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purely pantheistic systems. In the purer, older form recorded above, the purusha (Person) is sprung from the [=a]tm[ra]. There is no distinction between matter and spirit. Conscious being (sat) wills, and so produces all. Or [=a]tm[=a) comes first; and this is conscious sat and the cause of the worlds; which [Fa]tm[=ajeventually becomes the Lord. The [=a]tm[=a) in man, owing to his environment, cannot see whole, and needs the Yoga discipline of asceticism to enable him to do so. But he is the same ego which is the All.
The relation between the absolute and the ego is through will. "This (neuter) brahma willed, 'May I be many,' and created" (Ch[=a]nd., above). Sometimes the impersonal, and sometimes the personal "spirit willed" (TI=ajiit. 2. 6). And when it is said, in Brihad [=A]ran. 1.4.1, that "In the beginning ego, spirit, [Fa]tm[=a), alone existed," one finds this spirit (self) to be a form of brahma (ib. 10-11). Personified in a sectarian sense, this spirit becomes the divinity Rudra Çiva, the Blessed One (Çvet[=a]çvatara, 3. 5. 11).[30]
In short, the teachers of the Upanishads not only do not declare clearly what they believed in regard to cosmogonic and eschatological matters, but many of them probably did not know clearly what they believed. Their great discovery was that man's spirit was not particular and mortal, but part of the immortal universal. Whether this universal was a being alive and a personal (=astm[=a), or whether this personal being was but a transient form of impersonal, imperishable being;[31] and whether the union with being, brahma, would result in a survival of individual consciousness,—these are evidently points they were not agreed upon, and, in all probability, no one of the sages was certain in regard to them. Crass identifications of the vital principle with breath, as one with ether, which is twice emphasized as one of the two immortal things, were provisionally accepted. Then breath and immortal spirit were made one. Matter had energy from the beginning, brahma, or was chaos, asat, without being. But when asat becomes sat, that sat becomesbrahma, energized being, and to asat there is no return. In eschatology the real (spirit, or self) part of man (ego) either rejoices forever as a conscious part of the conscious world-self, or exists immortal in brahma-imperishable being, conceived as more or less conscious.[32]
