If you want to know what the Upanishads are, read this.

We’re going to jump right into the first Upanishad. It is called the Isha Upanishad, which means “Your inner ruler.” The name relates to the central message of the all of the Upanishads mentioned in my intro post—

"The Self is everywhere...”

Before I get into the analysis, I’d like to be clear that I am in no way trying to prove any of the claims made in the Upanishads or any of my interpretations.

Whether anything I interpret is accurate to the world as you know it is for you to decide, so I’m not going to twist your arm. But, I am going to do my best to demonstrate that the messages in the Upanishads are not a thought experiment or to be taken metaphorically.

They mean that “the Self is everywhere” in a real way. But, “Everywhere” is not an attempt to describe the phenomena in the outside world. It is the inside that the Upanishads address. And, even though our consciousness is still a mystery to science, but it is still real.

Even evaluating inner experience on the basis of factual accuracy is narrow. Risking cliché, consider a dream. A philosophy professor I had who screamed “I’m teaching my ass off,” on more than one occasion, told us that what a dream is is electricity lighting up certain parts of your brain. But, he screamed, “That’s not what my dream looked like at all!” The point should be clear—scientific truth and experience are two different things.

But, the difference between scientific truth and experience often lead to the thought that our experiences are haunted by looming falsity, like that we experience the sun as revolving around us but in scientific truth, we’re revolving around it. Here, to prioritize experience over scientific truth in terms of accuracy makes your experience just plain wrong. But, most people don’t think of their dreams or any internal experiences this way.

These internal experiences are still real, even if you cannot accurately know them, even when you’re asleep and your senses are not interpreting the outside world. That dream happened to you. Definitely that a dream is electricity in your head is a more accurate account, but it would be a mistake to confuse an account of what a dream is with the dream itself.

A dream you’re having is not the definition of “dream”—going to sleep and continuing to experience things. A dream is like this—I was in a park and I found a waterspout, and a snake came out of it.

The sciences treat the park and waterspout and the snake as not real because they don’t refer to an actual park or an actual waterspout or an actual snake. These and all other internal experiences are often written off. It’s all in your head is the most colloquial way of saying it.

I’m not here to tell you that the park and the waterspout and the snake are real or false. We’ll stop at the experience. How did they make you feel? What do you think you should do after seeing them? If you think your dreams really are only nonsense, then this mode of inquiry is silly.

But, your internal experiences in waking life ask these questions similarly—how does your life make you feel? What do you think you should do? I hope it’s clear at this point that a scientific answer to these questions is insufficient.

Look at these pretty flowers. They show I'm a considerate writer who breaks up the text with pictures.

Thankfully, the Upanishads address these exact questions. The quote mentioned above continues—

“The Self is everywhere…He it is who holds the cosmos together."

I think that the self’s holding “the cosmos together” is best understood in tandem with another famous passage that you might have heard before—

“Those who see all creatures in themselves and themselves in all creatures know no fear. Those who see all creatures in themselves and themselves in all creatures know no grief. How can the multiplicity of life delude the one who sees its unity?”

At the first look, this resonates with calls for compassion that cannot escape cliché if you stop there. I think compassion would definitely be symptomatic of seeing life as a unity, but it is this unity that I want to call attention to. Seeing life as a unity is what the self’s holding the cosmos together means.

The most practical interpretation is that all things that you encounter in your life are fundamentally in your perspective. There is no outside world, only your interpreting the things in your experience.

Kant proposes a similar idea in the Critique of Pure Reason, a groundbreaking contribution to philosophy that states that any thing that we experience cannot be separated from our mind’s perceiving it. So, any thing is the “correlate” between the thing and your perception. Things have to be filtered through you in order to know them. We can’t know things by themselves.

This might seem so obvious as to be negligible, or you might question what difference does it make? I’m not trying to prove that our consciousness literally animates the physical world around us as other have. However, the experience of the world in the present moment feels like that. The outside world appears first thing in the morning and disappears the moment we fall asleep. To reiterate, it is this direct experience that is in under investigation.

Understanding that every thing comes from your perceptions puts you as solely responsible for everything in your perception in the present moment.

Certainly, many people are actual victims of terrible things that they had no part in causing.  But, viewing the outside world as a separate from you can lead to a victim mentality to the bare drudgery of the day. Waking up on the wrong side of the bed, you trip, tear your shirt, spill your coffee, you’re late for work, you feeling like no one understands what you mean when you talk, you walk around irritable. The physical world reaches up and out to get you, and everything is someone or something else's fault.

Putting yourself as solely responsible in these instances disrupts the onslaught. You realize that the door didn’t jump out and grab your belt loop. You walked too close to the door. That’s a benign example, but trickier scenarios with conflicts between people also benefit from seeing “the Self... everywhere.”

I can’t count the number of interpersonal conflicts I’ve been involved in where I felt like I shouldn’t have to be dealing with the conflict. It’s like I was walking around, trying to be as sweet and sun-shiny as you please when I was rudely accosted with someone else’s problem. It’s easy enough to write off if it’s a belligerent stranger, but the conflicts that cause me the most turmoil usually involve people that I know really well.

It’s possible that I did something to upset the other person without knowing it. But, taking responsibility here should be obvious: acknowledge the wrongdoing, say sorry, move on. But, taking responsibility in the instance where you really haven’t done anything wrong is just as important. And, it’s especially easy to run from this responsibility since you’re just trying to live your life while the other person becomes a burden.

Facing this responsibility might improve your relationship with the other person, sure. But, facing this responsibility is important for you. The outside world has given you an opportunity to define yourself, and shrinking from this opportunity still defines you. In this way, the message to see the self everywhere is anything but conceptual or abstract.  It is a call to create yourself with every action.

More flowers. Aren't I nice?

This point is further driven home in this section—

“...The self is everywhere.  Bright is the self, indivisible, untouched by sin, wise, immanent and transcendent...  In dark night live those for whom the world without alone is real; in night darker still, for whom the world within alone is real. The first leads to a life of action, the second to a life of meditation.  But those who combine action with meditation cross the sea of death through action and enter into immortality through the practice of meditation.”

When someone mentions reincarnation, a lot of people try to escape the conversation. And, unless you enjoy speculating about what could happen after death, a lot of people think it's simply a matter of belief. That is, they consider it as a proposition that might be either true or false, but since it cannot be verified, there's nothing really to discuss.

But, this passage addresses the problems that people experience by being either only introspective or ignoring their interior lives. By looking only “within,” you withdraw from the world, which is a death of sorts. This death is avoided through action.

By looking only “without,” you lose touch with your interior, the only place that is unbounded by the restraints of the physical world. Defining yourself internally achieves immortality as a version of yourself that is not dependent on external validation.

Experiencing your interior grow and change over time is practical reincarnation. Ideas that used to mean so much to you can become stale and eventually change to something else. Perspectives on the world can be shifted when traveling to new places. Who you think you are can come into question when you do something that surprises or scares you. All of these oscillations in your interior are your old self dying and being born again with new ideas, a new perspective, and a new understanding of yourself, for better or worse.

But, the cycle of rebirth is something that the eastern religions are trying to escape. How does this square with practical reincarnation? Do we want to escape what ultimately amounts to growing as a person? The more practical interpretation of reincarnation is still enriched by trying to "escape" this ceaseless redefining and questioning your identity.

I for one am someone that likes to hop from thing to thing.  When something is new, it's exciting, and I have to confess, I frequently think to myself that that new thing will solve all of my problems. Everything will be smooth sailing. And for a while, it is. 

But, the novelty wears off, and it reveals itself to be insufficient, not the cure-all that I wanted it to be. Eventually, that part of me dies, so I'll dive into something else to make me happy, and the whole cycle repeats itself. Escaping the cycle of rebirth in this more practical example might mean escaping the perspective that the new way you define yourself will be the answer, the cure-all you always wanted. 

Escaping the cycle might still allow you to continue to grow and pursue new interests, but it will come from seeing a certain constancy within yourself among the radical changes that you go through. You might define yourself as a powerful, confident person one day, and the next day define yourself as timid and uncertain, but escaping the cycle of rebirth in these examples might be to shift your perspective to the thing that is being defined, even in radically different ways, is constant—you, your consciousness, your awareness, the Self.

Knowing the self as separate from external definition is further developed with this passage:

"The face of truth is hidden by your orb of gold, O sun.  May you remove your orb so that I, who adore the true, may see the glory of truth.  O nourishing sun, solitary traveler, controller, source of life for all creatures, spread your light and subdue your dazzling splendor so that I may see your blessed self, even that very Self am I!"

This is a clear take on the concept of light illuminating knowledge, the truth, etc.  However, it's significant that it says that "the face of truth is hidden by [its] orb" begging the sun to "remove [its] orb so that I... may see" and to "subdue [its] dazzling splendor so that I may see."

This is calling specific attention to the fact that the external world is not the truth. It is insufficient for defining the Self. It is by turning away from the these external signs ("turning out the light") that the truth of the Self is revealed. It is best to know the Self as the Upanishads told us to know the world around us: not separate from us at all. This seems obvious for the Self, but in this light it's more profound. The Self is experience, awareness, consciousness itself.

When you remove all external definitions from the Self, elevating it to a holy status is not as absurd. Without anything scientific to know the Self by, we are faced with the radical proposition that something transcendent permeates our every experience.

There is so much more to talk about, but I'm going to leave it at that for now. Thanks for reading. There will be more Upanishads posts in the future.

Source: 

The Upanishads by Eknath Easwaran, 2007