Meeting of January 4: We had a nice quiet session, following our routine of half an hour of meditation with Indian classical music, then one half hour of silent meditation and finally the question and answer time. For me the highlight was the beautiful sitar played by Shahid Parvez, a relatively young artist with a highly individual aesthetic style.
A couple of questions asked related to physical discomfort felt during meditation. Reports of soreness, muscular tension, body getting cold or other distraction are not uncommon. These symptoms occur more frequently during the initial stages of meditation practice. Relaxing the muscles, positioning the body, stretching and breathing exercises for a few minutes before meditation are often helpful. We decided that in future meditation sessions we will allow time for these relief activities during the five minutes of invocation we play at the beginning of our meditation. This should make our sessions more relaxing and should improve the quality of our experience.
Meeting of January 9: This was the Upanishads study meeting we hold on alternate Friday evenings. We have been studying the Isha Upanishad for some months now, exploring each and every Sanskrit word of the text and discussing different interpretations emanating from those of Shankara, Ramanuja and Radhakrishnan. We are using Radhakrishnan’s book called Principal Upanishads. We also read from Radhakrishnan’s massive Introduction in the book in the latter part of the session. But we devote the major part of the session to the Sanskrit text itself. We completed our study of the Isha Upanishad at this meeting. Happy ending, sort of!
I pointed out the epistemological nature of the verses 9, 10 and 11 compared to the metaphysical nature of the verses 12, 13 and 14. Since the distinction between epistemology and metaphysics is not obvious, I dwelt upon it in some detail. These are two branches of philosophy, with epistemology mostly serving the function of a method while metaphysics largely serves the function of the outcome. In terms of content, metaphysics deals with being, existence and reality at the ultimate level, going beyond our surface experiences of the world. Epistemology, on the other hand, focuses on how we arrive at our knowledge of truth and reality, how we support it, how we examine it and how can we decide what and how much can we know in reality. So, while epistemology tells us how to know reality, metaphysics describes the reality itself.
Verses 9-11 employ as key terms two words: vidya and avidya. Vidya literally means learning or knowledge and avidya literally means nescience or ignorance. Though literal meanings are not helpful in understanding the full import of what is involved here, it is clear that we are talking about knowledge here which clearly pertains to epistemology. Similarly, verses 12-14 use the key words sambhuti and asambhuti which literally mean being and non-being. This clearly puts them in the range of metaphysics. For greater expansion of the points involved here please refer to the highlights and commentary on previous meetings on the Isha Upanishad, especially the meeting of December 26.
The next point I’d like to highlight here is that the last four verses of Isha Upanishad seem to me to describe the actual spiritual methods referred to in these six verses. There is the method of avidya which helps overcome mrityu or death and the method of vidya which secures life eternal. This is from the perspective of knowledge. There is the method of asambhuti which also overcomes death and of sambhuti which secures life eternal. This clearly pertains to the viewpoint of reality. If you remember from my past commentary on the subject, specially on the meeting of December 26, 2008, I call these methods by the term “ladder.” I hold that verses 15-18, being the last four verses of Isha, briefly describe these four ladders, thus completing a total and comprehensive spiritual viewpoint. I explained the details of this at the meeting.
Meeting of January 11, 2009: At this Gita and Hinduism meeting we studied and discussed verse 35 of the tenth chapter of the Gita. A word of note here is what is called brihat-saman or the “large chant.” The term “large chant” is quite opaque but Vedic philosophy of Ojha we had done comes to the rescue once again, telling us that the word saman does not mean a metrical chant used in sacrificial ritual here but the outreach orb of anything. “Large chant” in this context refers to the saman or outreach orb of the Sun or the surya-mandala that reaches up to the parameshthi-mandala where the Sun finds its “food.”
From the book Philosophy of the Gita we read page 145 which is the final page of Section 6 of the book. Here I related the nature of moksha or spiritual freedom in relation to immutable individuator (avyaya purusha) and to non-perishing individuator (akshara purusha). The spiritual seeker who follows identitive monism or sankhya-nishtha accesses the avyaya directly, while a seeker following actional dualism or karma-nishtha accesses the akshara directly and reaches the avyaya through the grace of akshara.
OM TAT SAT !
Ramesh
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