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The knower of Brahman reaches that which is supreme. This is that
verse which was spoken;
"Truth, Knowledge, Infinity the Brahman,
He who knows that hidden in the secrecy in the supreme ether,
Enjoyed all desires along with the wise-thinking Brahman."
This is the burden of the opening sentences of the Taittirīya
Upanishad's second section; they begin its elucidation of the
highest truth. Or in-the Sanskrit,
brahmavid āpnoti param
tad eşhābhyuktā satyam jnānam anantam brahma
yo veda nihitam guhāyām parame vyoman
soshnute sarvān kāmān saha brahmaņā vipaschiteti.
But what is Brahman? Whatever reality is in existence, by which
all the rest subsists, that is Brahman. An Eternal behind all
instabilities, a Truth of things which is implied, if it is hidden
in all appearances, a Constant which supports all mutations, but
is not increased, diminished, abrogated, - there is such an
unknown X which makes existence a problem, our own self a mystery,
the universe a riddle. If we were only what we seem to be to our
normal self-awareness, there would be no mystery; if the world
were only what it can be made out to be by the perceptions of the
senses and their strict analysis in the reason, there would be no
riddle; and if to take our life as it is now and the world as it
has so far developed to our experience were the whole possibility
of our knowing and doing, there would be no problem. Or at best
there would be but a shallow mystery, an easily solved riddle, the
problem only of a child's puzzle. But there is more, and that more
is the hidden head of the Infinite and the secret heart of the
Eternal. It is the highest and this highest is the all; there is
none beyond and there is none other than it. To know it is to know
the highest and by knowing the highest to know all. For as it is
the beginning and source of all things, so everything else is its
consequence; as it is the support and constituent of all things,
so the secret of everything else is explained by its secret; as it
is the sum and end of all things, so everything else amounts to it
and by throwing itself into it achieves the sense of its own
existence.
This is the Brahman.
If this unknown be solely an indecipherable, only indefinable X,
always unknown and unknowable, the hidden never revealed, the
secret never opened to us, then our mystery would for ever remain
a mystery, our riddle insoluble, our problem intangible. Its
existence, even while it determines all we are, know and do, could
yet make no practical difference to us; for our relation to it
would then be a blind and helpless dependence, a relation binding
us to ignorance and maintainable only by that ignorance. Or again,
if it be in some way knowable, but the sole result of knowledge
were an extinction or cessation of our being, then within our
being it could have no consequences; the very act and fluctuation
of knowledge would bring the annihilation of all that we now are,
not its completion or fulfillment. The mystery, riddle, problem
would not be so much solved as abolished, for it would lose all
its data. In effect we should have to suppose that there is an
eternal and irreconcilable opposition between Brahman and what we
now are, between the supreme cause and all its effects or between
the supreme source and all its derivations. And it would then seem
that all that the Eternal originates, all he supports, all he
takes back to himself is a denial or contradiction of his being
which, though in itself a negative of that which alone is, has yet
in some way become a positive. The two could not coexist in
consciousness; if he allowed the world to know him, it would
disappear from being.
But the Eternal is knowable, He defines himself so that we may
seize him, and man can become, even while he exists as man and in
this world and in this body, a knower of the Brahman.
The knowledge of the Brahman is not a thing luminous but otiose,
informing to the intellectual view of things but without
consequence to the soul of the individual or his living; it is a
knowledge that is a power and a divine compulsion to change; by it
his existence gains something that now he does not possess in
consciousness. What is this gain? It is this that he is conscious
now in a lower state only of his being, but by knowledge he gains
his highest being.
The highest state of our being is not a denial, contradiction and
annihilation of all that we now are; it is a supreme
accomplishment of all things that our present existence means and
aims at, but in their highest sense and in the eternal values.
To live in our present state of self-consciousness is to live and
to act in ignorance. We are ignorant of ourselves, because we know
as yet only that in us which changes always, from moment to
moment, from hour to hour, from period to period, from life to
life, and not that in us which is eternal. We are ignorant of the
world because we do not know God; we are aware of the law of
appearances, but not of the law and truth of being.
Our highest wisdom, our minutest most accurate science, our most
effective application of knowledge can be at most a thinning of
the veil of ignorance, but not a going beyond it, so long as we do
not get at the fundamental knowledge and the consciousness to
which that is native. The rest are effective for their own
temporal purposes, but prove ineffective in the end, because they
do not bring to the highest good; they lead to no permanent
solution of the problem of existence.
The ignorance in which we live is not a baseless and wholesale
falsehood, but at its lowest the misrepresentation of a Truth, at
its highest an imperfect representation and translation into
inferior and to that extent misleading values. It is a knowledge
of the superficial only and therefore a missing of the secret
essential which is the key to all that the superficial is striving
for; a knowledge of the finite and apparent, but a missing of all
that the apparent symbolizes and the finite suggests; a knowledge
of inferior forms, but a missing of all that our inferior life and
being has above it and to which it must aspire if it is to fulfill
its greatest possibilities. The true knowledge is that of the
highest, the inmost, the infinite. The knower of the Brahman sees
all these lower things in the light of the Highest, the external
and superficial as a translation of the internal and essential,
the finite from the view of the Infinite. He begins to see and
know existence no longer as the thinking animal, but as the
Eternal sees and knows it. Therefore he is glad and rich in being,
luminous in joy, satisfied of existence.
Knowledge does not end with knowing, nor is it pursued and found
for the sake of knowing alone. It has its full value only when it
leads to some greater gain than itself, some gain of being. Simply
to know the eternal and to remain in the pain, struggle and
inferiority of our present way of being, would be a poor and lame
advantage.
A greater knowledge opens the possibility and, if really
possessed, brings the actuality of a greater being. To be is the
first verb which contains all the others; knowledge, action,
creation, enjoyment are only a fulfillment of being. Since we are
incomplete in being, to grow is our aim, and that knowledge,
action, creation, enjoyment are the best which most help us to
expand grow, feel our existence.
Mere existence is not fullness of being. Being knows itself as
power, consciousness, delight; a greater being means a greater
power, consciousness and delight.
If by greater being we incurred only a greater pain and suffering,
this good would not be worth having. Those who say that it is,
mean simply that we get by it a greater sense of fulfillment which
brings of itself a greater joy of the power of existence, and an
extension of suffering or a loss of other enjoyment is worth
having as a price for this greater sense of wideness, height and
power. But this could not be the perfection of being or the
highest height of its fulfillment; suffering is the seal of a
lower status. The highest consciousness is integrally fulfilled in
wideness and power of its existence, but also it is integrally
fulfilled in delight.
The knower of Brahman has not only the joy of light, but gains
something immense as the result of his knowledge, brahma vid
āpnoti.
What he gains is that highest, that which is supreme; he gains the
highest being, the highest consciousness, the highest wideness and
power of being, the highest delight; brahmavid āpnoti param.
The Supreme is not something aloof and shut up in itself. It is
not a mere indefinable, prisoner of its own featureless
absoluteness, impotent to define, create, know itself variously,
eternally buried in a sleep or a swoon of self-absorption. The
Highest is the Infinite and the Infinite contains the All. Whoever
attains the highest consciousness, becomes infinite in being and
embraces the All.
To make this clear the Upanishad has defined the Brahman as the
Truth, Knowledge, Infinity and has defined the result of the
knowledge of Him in the secrecy, in the cave of being, in the
supreme ether as the enjoyment of all its desires by the soul of
the individual in the attainment of its highest self-existence.
Our highest state of being is indeed a becoming one with Brahman
in his eternity and infinity, but it is also an association with
him in delight of self-fulfillment, ashnute saha brahmaņā.
And that principle of the Eternal by which this association is
possible, is the principle of his knowledge, his self-discernment
and all-discernment, the wisdom by which he knows himself
perfectly in all the world and all beings, brahmaņā vipaschitā.
Delight of being is the continent of all the fulfilled values of
existence which we now seek after in the forms of desire. To know
its conditions and possess it purely and perfectly is the infinite
privilege of the eternal Wisdom.
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