Get Your Hands On The Upanishads Authored By Anonymous Offered As Digital Edition

سه روزه دارم کتاب اوپانیشادها رو می خونم کتاب های مقدس هندوان. هندو ها به تناسخ اعتقاد دارن ولی این تناسخ برای همه رخ نمی ده. می شه اینجور گفت این تناسخ برای اونهایی رخ می ده که تو زندگی به کمالی که باید نرسیده اند و یگانه هستی یا روح رو نشناخته اند و باهاش یکی نشده اند. برای همین دوباره به زندگی پست دنیا به شکلی نوعی از آفرینش بر می گردند و این چرخه اونقدر طی می شه که یا یگانه هستی رو بشناسند یا همچنان این چرخه ادامه پیدا کنه. اما کسی که یگانه هستی یا روح رو

بشناسه از چرخه تناسخ و زندگی پست دنیا خارج می شه و با روح یکی می شه. نکته جالبی داشت برخلاف چیزی که شاید فیلم ها و داستانهایی که در اونها به تناسخ اعتقاد دارن نشون می ده در نظر هندوها تناسخ یک فرصت دوباره برای بهتر زندگی کردنه نه اینکه صرفا آدمها بتونن از زندگی لذت ببرن یا این یه نعمت مسرت بخش باشه. در واقع حکم امتحان جبرانی رو داره نه اینکه مقطع بالاتر یا ادامه یه سیر لذت بخش باشه.

پ ن : نمی دونم تونستم منظور رو برسونم یا نه! A remarkable collection of writings that somehow manages to sketch out the lineaments of the perspective of our highest realization, The uncanny thing is that these scattered linguistic sketches, left behind by diverse personalities separated by vast gulfs of historical change, nonetheless somehow manage to come together into a unified picture of what it'd be like, experientially, to grasp the unity of the real through the fully realized unity of the self.
These luminous fragments express an understanding of what wisdom consists in that is quite different from what we're used to in the Western tradition.
As such, they bear testimony to an aspect of the human condition that our own tradition has left largely uncharted, Here, wisdom is bearing experiential witness to rather than merely theoretically conceiving the unity of the real,

These fragments provide an insider's glimpse into the goal, once realized, of the philosophic quest, That selfknowledge is the first and last of knowledge, both its presupposed foundation and its ultimate culmination, is something both East and West agree on.
Both remind us that our ultimate goal, rightly conceived, is epitomized by the DelphicSocratic motto "Know Thyself, " Knowing that through which all else is known alone can provide us with the principles by which we can characterize the underlying unity of all knowledge and human experience alike.
These fragments also show that we need to mine outside the Western tradition for insight into the self, They show what attaining the goal of all our intending would be like, what it'd be like to occupy the center which the Socratic method has endlessly circumnavigated, but never penetrated.


From a philosophical point of view, these texts are fascinating because they refute the foundational tenet of the Western philosophical tradition that is, they refute the basic, inherited Platonic belief that the way of conceptual abstraction is sufficient to attaining the real.
They give voice to our most fundamental regulative intuition: that irreducible unity and continuity are the mark of the real, This intuition of unity guides the quest for knowledge of the principles of things,

"Who sees the many and not the ONE, wanders on from death to death,
Even by the mind this truth is to be learned: there are not many but only ONE, Who sees variety and not the unity wanders on from death to death, " Katha Upanishad

And to this same intuition of unity must we also circle back at the end of our theorizing if we're not to sink into despairing nihilism, which is another word for the loss of a vital, sustaining connection between self and world.


Abstraction, etymologically, derives from the Latin word for “separation, ” Right at the outset, the process of abstraction places us in a stance that is at a remove from the object and from ourselves, hence its impersonal character and its difficulttospecify relationship with particular, concrete, individual events and realworld details.
Of course, as these texts show, this adopted existential stance of separateness is a developmentally advanced form of pretendplay: we merely choose to disregard the allembracing context we find ourselves in in order to wrest a myopic flicker of clarity here and there.
The patchwork created by the sum total of these myopic flickers is our synoptic theory, But, if the Upanishads are right, any such approach to the unity of things is flawed, in principle:

“That which cannot be perceived by the eye, but by which the eye is perceived
That alone know as Brahman and not that which people here worship.
” Kena Upanishad

The experientially transformative comprehension of the Atman/Brahman unity seems almost like the first, and perhaps also the last, word of wisdom.
It seems to most fully describe our true, inescapable starting point, which is paradoxically also our most unattainable goal as they put it, “the goal of all longing.
” It turns out that the hardest place to get to in existence is one's own home! This is part of the agonizing logic of the situation we find ourselves in.
As Tagore put it, “The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.
”

These fragments teach us that we are ignorant of our true happiness, which lies in, as Max Zeller put it, learning to “relate to a life situation in the deepest sense: not from the standpoint of the ego that bemoans its fate and rebels against it, but from.
. . the greater inner law that has left behind its small birth, the narrow realm of personal outlook, for the sake of renewal and rebirth.
” That is, getting what we want is not what we really want, It is not what fills the gaping void at the center of the personality which drives us towards consummation and fulfillment,

What we most hunger for is to find that mode of relation that reveals the world as a home, It is to relate to the world on the level of what we call spirit, not sense, This is the meaning of the demand for greater unity that we find ourselves oftentimes making and which lies at the source of all our discontents, whether intellectual, moral, aesthetic, emotional, or otherwise.
The Upanishads show how beneath our familiar pseudoself, our constructed self, lie much deeper reserves by which we can relate ourselves to the real.


Ultimately, what they show is that the self just IS its characteristic mode of relation to the real Atman is Brahman, And it is not until we attain a unity of the personality at this underlying level that we can begin to grasp the unity of things.
Attaining unity within is the way to grasping unity without, Ultimately, the startling realization that the pursuit of selfknowledge leads us to is that our true center of gravity is to be found outside ourselves.
“The bond that attaches us to the life outside ourselves is the same bond that holds us to our own life,” as William Barrett put it.


In this, then, lies the insufficiency of theoretical knowledge, A theoretical grasp is not sufficient to transform the unity of the personality, It abstracts from the unity of the situation of encounter, and in so doing, it cannot draw on the full reserves of the personality to register reality in experienced witness.
Because attaining unity within the self is the precondition for discerning the unity in things, conceptualization cannot sufficiently specify the content of our relation to the world.


So the consummation of the philosophic quest to grasp the unity of things can never be found in a purely theoretical grasp though I'd add that such is probably an invaluable part of the means.
As a slight aside, the exclusive reliance on theory is perhaps the cause of the classic problem of "akrasia," or of ineffective wisdom, in Western ethics.
Theory just doesn't seem to be enough to drive knowledge home such that it transforms our motivational core, or the way that we see and feel things.
Theoretical knowledge doesn't alter the register in which our experience transpires, As an abstract acquisition, a piece of “intellectual property,” our theoretical understanding leaves us suffering and desiring as we did prior to acquiring it.
It remains inert in some unused compartment of our psyche, while our lives run on much as they did before, Thus, it doesn't by itself change our predispositions to act in ways that run against our principles, Sometimes, it doesn't keep us from destroying ourselves, each other, and our world,

In contrast, what the Upanishads offer is a view of philosophy as a way of life that is a corrective to this weakness.
The true goal and measure of knowing, they show, is a personal transformation that reorients our mode of relation to the world, Wisdom is not merely an inert cognitive acquisition, but a more fully realized mode of our being that enriches and deepens our whole capacity to respond to every situation of life.
This is wisdom coming home, as it were, enhancing our capacity to act in ways that enhance life,

This point is perhaps best brought home in the story of Svetaketu, in the Chandogya Upanishad, In the beginning of the story, Svetaketu prides himself on his having acquired conceptual knowledge of Brahman, His father's instruction, however, shows him how empty such an acquisition is if it stops short, as it does in his case, of existential realization of the discursively represented insight.
This story is perhaps the most damning critique of a purely theoretical approach to wisdom because it shows how such an approach fails to make the vital transition to the existential realization and integration of learned insight.
Until Svetaketu experiences the heart of the insight for himself, he does not know it, There are some truths that belong only to experience, They have to be lived through, This gives suffering perhaps the only meaning it has it too has the potential to bring insight and transformation, Such truths cannot be spoonfed to us through formal learning, but can only be acquired through personal seeking and struggle,

Ultimately, the Upanishads claim also an ontological transformation effectuated in the nature of the self following the attainment of this level of perspective, which modern secular readers will wonder at, if they stop long enough to reflect:

“Who sees all beings in his own self and his own self in all beings, loses all fear.
” Isa Upanishad

Anyway, the radiant simplicity of this order of truth which is after all the truth that we live by, that fuels our psyches, as food and water fuel our bodies is as innocuous, as ineffective, and as insipid as the dust under your feet and the water in your cells.
It comes as no surprise that such perennial wisdom is worthless in the world, It is not the kind of insight that you can cash into a theory, or a research program that you can stamp your name on.
It can never figure as the principal player in some blockbuster Theory of Everything and, if these writings are right, it will be the literally vital ingredient that will always be missing in all such synoptic attempts.
Instead, what forms the currency of our intellectual world, ultimately, are those lesser unities that provide us with stylish forms of abstraction from the concrete situation we find ourselves in.
Perhaps the closest symbolic approximation of lived truth that we can get are just such luminous fragmentary glimpses as we are given here, which somehow manage to gesture to an underlying constitutive background unity, which alone is understood as significant.


Trying to take seriously the possibility of casting doubt on the foundational Platonic creed that the unity of the real can be reflected by our cognitive processes of abstraction asks us to basically reexamine the ground that we think we're walking on and to consider that maybe it is but a thin, projected veneer a reified construct of cognitive process.
That is a hard pill to swallow, I think that right here, at the entrance, is where most Westerners like myself are most likely to be lost, Yet, unless we make the effort of placing even this cherished belief, as selfevident and rational as it seems to us to be, into question, we cannot pierce the letter and grasp the vision of the Upanishads.


The effort to bring the spirit of these letters to life seems like a part of my own life's work to shed the nagging sense of irreality that haunts even my everyday life.
I often find myself appalled when I am reading along, and suddenly, the letters fall on my deaf ears, Somebody knocks at the door, and it rings hollow inside, Reading such works is not just uplifting, as others say, It is also incredibly sad, because they ask us in this way to confront our own emptiness, I am reminded at such times that giving in to my spiritual complacency is accepting premature death, and that I must continue to go against the grain of my complacent nature if I am to realize more and more of the meaning to which these words try their best to gesture.


It is a bit bewildering for me to see how something so fragmented as these texts are could speak of unity more eloquently than other perfectly finished philosophical systems manage to.
Perhaps it is true, in an ultimate sense, that every system and every model is nothing but a counterfeit unity, and that without this active vision of unity that these fragments gesture to, all knowledge is empty acquisition.


The Upanishads not only offer a picture of what the consummating vision of philosophy might look like, of what it'd be like to look upon the world from the stance of our own highest realization.
They also provide a kind of common threshold to the religious life for people otherwise wary of that dimension of our experience, I'd agree with Mascaro's introduction though, which seems to suggest that the universality of the Upanishads is their very limitation, and that later developments in Hinduism the Bhagavad Gita, as well as in Christianity, more fully specify religious experience in its concreteness.
They are a threshold, not the main chamber, Ultimately, you must choose one specific path or another in the building, if you choose to go in, Though they help us to touch base with what is called the soul as well as help us put some flesh on this strange term through speaking to that level of our being the larger question of God still largely remains behind the scenes.


And yes, writing a Goodreads review of the Upanishads is lame and weird, .