The Upanishads

The Upanishads

from my friend Tom 

from the UPANISHADS from Tom Cowan on Vimeo.

Tom and I have a friendship which goes back to 1962! 

Along the way we have shared many thoughts and enthusiasms from film, literature and music, and occasionally from the field of philosophical speculation.

We often agree and occasionally beg to differ. 

While I appreciate the beauty of the natural world I have difficulty with philosophy when it equates everything as expression of the Universal Oneness.

I have expressed this to Tom and he has agreed we can open this up for discussion with anyone who might like to participate.

I am overwhelmed by the complexity of the world and everywhere I see beauty I also see it being broken down. Not only by human forces or human excesses... but everywhere in the natural world I see a struggle between birth and death, life and decay. Even the very formation of this astonishing planet was from all accounts a most violent affair, so I wrote this to Tom and let's see what you make of it:

Tom, the problem of this philosophy (as represented in your chosen images) is that it lacks the violence of "love" or "oneness" expressed in human violence, natural violence of the animal kingdom, the violence of droughts floods and earthquakes. 

This world does have expression everywhere of calmness and astonishing beauty but it is all "tearable".

And even the beauty we see everywhere has been formed by billions of years of violent activity. It is 4.5 billion years since mother Earth started forming to give us those beautiful landscapes with stunning flora and fauna, and humans bathing in the rivers, and everything came out of a fiery mass which lasted for more than half the age of the Earth.

Iceland today and Hawaii are both leftovers, reminders of those "tearable" eons where no life existed such as it does today.

And on the Cosmic scale, no planets such as Earth can be "born" without the cataclysmic forces which produce galaxies and stars out of massive clouds of gases... they are not pretty and not peaceful actions Tom! They do make pretty pictures from Hubble and James Webb telescopes but their pictorial beauty belies the violence of those forces.

So please give me a universal picture of love which includes both the stunningly beautiful calmness born out of excessive violence! The way a baby is born to a human mother from a tremendous struggle through the birth canal, a life and death struggle for both, to a picture of the baby asleep in the mother's arms as if nothing much has happened recently.

My mother groand! my father wept.

Into the dangerous world I leapt:

Helpless, naked, piping loud; 

Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my fathers hands: 

Striving against my swaddling bands: 

Bound and weary I thought best

To sulk upon my mothers breast.

OPEN FOR DISCUSSION!

pt

ADDITIONAL NOTES FROM TOM    (8.5.24)

Aldous Huxley was the first to introduce me to the Bhagavad Gita - he called it the Perennial Philosophy, meaning that it contained universal truths. 

I went to India in 1968 and carried a copy of the Gita with me.

The Bhagavad Gita is just one of thousands of Upanishads that were written over thousands of years. The 108 rather short remaining Upanishads are the mystical expression of Saints and seers regarding their meditations on consciousness.

The Upanishads are dealing with the question of the SELF. Their subject is the quest for consciousness.

Here’s a sample:

“The SELF lies deep in the hearts of all, hidden behind the illusions of law, energy and inertia”

“Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear"

So it is focused on individual realisation. That is: how you and me escape the violence of our natures by realising our Soul.

Their realisations connect the Soul we find within us with the Soul of the cosmos. The video is about that bit.

I find the Upanishads always surprising and those ancient men of the mountains are surprisingly familiar.

They don’t deal directly with Vishnu, the god of destruction. We see destruction on the news every night.

The Mahabarata is set in the midst of a cataclismic war. It sets brother against brother in the quest for power with death inevitable.

The Bhagavat Gita is an insert into the great epic. It deals with the way out of the illusions that foster killing. The later Upanishads focus only on the way to Self realisation. 

While I love the poetry of the Upanishads and they give me solace in the face of the horrors of our time - I can only imagine the realisation they describe.

Still, it may be useful to imagine identifying our universal Self within - and imagining its connection to the Ground of all Being (Huxley’s term).