“This teaching is indeed
The wisdom of the wise
And the intelligence of the discerning:
Through it one uses the unreal
To achieve the real.” – The Uddhava Gita – Dialogue 24:221
Today we meet to collate the last 60 posts which examined at least 13 lines of thought on ultimate reality in Hinduism. It is time to summarize and reconfigure the key principles we have uncovered in order to integrate them with scientific, philosophical, and alternate religious perspectives. Ultimate reality for these Hindu thinkers distills down to a closed circle of four supreme principles: (1) the divine being, (2) mystical truths, (3) governing laws, and (4) human apotheosis. Allow me to expand and elaborate these further.
THE DIVINE BEING
In a word, the undisputed ultimate principle of Hinduism is Brahman, FULL STOP! Brahman has many other names throughout Hindu literature, but by far the most important are God, the Lord, Krishna, and Vishnu. Brahman is not only singular as the Vedas came to recognize, but total – literally everything and every facet of reality including the abstract and the concrete. Brahman has or is consciousness, in fact, infinite consciousness.
Brahman is not anthropomorphic and is, in the end, unfathomable – best understood through the negation of human labels, concepts, and characteristics. There are at least five layers of this negation: aksharam (inexhaustible, unborn and undying), anirdeshyam (indescribable, indefinable, and unlocatable), avyaktam (unmanifest, formless), sarvatragam (non-reducible, indivisible, existence itself), and acalam (unchangeable).
MYSTICAL TRUTH
The second key metaphysical principle of Hinduism is the centrality of mystical truth. Such truths are termed ‘mystical’ because they cannot be validated scientifically or by logic alone, but are revealed through deep contemplation and direct inner experience. As such, they are reflected in and pervaded by inevitable paradoxes.
The first of these relate to Brahman which is both Absolute and the non-absolute universe. Brahman is both shiva (male, still) and Shakti (female, active). Brahman has two ‘faces’: one of pure love and the other of retributive karma. In addition, Brahman is both creator and destroyer, personal and impersonal, transcendent and immanent, Law and Law-giver.
The second level of mystical truth refers to reality itself which is seemingly dual and non-dual. At the level of the whole, the universe is both real and unreal. As Shankara tells us, it is in a sense, real to us, but its truthfulness or realness is sublated or superseded by learning the ultimate truth of Brahman as Absolute, indivisible, and complete. At the particulate level, Hindu monism seems to be contradicted by frequent references to purusha (the spiritual) as opposed to prakriti (the material). . The solution to this mystical enigma is that prakriti is a kind of illusion or mis-experience (maya) recognized as such only through complete detachment from the physical world by one’s innermost self (one’s purusha).
The third and perhaps most important mystical truth is “Tat tvam asi” or Brahmatmaikyan – the identity of Brahman the universal soul and Atman, the individual soul. The concept is easily stated and the words readily understood, but true apprehension occurs only by means of an inner transcendence. The achievement of this ‘unitive state’ derives from a deep and direct recognition of the unity of life and the unity of consciousness.
(continued next post)
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-1Swami Ambikananda Saraswati (translator), The Uddhava Gita: The Final Teaching of Krishna. Seastone (Ulysses Press), Berkely, California, 2002. ISBN 1-56975-320-2, page 238.
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