Kena
Presented on: Thursday, February 9, 1989
Presented by: Roger Weir
Intro To The Major Works Of The Upanishads
Presentation 6 of 13
Kena
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, February 9, 1989
Transcript:
like this is taught in a traditional form. That is, it's taught from person to person. And in India there is an unbroken lineage for this material. And my first contact with it about 30 years ago in the Chicago, Madison Wisconsin area was with an Indian from Central India, from Nagpur. And ostensibly on the surface he was a, what we would call colloquially, a soil engineer. He was one of these agronomist who knows about the chemical content of soils. And he said that that was a very pressing problem in India. And that it wasn't at all a low-level kind of life task. But he was in a lineage, a direct lineage, from his father able to teach The Upanishads and The Bhagavad-Gita.
And the first time that I heard an exposition. I didn't even know it was an exposition. I didn't realize that I was being told something traditional. And as a young American I offered all kinds of ingenious arguments and rationalizations and wanted proofs. But he came from an ancient lineage and he took care of me. Instead of getting into an argument, he said let's take a walk and just keep talking. And that well come to an understanding. And this walk was held in Madison Wisconsin. And I don't know if any of you know but the University of Wisconsin is on a lake, Lake Mendota. And it's seven miles across directly and it's about 20 miles around. And we started about 10 o'clock at night. And it wasn't until early in the morning that we actually got around the whole lake. And what was interesting was that he let me do the talking the first half the way. And I thought I was brilliant. I thought I was ingenious and on top of it. And its peculiar, its synchronistic, but directly across the lake from the University is the state mental asylum. And by the time we got to there I had actually run out of things to say. I had exhausted all of my capacity. When you're 20 you have just so much capacity. And he had taken it all and taken it in. And then he began to go back and give a classic traditional quiet delivery of the material. And I was tired. I was physically a little peaked. And I was argumentatively exhausted. And he talked in the smooth measured way. He was a little Indian with bright eyes, quiet manner.
And as we got around and as the dawn started to come up the, it seemed like the amperage in what he was saying began to score on me. And by the time we got back around. And he was telling me about the breaking point in The Bhagavad-Gita where Arjuna in his conversation with Krishna begins to realize that all his life he has listened to the mind. And that he has never quieted the mind to see if there are some other voice inside of himself. And I realized that this is exactly what I had done. And that I had had very little experience with whatever was there in an inner dimension without the voice of the mind kibitzing, as it were. I didn't know that was kibitzing. I thought that's how you thought. I thought that's what thinking was. And I can still remember beginning to get a glimpse of understanding. And as my understanding came in more and more his words had a kind of a force. And I it was like a double consciousness. I was aware that he was speaking exactly the same, but that the force of the words, the meaning, was bowling me over. Was eliciting from me a response which I found that I was not able to control and channel. And began to have a kind of a kinesthetic sense of an aura of presence around myself. When I would step would be like an, an echo of dance movements as I would step. And I didn't know where that was coming from it at all. And he was very kind. And when he finished and we got back to the University, he said something colloquial like see you later.
And I was just, I was bowled over by the whole event. And went to read and the book that I picked up at that time is this first volume of The Sacred Books Of The East. And I still have this volume from about 30 years ago. And it was first published in 1879.
And tonight, we're going to talk about The Upanishad that he talked about to me. It is, and so I'm glad that thirty years later I can give you somewhat a traditional amperage. It's up to you whether you can hear it or not. But I'll do my best.
This Upanishad is known as Kena. K-e-n-a. Kena Upanishad. Because the first word in the Upanishad in Sanskrit is kena. Kena is a questioning kind of a word. And it means essentially whom. By who or whom. And it means essentially the whole Upanishad is concerned with the question who, who is this that I really am?
The Upanishad called Kena because of the first word actually in ancient times was not called Kena. its ancient name was The Talavakara. The Talavakara Upanishad. Because it occurred in a larger body of writing the Talavakara Brahmana. And almost all of that Brahmana are directions and formulas for sacrificial actions. What to do. And when to do it. And why you do it. It's essentially about man and God. About man's actions and the images of God that he uses. And the coordinating of those two sets. But when The Talavakara Upana
Brahmana comes to about the ninth section, ninth conda as it were, all those instructions stop. All those complications stop. And there in the equivalent of about three and a half-printed pages is like a gem of brilliant insight and understanding. Beyond understanding. It's like in this Upanishad is the glint of all the meaning of everything that you've been doing and think you have been doing condensed into a flash point. Now it takes about three three-and-a-half pages to deliver that flashpoint. So that what comes to us that The Kena Upanishad is the exclamation mark at the end of a long series of complicated instructions of how to move in ways that will make you consonant with Gods, we think of Gods will or Gods love. But The Upanishad makes it clear that even though the essential energy is one of adoration, the quality is one of presence. So that man moves in consonant with Gods presence.
In The Talavakara Upanishad called Kena, there are four different sections. And they're called condas. And I've outlined for you so that you can understand a little bit here of the structure. Because the structure is essential. In these four condas, or these four sections, the first two, the first pair are in high poetry. And the second pair are in incisive prose. Now there's not much difference in English translation between the poetry and prose but in the Sanskrit the poetry is high floss. It's like high dramatic language. And in the prose, it's like a concessive telling of an arcane story. The myth of all myths. And in this myth of all myths that's told, in the second half of The Talavakara Upanishad, the story is told in the third section. And in the fourth section one of the characters of this myth of all myths steps forth from the story and engages the reader. By implication involving the reader in a kind of a meta reality. That you thought that you were reading a book of high spiritual language, but it was in the book. And then in the final section one of the characters in a story in the book steps out and talks with you directly. And it's your response to that whole ensemble that counts.
In this way The Kena Upanishad, The Talavakara Upanishad introduces a new note into Indian civilization. The note is that the page, the writing, the written word, is a teaching horizon that can open up the inside of a human being. That whereas before it had been word of mouth, that only spiritual teaching by word of mouth was effective. writing was in its early centuries. In fact, for the first couple of thousand years was just an account keeping for economic records. Business purposes. The earliest writings that we have are really accountant ledger books. It's only with the advent of documents like The Kena Upanishad that it became able to be a medium that was under control enough, malleable enough, to begin to also serve as a new medium for secret instruction. What had before been necessary for word of mouth, one-to-one, was now entrusted to the written word, which would be in a sense on the page. So, it's a revolution in communication. It means then that the sage who taught The Talavakara Upanishad first understood that he or she was now to have students of indefinite numbers throughout the ages.
So that The Kena Upanishad, The Talavakara Upanishad, has in its very structure a brilliant super consciousness aware that this has to be handled in such a way that the experience of reading it will also awaken you. And this is what makes it distinctive.
The hallmark of the insight is this, that in order to convey a sense of the presence of God there must be a sense of paradox in the human world. But that the paradox is in the world. It's in man's communication capacity and not in God. That God is not paradoxical. That it's mans communicative skills that raised to their highest are paradoxical. So that man has to learn to hold in advance his sense of belief in either aspect of the paradoxes that come up to him at the end. He has to learn not to pull the trigger on his decision-making capacity. And that means he has to be able to balance his will, his willfulness. Not to make that decision. this is right, that's wrong. This is good, that's bad. And that in that balance the most precarious thing that comes up is the self-doubt that one any longer has the capacity to will. Because you've held this in suspension and you're not used to it, you begin to have unconsciously or subconsciously a doubt that anything can be done. That there is any decision to be made. That well I just, I well, I don't know. And you'll end up in that kind of a gray, neutral limbo. And that of course as an image of true death within life.
So, in The Kena Upanishad, in its structure, the super brilliant sage who made this understood that the basic process that has to be before our eyes all the time is the teaching mode. So that there is the teacher and the pupil, or however many pupils there are, can come in and fill that space. be that role. But that the teacher and the pupil is a very special case of engendering the paradox. So that the pupil has to come to understand what the teacher is saying but in a non-judgmental way. In the sense that it's a paradox, is it what the teacher is saying or is it what I am understanding? And to finally come and hold that in an ultimate balance. It is not what the teacher is saying. It is not what I am understanding. But it is God's presence.
And the, the clue to this, like the symbolic cinch that holds all of this together, is the Sanskrit word for truth which is Satya. And usually it would be pronounced sat-ya. But if you discipline yourself and you say the word in a measured way, you'll notice that there are three syllables in word. Sa-ty-a. The sat is that immortal aspect of one that rises transcendently. The ty is that mortal aspect of oneself that tends to want to become imminent. Not imminent like prominent but imminent like right here now. And the ya is that which holds those two together in a balance. it's the yoga, as it were. And the yoga, always, a yoga always disciplines itself towards the ya aspect of truth. The Satya. The, the conclusion of the truth the silence after the words. The unity beyond the polarity.
But in The Upanishad, one goes one step deeper than that to see that all three must be held in balance. That Satya is not only a polarity held in an ultimate balance in unity, but that that whole ensemble is something which can be taken away and some other discovered. And the Indian term for this is para. And para means beyond. It means that truth is an understanding which we can come to in our ultimate sense. And then we must have a spiritual courage to let whatever we have understood of truth ultimately, let that set aside and experience what is there beyond that.
And so, The Upanishad has this kind of an arcane jiu-jitsu almost. To try and bring us into a kind of a use of language, a use of education, a use of our minds, a use of our awareness. Which brings us to whatever ultimate capacity we have. And then to convince us that we must set this ultimate realization aside for the unknown. And that when we do that then God is there. God is there beyond our capacity to envision.
Now in The Kena Upanishad like almost every other ancient writing, there is a use of terms of the Gods. And in The Kena Upanishad because of its peculiar nature it is going to show us a realization that the Gods belong to a mythological level. And that there is an experience that all of the images of the Gods in that mythological level, which are so essential to life, so essential to the psyche, are but an aspect that you should wink your eye at. And that equal to that on the other side is the psychological level, the deep self-experience. Which is always fraught with danger and struggle. Always, always a travail. That that too has to be when one given. Not given up. Not discarded. But given to the moment. Given to the presence.
And the king of the Gods in the mythological sense whose name is Indra. Indra is the king of the Gods. but if you recall about three weeks ago in The Aitareya Upanishad, The Aitareya Upanishad tells us the secret teaching. That the pronunciation of the name Indra is a contraction. And the full correct pronunciation of the name of the king of the Gods, is Idendra. And Indendra in Sanskrit means he who perceives this. So that the king of the Gods is really that aspect of oneself, he who perceives all this. So that there's a double entendre here. The king of the Gods in the mythological sense is a disguise for your own deep self. So, when The Talavakara Upanishad, The Kena Upanishad, brings us to that moment where we balance the mythological and the psychological together and put those hands down. Open ourselves up to what is beyond those. It's a scary moment. Because we have never in our wildest imagination ever considered that there might be a moment when we were unprotected by the Gods and unprotected by our own deep self. what's out there? What's in that unknown? And so, The Upanishad teacher in a very comprehensive way prepares us for that ultimate moment of courage to lay down every defense that we might have to screen out the experience of God unvarnished. So, it's a very great Upanishad.
At the beginning is this invocation, and I'll read it in the Radhakrishnan translation for you. it's just three lines. In Sanskrit the lines are of such a nature that they're usually a couplet, a sloka as there, as they're called.
The first thing in, in the invocation is to invigorate the moment. Invigorate yourself to get the circulation up. May my limbs grow vigorous. my speech, my breath, my eye, my ear. And also, my strength and all my senses. Then comes a sense of complementation. All is the Brahman of the Upanishads. May I never discard Brahman. May the Brahman never discard me. May there be no discarding. May there be no discarding of me.
Do you notice from what I have said preparing you how the second of the three lines of the invocation speaks directly to this experience that the sage knows you're going to have to do. You're going to have to discard your favorite images of God. And your favorite sense of self. Those are what exactly are going to have to go. so, in the invocation here what is really God is not going to be discarded. What is really you is not going to be discarded. Though when the time comes you will think indeed, I'm, I'm throwing away everything.
And then the third is a sense of bringing this invigoration and the sense of complementation together. And when that's brought together in the traditional wisdom teachings that was always a life dedication. That this is for life. Not for life long, but that all of this is being done so that life can be in its richest. It's a dedicating of all of this activity. Why are we doing this? Why does anyone do this? Why does anyone go out on these almost impossible quests? To enrich life so that life can be full. So, this life dedication at the end of the invocation. Let those truths which are set forth in The Upanishads live in me. Dedicated to the self. Ohm. Peace. Peace. Peace.
So, in the invocation is this classic bringing of a presence, bringing the energies into play and then dedicating them to an enrichment of, of life.
Then the first conda comes out and the very first word is literally who. Who willed and directed. does the mind light on its objects? It's not just that the eye sees, and the ear hears. Who is it that, that directs this? For whom does the eye see? For whom does the ear hear? the mind? for whom does the mind work? It's like a probing question and it's like if you get the sense right it's like holding two mirrors together and introducing an image in between them so if there's an influent reflection. And you can see that if you look backwards or forwards there is no way to tell whom. The only place that you can tell whom, is not to look into the reflections back or forward. Not to look into the past of the future. But to try and constellate yourself in attention and concentration to see what was it in the present that made all those echoes in the first place.
28that is who I really am. That is my essential, universal self. Whatever that is. Not the echoes but the, the real thing. That's who it is.
And it goes on. Because these questions have to be set into reverberation.
By whom willed and directed that the mind light on its objects? By whom commanded does life at first move? At whose will do people utter this very speech? And what God is it that prompts the eye and the ear? Because it is that which is the ear of the ear. It is that which is the eye of the eye. It is that which is the mind of the mind. The breath of the breath. Those who are wise give up all false notions of self-sufficiency and departing from this realm become immortal.
So, what is introduced here is a very broad kind of a strategy. It's easy not to look at what the eye is looking at and close your eyes. It's easy not to hear what the ear is hearing. You can just distract yourself and not hear it. How do you close the inner eye? How do you close the inner ear? The eye of the eye. The ear of the ear. And who can do that? And The Upanishad says, that on that level we can find out who can do this. Not on the level of seeing and hearing, but on the level of who can close the ear of the ear. Who can close the eye of the eye? That's someone that we should know about. And the only way to know about that is to become wise in the sense of giving up this whole realm of notions of self-sufficiency. You see, we think it's our eye. We think it's our mind. Or we can say well we have a secret inner self. Who is directing that secret inner self? You see, and you begin to get in the infinite regressive Echo's.
So, The Kena Upanishad then brings us into an exclusive quandary. The quandary is this, There the eye goes not. There speech does not occur. There, there is no mind. We do not know, and we understand not how one can teach this. The problem that the sage has then is brought up before the pupil. You think you have a problem in understanding what I am saying. And the sage says I have an equal problem to you because I don't know how to teach this to you. Because being where I am, I don't have any way to reach you. And you don't have any way to reach me, how can there be any teaching with this kind of an impasse.
Now notice that strategically what the author of The Upanishad, the brilliant sage is doing he's introducing the pupil to the real problem. The real problem is not that the pupil doesn't know is, is ignorant and needs to learn from the teacher. The real problem is that there's no way to communicate between the teacher and the pupil. Between those who know God and those who don't, there's a missing gulf. And the real problem is that they must work together otherwise this gulf is never going to be bridged. It's of such a nature that one can't bridge it to the other. No matter how brilliant you are, you can't do it alone. That the pupil then begins to be moved out of his archetypal ignorance. Not the ignorance of not knowing this or not knowing that but the archetypal ignorance of not knowing really what the problem is. The problem of problems. And the solution to the problem of problems is that you have to work it out together. If the teacher and the pupil don't work, it together there's no way that anything can be going on. There's no way that teaching can occur.
So, the issue, The Upanishad right away in the third section, right away brings it up. We've had only three sentences and The Upanishad brings up the essential question. Is how do we teach this? Never mind what it is. The real problem is how it can be brought across.
So that in the fourth line of The Upanishad it reads like this, Other indeed it is than the known. And also, it is above the unknown. Now there is a kind of a logical balance here. It's not the same as saying, well if either known or unknown. If you say it that way your mind has a subconscious category to put that in. It's called mirror opposites. And you just automatically subconsciously do it. This language is very precise. It's made by someone who is experienced with this kind of inner reflective jujitsu. And says it's other than the known and it's above the unknown. So other than the known means that it's like an obverse rather than a reverse. And above the unknown means it's like, in logic the term is a contrapositive rather than a mirror image. So, you're dealing with the edges, with like the diamond edges, rather than the two sides of a polarity you're dealing with the corners. And the subconscious worldly mental categories do not have a rote reflex. They do not have a habituated reaction to this. We're not used to considering the corners. We're used to considering sides but not the angle views.
In fact, there's a classic realization about this, the line that links the corners is a diagonal. Instead of a straight line or a vertical line, it's a diagonal. It cuts across all the issues in a way that you, were unexpected. You didn't expect that you would ever look at things this way.
And so, the sage of The Kena Upanishad has gotten us into this perception that there is a completely different way of looking at all of this. Then it reads like this, this is the completion of this, this line. It's made into two lines in English but in Sanskrit it's one line. Other indeed is it than the known. And also, it is above the unknown. Thus, have we heard from the ancients who have explained it to us. In other words, this peculiar situation that you now find yourself in. that all the reference that you are used to using are suddenly turn 90 degrees, 45 degrees, he's saying that this is a traditional way of teaching. He just said the line before that this is a problem of how to teach this and now, he's telling you that it not only has been solved as a problem, but it's been passed on since ancient times. So that the student is turned around again. He's turned backwards when he's taught that the problem is communicating. The teacher and the pupil together that's the problem. What is there to say? How could we say it anyway? And so, the pupil is turned around. he's facing the same way the teachers facing. They're facing the unknown together.
And then the very next line after he's shown the corners. It's other than the known it's above the unknown Then the sage says, we have been taught this in this way since ancient times. So, both the pupil and the teacher turn around, instead of facing the unknown they face the known again. but they do it together. So, the pupil has been like magnetized to the teachers sense of what the real problem is. It isn't the problem the student thought he had. It's a problem that the teacher and the student have together. They always have. They always will. The problem is how can we learn together? Not what I can teach you, what you can learn from me. What can we learn together? And once the pupil is affinities to the teacher in this way, then the teacher and the pupil turn together and face the ancient tradition together. And they realize that whatever they're going to work out together, this issue of cooperation has been faced since ancient times by human beings. And they have found a way to do it.
So, you can see how The Kena Upanishad in a brilliant way gives you in the first four lines what is called, a four-part structure is called a quaternary. And whenever you have a quaternary you have like a cross-section, like a mandala of the deep self already. So that the student knows at this point that if you took a cross-section of his psyche and you put it up in a diagram it would have these four sections. You have the question of who. You have the question of essence. The question of the problem of teaching it. And the question that this is an ancient tradition of teaching in exactly this way.
Then The Kena Upanishad takes this quaternary and puts it in motion. It's not enough to have a cross-section. So, it turns this on its side. Turns this quaternary on its side and pushes it through a five-phase process. That five-phase transformational process is characteristic of Asia. You find it in China, and you find it in India. In China in Daoism it's always a zero-based transformational process. You can find it in Laozi the 42nd chapter. The Chinese version is that the Dao makes the one. zero makes the one. the one makes the two. The two makes the three. and the three makes, the Chinese phrase is the 10,000 things. It's a Chinese phrase for multiplicity. In our 20th century understanding we would understand that that the three process makes an infinity. It makes an infinite number of things. And this infinity factors back into the Dao without any remainder. Infinity comes back to zero smooth. There's no remainder. So that there is an energy cycle.
In India the energy cycle is understood as the five koshas. And we've gone through this in The Taittiriya Upanishad. And these five koshas, or the five sheaths, are now presented as a transformation process in The Kena Upanishad as being not the stages that you thought they were. They're not just penetrating five sheaths but that that whole process is like a, I've drawn a sine wave here on the board, that whole process is like the energy wave of God. If you can see that five-phase process as a whole, just one of those units you will tune yourself to that vibration. That's God's vibration. That's the energy where his reality is. Not any five-phase process but the five together as a transformational movement, as it were. The Kena Upanishad
says that this is Brahman. I write Brahman on the board.
So, the first section of the four of The Kena Upanishad the first four established the quaternary of the self. And the next five take that quaternary and put it through one complete transformation phase process. To show you this is what it, this is what it's like. I'll read it to you and, and you'll see. This is how it begins That which is not expressed through speech but that by which speech is expressed. that verily and verily known is Brahma. Not what people here worship. And the sixth, the next one, number two in this sequence. That which is not thought by the mind, but by which they say the mind is thought. That verily know thou is Brahman. And not what people here worship. and the seventh, which is the third in this process. That which is not seen by the eye, but by which the eyes are seeing. That verily know thou is Brahman and not what people here adore.
Now pause here for a second. That middle part of a transformation process is a very accurately precarious point. It's the point of balance. If you do not have an engendering sense of commitment you will lose yourself here. It's like the American Indian sage Black Elk says, it's in the dark of men's eyes if they get lost. What that means in a very accurate wisdom way is that when you come to look at yourself directly, you look with these eyes, with the inner eyes, and you see eye to eye. And usually in these eyes in the world there's an image there in the dark of your eyes. But the inner eye in this process, the pupil of the inner eye has no image whatsoever. And your eye, the pupil, has no image whatsoever. It's not that you're not seeing anything, but its that what you're seeing doesn't have any image form.
Should we pause. Do you want to take a break?
END OF SIDE ONE
The audio quality of side two of the lecture is too poor to be able to continue the transcription at this time.