World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 86

Lord. In itself Being itself emerges from an infinity which cannot be named or described. This primordial infinity is what the Isha Upanishad refers to at its very beginning, with the purnam preamble. To the spectrum of experience, this infinite out of which the infinity of Being emerges is eternally Unmanifest. Conscious Being itself manifests its infinite possibilities through power of consciousness (chit) and of these, one modality of manifestation is structured systematically in terms of Real-Ideas by Supermind. Among supramental possibilities of manifestation, one is this evolutionary world in which we find ourselves. In this self-Becoming, Being lapses into a state of Inconscience or more properly, objectifies itself to itself by power of consciousness so as to form a ground zero of graded and phased self-emergence. Being as Spirit or Subject being infinite, its self-perception as Object (Inconscience), is also infinite, a Dark Infinity. This dissolution (laya) of consciousness in the Unmanifest, can be of two kinds. One, by persistence in Ignorance and choice of Falsehood, takes us into Inconscience; and the other, by negation of all manifestation, facilitates escape into the Superconscient Transcendence, beyond the domain of the Lord's self-becoming.
This is brought out in succeeding stanzas of the Upanishad and its later movements. In terms of "the sunless worlds," both these cases of dissolution into the Unmanifest may be hinted at here. In both cases, there is an entry into Darkness. In one case we found the Darkness of the Night of lost consciousness, in the other the Darkness of the excess of Light, from which there is no return to the possibility of manifestation. In later stanzas, the Upanishad says, 'Into a blind darkness they enter who pursue after the Ignorance.' This is an extension of what is introduced here as the consequence of soul-slaying desire. But it speaks in even stronger terms of the Darkness of the Superconscient Unmanifest (avyakta paratpara): "But into an even greater darkness they enter who pursue after the Knowledge alone." We encounter here the deliberate enigmatic language of this particular Upanishad. It enjoins strongly against the soul-slaying power of desire which leads to the Darkness of Inconscience. Its voice is even stronger against the denial of the will of the Lord that is here for work and enjoyment, for the self-revelation of Being in the Becoming. The result of this escape into the Transcendent Unmanifest, according to it, is an entry into an even greater darkness. This, again, is related to the status of the soul. Even the slayers of the soul, who subject it to the law of the Inconscience (death), cannot succeed in rejecting it from the Becoming. All souls in the Becoming are eventually subject to the evolutionary will of the Lord (isha) and, sooner or later, resume their journey towards the conscious inhabitation of the human instruments. But the soul that escapes from the realm of Being-in-Becoming loses its chance of participating in the self-representation of the Lord in the universe. This inability to fulfill its destiny as a soul which had chosen to participate in the evolutionary becoming, is held out by the Isha Upansihad as the darkness of no return. That concludes the first movement of this Isha Upanishad.
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