When I Was King

The Upanishads, or the most well-known and circulated exegesis of the Vedic tradition, are the more philosophical answer to the religious-based Vedas. This was not only a philosophical movement, but it signaled a significant power shift in ancient Indian society.

Formerly, the ruling class, or caste was the Brahmin, or priestly caste. These were chiefly men from the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans who had descended upon the sub-continent from most likely the Russian Steppes, or former Persian empire in about the year 1500 BCE. In order to distinguish these taller, fairer skinned conquerors, the caste system, based upon varna, or color, was installed. Though this later becomes associated with civil status and occupation, originally the caste system was a way to discriminate between the conquering and the conquered.

For quite some time the Brahmins reigned supreme, espousing the holy scriptures as the Truth, but this was not to last. Within the second caste, the Kshatriya, there began to be murmurs of discontent. The Kshatriya class was the princely and warrior caste and the Upanishads belong primarily to their canon fodder of thought. Within this tradition, The Bhagavad Gita, whose hero is the princely warrior, Arjuna, is considered to be a discreet Upanishad within the larger epic, the Mahabharata.

Upanishad, or Upa-ni-shad, literally means to “approach and sit before.” These were teachings in which the student would approach the guru and sit before him, engaging intellectual debate, seeking clarification in the often vague and contradictory scriptures. These became the dialectic of the Kshatriya who eventually did wrestle the power from the Brahmins, and amongst whom Siddhartha Gautama, or, the Buddha , was counted. His questioning of the scriptures of old was quite in line with the Upanishadic tradition of the dialectic, quite like that of Socrates in his native Athens.

The Mandukya Upanishad chiefly deals with the breakdown of the sacred syllable of OM, which is famously used in yoga classes around the world as a mantra to be used for meditation.

However, the “true” nature of OM, when examined, is protracted to four movements, A, U, M, and Silence. When chanting the OM, it should begin from deep in the chest cavity, reaching back to the spine at the back of the throat with a bass “A” which then gradually moves up the esophagus as the “U” transiting towards the tongue with the “M” as it moves to the lips and finally clenched teeth and the nasal drone exiting from the nostrils trailing off into Slience, to be repeated again from the core of the abdomen.

In Upanishadic tradition, these tesseract of sound (and absence of sound), mimics the four stages of sleep, ranging from light, disturbed sleep of the “A” to a superbly profound, dreamless sleep of the silence, signaling the dissolution of the Self into the Atman, or Universal Soul. Before that, the Self enters the dream stage in which all things are possible. In the dream state, a pauper becomes king, a murderer a saint, and all barriers of Time and Space are broken. It is the great equalizer for it is the verisimilitude of Death, the true great equalizer.

In Advaita Vedanta, the concept then of the dreaming stage of sleep is likened to the quest for liberating the mind of discrimination between the Self and Other, between opposites, and any discretions at all. It is the moment before enlightenment in which the thinking and intellectualism can serve one no longer, it is the space between the calculus that cannot be measured, that illusive cantor dust, yet only transcended by the release of the ignorance of the “educated” mind, which deludes us with divisions, rather than seeking correspondences.

Shankara writes of this transitional phenomenon:

That which transcends caste and creed, family and heritage,

Devoid of name and form, praise and blame;

Transcending Time and Space and bass matter:

That Brahman, “Thou Art That.”

Contemplate this in your mind.