The fifth part of this expose brought us to the verge of Vedic Yoga perspective to human freedom, death and immortality.
The Yoga experience culminates in merger of self identity with its own Truth Value — the universal Self-Pure. Chronologically, its discovery precedes the Vedic codified advisory for individuals and instructional outreach to communities everywhere.
It is true that the Veda pre-exists in creation and is only discovered in every age in the heart of the Yogi, who must first succeed at transcending the two apparent singularities at which individual I-identity and its featuring adjucts dissolve, erasing absolutely even the trace of identity as oneself. There is no object or subject, sense or feature; no I-notion, space nor time, just the blissful fullness of being : calm, Consciousness Pure, being effulgent in itself. It is upon his hugely lagged re-emergence that the entire truth is revealed in quantum doses, in slow motion as it were.
There is no potent cause or reason while he remains merged for the rise of the first dreamlike adjunct of universal-vital-being, the First Cause, even as the dormant capacity is ever present in Consciousness, as it is. Consciousnes Pure is consciousness in itself, as in deep sleep. The dream is yet an uncarved image within a huge boulder of granite, so to speak. It does not exist, only the boulder does. Even when it apparently does exist, the universally potent dream is only in the imagination of a speck of consciousness pure, which for a moment, of its own conscious nature, chooses to watch the dream.
That momentary forgetfulness, derived of the nature of the consciousness pure, is also termed as Nescience or Primordial Ignorance, or symbolically represented as the Mother Goddess or the Supreme Creatrix. The Vedas term the pure consciousness as Brahman and symbolically represent it as Vishnu, the great Lord who sleeps through entire duration of creation. The first adjunct or the First Cause is represented by Brahma, The Creator who arises from Vishnu’s navel, signifying Brahma’s constituted nature as universal vitality or Cosmic Prana. Interestingly, Vedic lore famously points to the fact that Brahma is ignorant of his own origin, alluding to the veiling power inherent in the first adjunct.
The dream adjunct, brought to life in that momentary watch, persists even as the speck of consciousness pure, to which it occured, rejects the dream and turns over back into its effulgent consciousness. The adjunct retains the impressed shadow of that long turned away speck, as its dreaming self. Even as impressed memory reflecting in the primordial adjunct, it serves as the eternal Godhead, the pervasive self effulgent subject witnessing the universally manifest dream.
The seeming dream and effulgent memory of dreaming consciousness pure together take on an apparent reality of its own, projecting all this existence and totally veiling its supreme origin, on one hand, and yet remaining nothing more than a dream imagined, nonexistent in reality and long since forgotten, on the other.
In truth, nothing has happened ever in consciousness pure; only a passing imagination momentarily engaged a speck of it. But the nonevent in consciousness pure triggers the momentous beginning of universe formation projecting, in the individual self’s perspective, this entire existence, these endlessly forming multiple subtle domains and their respective beings and countless material forms and their respective entities, and causing the living among them, individuals and species, to evolve.
The moment in which the dreamlike first adjunct shimmered as real stretches into directed, unceasing Time, over which the dream expands as limitless Space projecting the universe within it, populating it with galaxies and stars, suns and planets, entities inert and living, in the effulgent gaze of witnessing shadow consciousness, filled with wonder and curiousity, yet with ever clear memory of its true being as conciousness pure, deep asleep in its own conscious effulgence.
The memory of consciousness pure pervades the universe as the Self of all things projected, living and inert. That reflection of the consciousness pure in the shadow self of the First Cause fills all cascadingly formed adjuncts subtle and gross, which progressively cover its own origin with increasing layers of forgetfulness in that imagined dream of consciousness pure, and completely veils even the shadow self ever behind and within each manifest thing.
The adjunct induced sense of the Godhead itself is a dream and the dreamer is the reflection of the self-infinite-pure-consciouness. cascades down into series of subtle and gross adjuncts, ending at conscious body identified individuals with their object orientation, worldly awareness, senses to feel with, reactive emotions and will, mind to reflect in and intellect to know.
It is to this species familiar setting the Yogi is restored upon his re-emergence from consciouness pure, transiting through the existence-knowledge-bliss infinte experience of the Godhead. The supreme Truth Value regained transforms his own Substratum and its internal domains forever. The world is nothing apart from the Godhead he remembers all too well, which alone is his true nature. The body, alongwith every domain within it, is nothing more than an adjunct external to the Self he truly is. He is that perpetual subject, who alone can neither destruct nor be transcended. Every gross adjunct dies when its vitality departs and is thus reduced to being nothing; every subtle adjunct can be transcended and be thus reduced to being inconsequential. Only the self pure is truly immortal.
The knowledge of his true nature displaces all other domain proper identities he had as the individual self. The memory of his identity with Godhead, to which he is now ever oriented, remains infinitely more real than the materially concrete objects to which the existential self, ignorant of his true nature, is compulsively attached and oriented.
The reality of the world is now minimally acknowledged, only as necessary to discharge of his role, which the Yogi continues to play up to. For the rest of his time, it displays a translucent fluidity before vanishing in thin air. The senses are withdrawn, the vitality settles to hamonious rise and ebb, unagitated by emotions and incapable of drawing his will, and the mind is empty without a thought.
The Yogi’s reincarnated sense naturally gravitates to the witness being identified with and peering through the intellect, aware of true knowledge in respect of his self and experiencing the remembered bliss. Existence, in his vision, is immanent and pervasive and not merely as mottled with coagulated matter.
Without limitations inherent to inner domains, finite attributes of adjuncts over adjuncts, or the compulsive object orientation and its consequences, the Yogi identifies with his self pure and is absolutely free, at peace, experiencing bliss in and of himself, and convinced of his immortal reality without a trace of doubt.
What the Yogi does or does not do is inconsequential to what is settled forever : he has done all that needed to be done; he has known all that needed to be known; he has experienced all that he needed to experience. His Dharma shines in his ever present discrimination; he takes no time in making electable choices and commits no error in his conduct or behaviour.
The Yogi is no longer one in this sea of many, a drop in the ocean. He is the sea converged into one, the ocean entire in a single drop.
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It is to eulogise the Conscious Pure Being at the source of creation that the Vedic hymns are sung. They are of the form of prayers, sacrificial practices, enlightening advisories, elucidating and illumining stories, occasional community or personal events, and are diversely directed to the Great Mother, the cosmic powers manifest, Sun and Moon, Mitra and Varun, Agni and Brihaspati, Usha and Sandhya… all of which hymns reveal glimpses of one memory or other of the transcendental experience, the accompanying vision and, or, the ‘dharma’ values the seers anchored themselves to in order to progress towards Godhead realisation and merge in consciousness pure.
More detailed reading of the Vedas can be done here. Information on Vedic cosmogony are included in several works listed here. More specifically, Adi Shankar’s Panchikarnam and elucidatory gloss by Sureshvacharya can found at this link.
The real trouble with comprehending the coded import of the Vedas is to discern the intuited revelation in its context, in its own time period and as it was meant to convey to listeners then, and to ascertain the significance of symbolism frequently included in the hymns, as structured in the prevailing cosmogonal perspective or in accord with metaphorical usage then in vogue. Knowledge of unbroken tradition continuing to this day would be as important as familiarity with the language itself. Even with these skills, the unitary soul of the works prove elusive in the absence of intellectual sharpness and meditative focus which cut the clutter, categorically define the nature of the text portions, and relate them to their coded intent in overall context.
In his commentary on Bhagvad Gita, Adi Sankara harshly observes :
“Whatsoever his mastery of all other branches of knowledge, he who does not know the sampradaya (school of tradional practice) must be discarded in the same way as we discard all perverse and ignorant people.”
Again, in his commentary on Prashna Upanishad, he says :
“Give up all your egotistic fancies, and listen to the meaning of the Sruti. Independent effort, even if continued for a hundred years, cannot disclose the true import of the Sruti to those whose heads are filled with self-conceit and who foolishly assume that they can know it for themselves (without the teacher’s aid).”
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A well known, simply understood Vedic prayer thus addresses the Self Supreme :
O Brahman, lead us from (this world of) darkness to light (in truth), from (this world of) nonexistence to existence in truth,
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