. If you have really learned the meaning of this word, you are free. Non-attachment means great love—pure love. Presently, you are attached to the things of the world; whatever you love, whether it is a person or an object, brings you pain. Strangers do not create pain for you; it is the objects and recipients of your love that cause you pain. The way you create and develop your attachment to the things of the world creates pain. You should learn how to love and enjoy your loved ones. You can do this by working with yourself systematically. Although the body is an important instrument, it is less important than the mind. If you really want to know yourself, sit quietly for a few minutes and allow yourself to become aware of what you are thinking. If you do this, you’ll learn something about your personality. Sometimes when you do this, you may feel very sad. People sometimes think, “I thought I was such a good person. What has happened to me?” Attachment and fear create misery. A father and son love each other very much and know that one day they will leave each other. Each knows that he will die, and yet despite this, they still cry because of their attachment. A lover knows that one day his beloved has to leave him. These unconscious fears spring up within the human mind and heart because they are never examined. There are many such fears within us: we fear that we will not attain what we want, or that we might lose what we have. Wherever you go, learn to remember the Lord all the time. A thief doesn’t really enjoy something he stole because he knows that it does not belong to him; a woman does not enjoy a man because she is thinking of many other things; a man does not enjoy a woman because he is distracted. You do not enjoy the things you have—your own body, your mind, your heart, all your instruments. You do not enjoy life because you have not learned the technique of enjoyment. *The Upanishads say that the technique of enjoying life means to become free from fear by realizing that everything within and without is governed by God. The truth is not subject to change, death, or decay.* You cannot enjoy the things of the world under the pressure of fear, yet all fear will go away when you know that God exists everywhere. Then where is your fear? Of whom are you afraid? You are afraid of someone or he is afraid of you only if you think you are different from each other. You lie to someone or he lies to you because you are afraid of each other. But the day you really know that the witnessing force between us is one and the same, then we cannot hate each other. I will see God in you, and you will see God in me. Then who can hate whom? There will be only love; love will rule life and the universe. We cannot then say that there was no philosophy in the earlier & obscurer hymns unless we are sure that we have rightly interpreted their difficult language. But there are also certain positive considerations. The Vedantic thinkers positively believed that they were proceeding on a Vedic basis. They quote Vedic authority, appeal to Vedic ideas, evidently thinking themselves standing on the secure rock of Veda. Either, then, they were indulging in a disingenuous fiction, inconsistent with spiritual greatness & that frank honesty, arjavam, on which the nation prided itself,—either they were consciously innovating under a pretence of Vedic orthodoxy or else quite honestly they were reading their own notions into a text which meant something entirely different, as has often been done even by great & sincere intellects. The first suggestion—it has, I think, been made,—is inadmissible except on conclusive evidence; the second deserves consideration. If it were only a matter of textual citation or a change of religious notions, there would be no great difficulty in accepting the theory of an unconscious intellectual fiction. But I find in the Upanishads abounding indications of a preexisting philosophical system, minute & careful at least & to my experience profound as well as elaborate. Where is the indication of any other than a Vedic origin for this well-appointed metaphysics, science, cosmology, psychology? Everywhere it is the text of the Veda that is alluded to or quoted, the knowledge of Veda that is presupposed. The study of Veda is throughout considered as the almost indispensable preliminary for the understanding of Vedanta. How came so colossal, persistent & all-pervading a mistake to have been committed by thinkers of so high a capacity? Or when, under what impulsion & by whom was this great & careful system originated & developed? Where shall we find any documents of that speculation,—its initial steps, its gradual clarifying, its stronger & more assured progress? The Upanishads are usually supposed themselves to be such documents. But the longer I study these profound compositions, the less I feel able to accept this common and very natural hypothesis. If we do not prejudge their more recondite ideas as absurd, if we try sympathetically to enter into the thoughts & beliefs of these Rishis, to understand what precise facts or experiences stand behind their peculiar language, especially if we can renew those experiences by the system they themselves used, the system of Yoga,—a method still open to us—it will, I think, very soon dawn upon our minds that these works are of a very different nature from the speculative experiments they are generally supposed to be. They represent neither a revolt nor a fresh departure. We shall find that we are standing at a goal, not assisting at a starting-point. The form of the Upanishads is the mould not of an initial speculation but of an ultimate thinking. It is a consummation, not a beginning, the soul of an existing body, not the breath of life for a body yet to come into being. Line after line, passage after passage indicates an unexpressed metaphysical, scientific or psychological knowledge which the author thinks himself entitled to take for granted, just as a modern thinker addressing educated men on the ultimate generalisations of Science takes for granted their knowledge of the more important data and ideas accepted by modern men. All this mass of thought so taken for granted must have had a previous existence and history. It is indeed possible that it was developed between the time of the Vedas and the appearance of these Vedantic compositions but left behind it no substantial literary trace of its passage and progress. But it is also possible that the Vedas themselves when properly understood, contain these beginnings or even most of the separate data of these early mental sciences. It is possible that the old teachers of Vedanta were acting quite rationally & understood their business better than we understand it for them when they expected a knowledge of Veda from their students, sometimes even insisting on this preliminary knowledge, not dogmatically, not by a blind tradition, but because the Veda contained that basis of experimental knowledge upon which the generalizations of Vedanta were built. There is a chance, a considerable chance—I must lay stress again and more strongly on a suggestion already hazarded,—that minds so much closer to the Vedas in time and in the possibility of spiritual affinity may have known better the meaning of their religion than the inhabitant of different surroundings and of another world of thought speculating millenniums afterwards in the light of possibly fanciful Greek and German analogies. So far as I have been able to study & to penetrate the meaning of the Rigvedic hymns, it seems to me that the Europeans are demonstrably wrong in laying so predominant a stress on the material aspects of the Vedic gods. I find Varuna and Mitra to be mainly moral and not material powers; Surya, Agni, Indra have great psychical functions; even Sarasvati, in whom the scholars insist on seeing, wherever they can, an Aryan river, presents herself as a moral and intellectual agency,—“Pâvakâ nah Sarasvatî Vâjebhir vâjinîvatî, Yajnam vashtu dhiyâvasuh. Chodayitrî sûnritânâm Chetantî sumatînâm, Yajnam dadhe Sarasvatî. Maho arnas Sarasvatî Prachetayati ketunâ, dhiyo visvâ virâjati.” If we accept the plain meaning of the very plain & simple words italicised, we are in the presence not of personified natural phenomena, but of a great purifying, strengthening and illuminating goddess. But every word in the passage, pavaka, yajnam dadhe, maho arnas, ketuna, it seems to me, has a moral or intellectual significance. It would be easy to multiply passages of this kind. I am even prepared to suggest that the Vritras of the Veda (for the Sruti speaks not of a single Vritra but of many) are not—at least in many hymns—forces either of cloud or of drought, but Titans of quite another & higher order. The insight of Itihasa and Purana in these matters informed by old tradition seems to me often more correct than the conjectural scholarship of the Europeans. But there is an even more important truth than the high moral and spiritual significance of the Vedic gods and the Vedic religion which results to my mind from a more careful & unbiassed study of the Rigveda. We shall find that the moral functions assigned to these gods are arranged not on a haphazard, poetic or mythological basis, but in accordance with a careful, perhaps even a systematised introspective psychology and that at every step the details suggested agree with the experiences of the practical psychology which has gone in India from time immemorial by the name of Yoga. The line Maho Arnas Sarasvati prachetayati ketuna dhiyo visva virajati is to the Yogin a profound and at the same time lucid, accurate and simple statement of a considerable Yogic truth and most important Yogic experience. The psychological theory & principle involved, a theory unknown to Europe and obscured in later Hinduism, depends on a map of human psychology which is set forth in its grand lines in the Upanishads. If I am right, we have here an illuminating fact of the greatest importance to the Hindu religion, a fact which will light up, I am certain, much in the Veda that European scholarship has left obscure and will provide our modern study of the development of Hindu Civilization with a scientific basis and a principle of unbroken continuity; we may find the earliest hymns of the Veda linked in identity of psychological experience to the modern utterances of Vivekananda and Sri Ramakrishna. Meanwhile the theory I have suggested of the relations of Veda to Vedanta receives, I contend, from these Vedic indications a certain character of actuality. (SRI ARABINDO) K RAJARAM IRS 24326 On Tue, 24 Mar 2026 at 05:33, Jambunathan Iyer <[email protected]> wrote: > "Fear is the enemy of logic & also is the main source of superstition, > and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of > wisdom. > > *N Jambunathan , Chennai " What you get by achieving your goals is not as > important as what you become by achieving your goals. If you want to live a > happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things "* > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CAL5XZopNOV4HdsnqXCGwWkEu%2BdUQBzaJOMGJzr30%2Bfv9La9O-g%40mail.gmail.com.
