| |
"dwelling-place of the gods", and so certainly it is. Each word has become divine, just because it has been used by people who had known God or godliness.
This Upanishad in which we are entering today is the smallest -- it can be written on a postcard -- and yet it is the greatest document in existence. There is no document of such luminosity, of such profoundness anywhere in the whole history of humanity. The name of the Upanishad is ISA UPANISHAD.
The world of the Upanishads is very close to my approach. In fact, what I am doing here is giving a rebirth to the spirit of the Upanishads. It has disappeared even from India, and it has not been on the scene at least for three thousand years. There is a gap of three thousand years, and in these three thousand years India has destroyed its own achievement.
The first thing is that Upanishads are not anti-life, they are not for renouncing life. Their approach is whole: life has to be lived in its totality. They don't teach escapism. They want you to LIVE in the world, but in such a way that you remain ABOVE the world, in a certain sense transcendental to the world, living in the world and yet not being of it. But they don't teach you that life has to be renounced, that you have to escape from life, that life is ugly or life is sin. They rejoice in life! It is a gift of God; it is the manifest form of God.
This fundamental has to be remembered. Upanishads say that the world is the manifest form of God and the God is the unmanifest form of the world, and every manifest phenomenon has an unmanifest noumenon inside it.
When you see a flower, the flower is only the manifest form of something inside it, its essence, which is unmanifest, which is its soul, its very being. You cannot catch hold of it, you cannot find it by dissecting the flower. For that you need a poetic approach, not the scientific approach. The scientific approach analyzes; the poetic perspective is totally different. The science will never find any beauty in the flower because beauty belongs to the unmanifest form. Science will dissect the manifest form and will find all kinds of substances the flower is made of but will
|
|
|