Paradigms of Abundance

Orthodox Reflections of the Upanishads Part 2

I am not alone here. God is here; God is everywhere.

-Saint Herman of Alaska

I have written and rewritten this article several times, finding, with some difficulty, the correct tone and way to discuss the following Upanishad. When reading any Upanishad, much like reading the Psalms, one finds that the pathways open for reflection and meditation are without number. This is particularly the case when discussing perhaps this most essential Upanishad: the Isha Upanishad. In sum, the ways I could have taken this article veer off into a chasm of endless possibilities. I believe some of this difficulty lies, in part, because it is so general, so universal.

The Isha Upanishad tends to shy away from the particulars of devotional love. Quite unlike the profoundly bhaktic character of the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, with its tender images of Brahman residing in the heart, akin to the image of the god present in the inner sanctum of a temple, the focus is rather on a universal state of affairs. An emphasis that at the root of reality is the burgeoning fulness of Brahman in all and through all. What I found as I was reading through Isha again for this essay, was that this aspect of God’s givenness takes center stage. It is only in understanding this radical availability and inclusivity of God that the foundations for existence and our liberation from death into life are made possible.

From the outset, the Isha Upanishad seeks to lay the ground for an appreciation of Brahman as that which is not only wholly available but is that which is the very fabric of both internal and external reality. Each Upanishad begins with an invocation taken from a traditional set. For Isha, this invocation, paralleled with the opening lines of the Upanishad itself, shares thematic similarities and offer us a coherent frame by which to understand the wholeness of the Upanishad itself. The invocation, “All this is full. All that is full. From fullness, fulness comes. When fullness is taken from fullness, Fullness still remains. OM shanti shanti shanti”¹ is thus paralleled in the opening line of Isha, “The Lord is enshrined in the hearts of all. The Lord is the supreme Reality.”² A totalizing image of God’s presence is expressed; in God is that inexhaustible expression of reality present even down to the last blade of grass. God donates of himself without regard, or in the words of the Philippian hymn “Emptied Himself”³, and yet the light of his beauty is never diminished. Rather, it is intensified. For in this giving is the supreme manifestation of God’s nature made evident.

This reality can only be understood, and thereby become a liberating experience, when we recognize Brahman and Atman’s⁴ unity (and in the mind of Advaita Vedanta, their coincidence). Atman is a tricky subject. Like many terms in Sanskrit its usage varies from time and place and is used to mean different things by different philosophers. However, because Atman is such a central concept to the Isha Upanishad (and many other Upanishads I will be discussing over several articles), I will attempt to briefly explain what it means both within this Upanishadic context and corollaries found within Christianity.

Very often Atman is considered something like “soul” within the Christian tradition. Within the Upanishadic mind⁵, however, the concept of jīva bears closer similarities to the Christian understanding of soul. This becomes clear when observing that the Sanskrit jīv, meaning “to breathe,” has closer association with the Christian conception of soul as the “life-breath” or a living soul. Nép̄eš, in Hebrew, which was thus translated as ψυχή (psyche) in Greek and anima in Latin all share closer similarity with jīva as describing something of a quality the Self possesses, rather than an understanding of the Self itself. What is clear about the True Self is that it is not to be confused with the passing finite psychological and physical states we identify as self. In English, a contrast between True Self and Ego becomes a useful way of understanding Atman as opposed to the passing states of mind and body we generally identify with.

In Thomas Merton’s Asian Journal, he quotes from Adi Sankaracharya’s The Crest-Jewel in understanding Atman,

There is a self-existent Reality, which is the basis of our consciousness of ego. That Reality is the witness of the three states of our consciousness and is distinct from the five bodily coverings [skandas].

That reality is the knower in all states of consciousness—waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep. It is aware of the presence or absence of the mind and its functions. It is the Atman.

That Reality sees everything by its own light. No one sees it. It gives intelligence to the mind and the intellect, but no one gives it light.

That Reality pervades the universe, but no one penetrates it. It alone shines. The universe Shines with its reflected light.

Because of its presence, the body, senses, mind, and intellect apply themselves to their respective functions, as though obeying its command.

Its nature is eternal consciousness. It knows all things, from the sense of ego to the body itself. It is the knower of pleasures and pain and of the sense-objects. It knows everything objectively—just as a man knows the objective existence of a jar.

This is the Atman, the Supreme Being, the ancient. It never ceases to experience infinite joy. It is always the same. It is consciousness itself. The organs and vital energies function under its command.

Here within this body, in the pure mind, in the secret chamber of intelligence, in the infinite universe within the heart, the Atman shines in its captivating splendor, like a noonday sun. By its light the universe is revealed.⁶

As best as I can tell, Atman here refers to something more intimate to our existence than our soul (itself a concept often sullied by Cartesian mind-body dualism). As other Dharmic interlocuters have noted, Atman is something like the Knower who knows, or the Observer who observes. We observe, but how are we aware of our observation or who is making the observation? It is towards this Observer, that is somehow at the root of our perception, that the Isha turns its attention towards. Within the Christian context, it is perhaps something akin to the Imago Dei. However, it should be noted that Atman, unlike the Christian understanding of the Imago Dei, is not necessarily restricted to human persons. Another useful corollary within Christianity that bears certain similarities to Atman is the understanding of the logoi. These are patterns of existence “stamped” into all things mineral, vegetable, and animal. The various logoi then sing back to the Logos as their truest subsistent reality—ever connected with God and with all of creation. The Image or logos God implants within us is the very source out of which springs our individual existence (what Sankara describes as ego-consciousness) but perpetually grounds us in God’s more original and infinitely splendid existence.

For this reason, the Isha Upanishad claims, “Those who deny the Self are born again/Blind to the Self, enveloped in darkness,/Utterly devoid of love for the Lord.”⁷ Not only is the Self that which communes with God, it is the very Image that he has lovingly implanted within each of us as our most true and original Self. Furthermore, by failing to possess a healthy self-love, we are led to profound callousness towards our neighbor with whom we share the same Atman, the same Image. For there is always a limitation in the scope of our love for others when we can never escape the event horizon of the disdain we hold for ourselves. The mystery of “Love your neighbor as you love yourself; for I am the Lord”⁸ is challenging precisely because it not only demands for us to love others, but that for this love to be genuine and earnest it must first originate from a true and healthy love we have towards the Self—for God is the Lord. To deny the Self leads to “rebirth” in the endless wheel of fire that is Samsara: cycles of trauma, pain, and generational curses. It is to continue in an existence of perpetual self-hatred that expresses itself as disdain for others. If we do not perceive the divine within, we become “Utterly devoid of love for the Lord”, who is the One enthroned in the hearts of all.

Isha pushes this understanding further stating,

Those who see all creatures in themselves
And themselves in all creatures know no fear.
Those who see all creatures in themselves
And themselves in all creatures know no grief.
How can the multiplicity of life
Delude the one who sees its unity?⁹

One could view this as a dismissal of multiplicity as a result of ignorance and illusion in the light of God’s ultimate unity. And within Advaitan¹⁰ systems this often appears to be the case. However, with a Christian eye towards this Upanishad, we see again a playful gestalt of unity and multiplicity at work here. The Christian who cannot see all creation in themselves cannot know true love, or the supreme intimacy of gnōsis in God. For it is in God that we “Live and move and have our being.”¹¹ To be a creature is to recognize our shared origin in the Lord. For this reason, the anchorite praying in the desert is a true friend with all Mankind. For when he closes the door to his inner room and prays secretly to his Father, he prays on behalf of all and for all as all. St. John Chrysostom understood these insights and wrote the following concerning the relationship between the Saints and animals which is useful for understanding our relationship with creation more broadly, “Surely we ought to show them great kindness and gentleness for many reasons, but, above all, because they are of the same origin as ourselves.”

What the Christian sees in his fellow creatures are not merely illusions of distinct identities that are to be transcended. Rather, he sees both the beauty of a fearfully and wonderfully made creation and also “The Self [who] is everywhere […] Immanent and transcendent. He who holds the cosmos together.”¹² The beauty of multiplicity bound up together in the Divine Logos who is their true and final source of unity.

In this meditation, I must also acknowledge the season of the Nativity fast we are currently enjoying. In this time of prayer, fasting, and sober anticipation one cannot help but see the great mystery of God’s fulness spilling out over into his creatures, and in particular in the kenotic act of the incarnation of the Logos, forever establishing the eternal covenant that, Īmmānūʾēl, God is with us.

What can be understood in this act of benevolent outpouring and eternal love is that God withholds nothing of himself from his creation. And this has not only notional spiritual implications but social and political implications as well. What God reveals to us in the holy incarnation of the Son, whose only goal was and continues to be to serve even as he compassionately judges, is that our paradigms of scarcity no longer have a place in the divine economy not only of salvation but in our daily lives. Justly was it written “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”¹³ God gives more freely of himself with little concern for being depleted of his goodness, mercy, and compassion knowing these virtues to be multiplied when they are offered with ever greater abandon.

We live in a world, as we always have, in which paradigms of scarcity run rampant. We tear, we bite, we devour each other in an effort to scrape together just a little extra money or just enough food to try and make it to the next day or even the next hour. And yet, God, the ineffable Brahman, that vanishing point of total poverty forever enthroned in all that is visible and invisible, expresses himself to us as that which is the ever empty yet ever full and ever inexhaustible. We are to see in the radical self-emptying of Christ a movement of trust in the Father’s goodwill for us. Where we do not care about food or drink, or what we will eat, or with what we will be clothed. We know that all is from God. All is in his hands, and all is willed by his inscrutable will. God calls us to that higher form of life. One which leaves behind our scrounging in fear for that which is passing away, and into life: into paradigms of abundance. Where to give, to truly martyrically give, is not a diminishment of the Self, but rather, her true end and fulfillment.

I leave you with my favorite hymn from this time of preparation that is both wonderfully Upanishadic and indisputably Christian:

Today all things are filled with joy! For Christ is born of the Virgin!

Truly all things are filled with joy, for it is Christ who is the source and climax of all our joys and desires. He fills all things with love, and every atom of creation shimmers with the divine energies infusing and sustaining all things.

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1. Easwaran, Eknath. 2007. The Upanishads. 2nd ed. Easwaran’s Classics of Indian Spirituality. Tomales: Nilgiri Press. 56

2. Easwaran, 57

3. Philippians 2.5-10

4. For clarity, I will be using Self/True Self/Atman interchangeably. Easwaran translates “Atman” as “Self” in his translation of the Upanishads.

5. I mention “Upanishadic” specifically and not “Dharmic” or “Vedic” as this term is used in different ways depending on what source of literature it is found. The Bhagavad Gita, for instance, refers to jīva as indestructible and eternal and thus uses the idea of jīva in a similar way to Atman.

6. Merton, Thomas. The Asian Journal. New York: New Directions Pub Corp, 1973. 269-70

7. Easwaran, 57

8. Leviticus 19.18 c.f. Mark 12.30-31

9. Easwaran, 58

10. Advaita Vedanta is the best-known stream of thought within the school of Vedanta (itself one of the six orthodox schools of Indian philosophy). The other two major streams being Vishishadtvaita Vedanta (which has arguably had the greatest impact on Hindu philosophy and practice) and Dvaita Vedanta. In a later post I will discuss these different sub-schools and their founders in light of the Christian tradition.

11. Acts 17.28

12. Easwaran, 58

13. Acts 20.35