Commentary on the Isavasya Upanishad : 19. Swami Krishnananda.

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Tuesday, December 13, 2022. 07:30. 

Part-3.

Post -19.

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We owe a debt to this world, and we owe a debt to this body. It is the debt that we owe to this body and the world that compels us to live in this body and to work in this world. Sometimes this debt is designated as prarabdha karma – a kind of nemesis, a reaction produced by certain actions that we did in the past, accumulated for the purpose of experience in this world, forcing us to reap the fruit of those actions, whether pleasurable or miserable, whatever the case may be. This is that impulse to act. It is this impulse that keeps us alive in this body. As long as the reaction of those actions, called prarabdha, continues, as long as the momentum of those actions continues, as long as we have not exhausted by experience the results of those actions which are called prarabdha, the body will continue to live. The body cannot live even for a moment after the exhaustion of this prarabdha karma. Like the flame of a lamp gets extinguished when there is no more oil, death of the body will take place instantaneously when the momentum of those actions which have produced this body ceases to act. Similarly will the impulse to act in this world cease automatically.

Therefore, it is futile to try to cut off connection with the world. No one can ignore this body. No one can deliberately disconnect oneself from this body and the world as long as this impulse with which we are born, and which itself is the reason for our birth, is alive. Hence, the warning is discharged in this Upanishadic Mantra: do not attach yourself to this body or the work of this world under the impression that there is nothing more; and also, do not ignore the body or the world, because you cannot do that. No one can peel one's own skin. Work has to be carried on in this world through this body, though not for the pleasure that the work brings or the delicious fruit that the work may yield. That would again be further attachment to the work, and would increase the desire to perpetuate life in this body. Work should not be done for the pleasurable fruit that it brings, not for name, fame, authority, not for any kind of compensation that we expect through this action, but merely because it has to be done as a debt that we owe to the body and the world through this working of the prarabdha karma.

In that manner, live in this world. Thus the world will free you from its clutches. Mrityu, death, will not any more harass you because death, which goes together with birth, is a consequence of the karmas of the past. As long as the karmas of the past germinate into action, life in this world and the body will continue to exist, with all its involvements in life. Knowing this, one has to discharge the debt through the body in respect of the world – but be not attached.

The knowledge which is referred to here as the counterpart of action, resorting to which entirely, unconnected with action, is supposed to lead one to greater darkness, is theoretical knowledge. It is imagining in the mind, like building castles in the air: I am not this body, I have no connection with this world, I have no connection with anybody, I have no relation to any person in the world, this body is not me. There are people who chant mantra-like statements of this kind, which cut no ice because what is the use of merely saying “I am not this body”, when we know we are the body? That knowledge, which is mere adumbration of a false notion entertained conceptually – not actually a freedom from the body that is realised, but a mere thought in the mind together with the entanglement in the body – such a knowledge will take us to greater darkness because it is hypocrisy. 

It is hypocritical contemplation to imagine theoretically “I am the Atman”, while we know that the body pinches with every kind of pain in this world. We have hunger and thirst, and terror of every kind in this world. The body experiences them. As long as this consciousness of the existence of the body is with us, we cannot say that we are not the body. Merely saying, or chanting a mantra-like type of conceptualisation that is theoretical, scriptural, will make a person go to greater darkness, because the bondage will not cease. They will take birth once again, and because of the egoism with which they started this kind of theoretic contemplation – a hypocrisy, as it were – they will entangle themselves once again in rebirth, and continue to do the same work to which they were subjected earlier.

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To be continued