Questions about Hindu Monotheism — often phrased rather bluntly such as “Is Hinduism monotheistic or polytheistic?” — have cropped up of late. The answer, in a general sense, is either “it depends” or “whose monotheism?” or “which Hinduism?” Folks, at least according to the search trends, seem deeply concerned — even disturbed — that any form of Hinduism could be monotheistic as opposed to polytheistic. Seeing such a trend in the search console has me wondering if we might blame some popular philosophical text such as David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God.
The problem is worsened by how many claim to be monotheists but are, in turn, little more than glorified deists or even themselves functional atheists. Perhaps not, but it seems a great swath of Western thinkers know… almost nothing about the late Vedic Sanskrit texts, in spite of The Penguin Classics’s attempt to circulate them widely for English consumption. I have a hunch this revelation of a Hindu monotheism led more to the exorcizing of Joseph Campbell, Rudyard Kipling, and James George Frazier types rather than their more philosophical counterparts; more to the Occidental reverse-catapulting of Byzantium-vaulting far-east-seeking lapsed Catholics (or, as is far more often the case, Catholics that never quite understood their own tradition) than reckoning with Hindu monotheism ideas as ideas. The offending passages that may have prompted this are peppered throughout this book and others, but a couple come to mind.
To wit:
“To speak of “God” properly, then—to use the word in a sense consonant with the teachings of orthodox Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, Bahá’í, a great deal of antique paganism, and so forth—is to speak of the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss
And also:
“The soul’s unquenchable eros for the divine, of which Plotinus and Gregory of Nyssa and countless Christian contemplatives speak, Sufism’s ‘ishq or passionately adherent love for God, Jewish mysticism’s devekut, Hinduism’s bhakti, Sikhism’s pyaar—these are all names for the acute manifestation of a love that, in a more chronic and subtle form, underlies all knowledge, all openness of the mind to the truth of things. This is because, in God, the fullness of being is also a perfect act of infinite consciousness that, wholly possessing the truth of being in itself, forever finds its consummation in boundless delight. The Father knows his own essence perfectly in the mirror of the Logos and rejoices in the Spirit who is the “bond of love” or “bond of glory” in which divine being and divine consciousness are perfectly joined. God’s wujud is also his wijdan—his infinite being is infinite consciousness—in the unity of his wajd, the bliss of perfect enjoyment.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss
…which deals a bit more with the formulation in that text.
It seems that folks within particularly… shall we say insular traditions — the sort of fundamentalists for whom the gated community of heaven juxtaposed against the eternal conscious torment of infants predestined to hell is the best part of the story — have a particularly visceral reaction to this idea. Vedas make them vomit.
However, to play advocātus diabolī for the potential saintliness of someone’s favorite text, you can have even demonic texts, according to the Bible, that still worship one God:
You say you have faith, for you believe that there is one God. Good for you! Even the demons believe this, and they tremble in terror.
— James 2:19
To have a text that isn’t demonic, you need to have something beyond monotheism. If it’s monotheism you’re being precious about — monotheism alone drives your persecution of other faiths — perhaps you need to reevaluate your core tenants. So it’s not some great revelation to be able to say we’re all talking about the same monotheism here: if the demons can tremble in submission, why can’t we all? What should trouble us more is when we say even less than the demons say: which is that there is no God, but that’s an entirely different article.
We’re here to illumine the idea of Hindu monotheism, its interplay with Christian and Islamic and Jewish traditions (among others). The easiest way seems to me to be to go verse-by-verse through the Penguin Classics version of the Upanishads — the one any one of you could get from the story — and see where Judeo-Christian monotheism rears its beautific horn.
Table of Contents
Kena Upanishad
In Part I of Kena (and I’ll be using the page numbers from the 1965 Penguin Books paperback edition), we find a series of phrases that would make both Boethius and C.S. Lewis proud. We’re speaking over and over of The Alone, God, Brahman, Being, the One Spirit — many names, these scripts use. This first section, it seems to me, may well be worth quoting entire:
from part 1:
Who is the Spirit behind the eye and the ear?
It is the ear of the ear, the eye of the eye, and the Word of words, the mind of mind, and the life of life. Those who follow wisdom pass beyond and, on leaving this world, become immortal.
There the eye goes not, nor words, nor mind. We know not, we cannot understand, how he can be explained: He is above the known and he is above the unknown. Thus have we heard from the ancient sages who explained this truth to us.
What cannot be spoken with words, but that whereby words are spoken: Know that alone to be Brahman, the Spirit: and not what people here adore.
What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think: Know that alone to be Brahman, the Spirit: and not what people here adore.
What cannot be seen with the eye, but that whereby the eye can see: Know that alone to be Brahman, the Spirit: and not what people here adore.
What cannot be heard with the ear, but that whereby the ear can hear: Know that alone to be Brahman, the Spirit: and not what people here adore.
What cannot be drawn with breath, but that whereby the breath is indrawn: Know that alone to be Brahman, the Spirit: and not what people here adore.
— Kana Upanishad, Part 1. p. 51.
This calls to mind, of course, the conclusion of The Abolition of Man, which goes:
To reduce the Tao to a mere natural product is a step of that kind. Up to that point, the kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on `explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on `seeing through5 things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to `see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To `see through’ all things is the same as not to see.
— C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
Or, as is said among every other monotheistic formulation, God isn’t our eyes, but “Be Thou my vision”; our ears, but “the music of the spheres” — the Harmony we hear (the means of hearing Harmony) when noise is put to order; not mind, but reason; our conscious life, but Consciousness; not an animal, but The Animate that makes it an animal as in we are animate creatures and not inanimate objects. All of this points towards some governing logic — a דבר — behind every other part of our being.
Lewis uses a similar metaphor when in The Personal Heresy he tries to show how a poem both does and is logic and art:
To see things as the poet sees them I must share his consciousness and not attend to it; I must look where he looks and not turn round to face him; I must make of him not a spectacle but a pair of spectacles : in fine, as Professor Alexander would say, I must enjoy him and not contemplate him. Such is the first positive result of my inquiry.
— C.S. Lewis, The Personal Heresy (12)
Or consider sūrah Al-An’am 6:103 in the Quran:
No vision can encompass Him, but He encompasses all vision. For He is the Most Subtle, All-Aware.
— Al-An’am 6:103
from part 2:
He comes to the thought of those who know him beyond thought, not to those who imagine he can be attained by thought. He is unknown to the learned and known to the simple.
— Kana Upanishad, Part 2. p. 52.
This, it seems to me, is a shorter but nearly identical formulation to Paul’s in Corinthians:
For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power. For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.’
— The Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians 1:17-31; NRSVACE
Or Socrates:
“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”
― Socrates in Plato, The Republic
from part 4:
Concerning [Brahman, the Spirit Supreme] it is said:
He is seen in Nature in the wonder of a flash of lightning.
He comes to the soul in the wonder of a flash of vision.
His name is Tadvanam, which translated means ‘the End of love-longing’ …and all men must adore such a lover of the Lord.— Kana Upanishad, Part 4. p. 53-54.
Entirely possible this section is referring to a minor demiurge first and foremost due to an odd syntax in which case the statement is simply moved back a step in deference, however either way the final cause of the statements seem to parallel what Augustine says:
“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
— St. Augustine, Confessions (Lib 1,1-2,2.5,5: CSEL 33, 1-5)
Or, again, C.S. Lewis on his theme of Sehnsucht:
“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.”
— C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
Or Socrates:
Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.
— Socrates; Plato, Theaetetus, 155
Or Hart here:
“God’s love, and hence the love with which we come to love God, is eros and agape at once: a desire for the other that delights in the distance of otherness.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth
“But desire must also be cultivated; the beautiful does not always immediately commend itself to every taste; Christ’s beauty, like that of Isaiah’s suffering servant, is not expressed in vacuous comeliness or shadowless glamor, but calls for a love that is charitable, that is not dismayed by distance or mystery, and that can repent of its failure to see; this is to acquire what Augustine calls a taste for the beauty of God (Soliloquia 1.3-14). Once this taste is learned, divine beauty, as Gregory of Nyssa says, inflames desire, drawing one on into an endless epektasis, a stretching out toward an ever greater embrace of divine glory.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Beauty Of The Infinite: The Aesthetics Of Christian Truth
Katha Upanishad
In the next Upanishad, we find still more markers of Hindu monotheism, but also some similarities to other texts I’ll try to point out as they appear.
from part 1 & 2:
This part features a son called Nachiketas who, like Cain, offers a poor sacrifice: in his case it’s cows too old to milk and too weak to masticate or hydrate. He asks his father, “to whom will you give me?” Nags him, even. On the third time, his father says, “I’ll give you to Death.” Rather Abrahamic, if you ask me. The kid spends three nights without food in the house of Death.
And Death turns into something of a southern belle. Some random Voice (Brahmin as the spirit of fire, in this case, sort of a burning bush moment) shows up and rebukes Death and demands of him an offering of water. Death’s horrified that the boy Nachiketas stayed three nights without any sort of hospitality. So he offers there boons. This is more djinn in nature, of course, or perhaps even cut from the 1,000 paper swans and wish upon a star cloth.
It’s interesting that the first thing Nachiketas wishes for is that his father’s anger would be appeased, that he would remember him, and welcome him home when he returns (he’s floating a trial balloon here, you see, that he’ll return from the house of Death). But this takes a hard divergence from Cain and stokes cinders of the fires that burns behind the Prodigal Father story that Jesus tells.
Death grants this boon.
He asks for the sacred fire that leads to heaven, the means by which he might attain infinite world. Death speaks of the fires of creation — a bit Promethean here, a bit Tabernacle in the desert. Nachiketas thanks him. Death demands he choose the third boon.
So Nachiketas asks whether a person exists or not after death. And they start to haggle — Death here is adamant he take anything other than this answer:
Death. Take horses and gold and cattle and elephants; choose sons and grandsons that shall live a hundred years. Have vast expanses of land, and live as many years as you desire.
Or choose another gift that you think equal to this, and enjoy it with wealth and long life. Be a ruler of this vast earth. I will grant you all your desires.
As for any wishes in the world of mortals, however hard to obtain. To attend on you I will give you fair maidens with chariots and musical instruments. But ask me not, Nachiketas, the secrets of death.
Nachiketas. All pleasures pass away, O End of All! They weaken the power of life. And indeed how short is all life! Keep thy horses and dancing and singing.
Man cannot be satisfied with wealth. Shall we enjoy wealth with you in sight? Shall we live whilst you are in power? I can only ask for the book I have asked.
When a mortal here on earth has felt his own immortality, could he wish for a long life of pleasures, for the lust of deceitful beauty?
Solve the doubt as to the great beyond. Grant me the gift that unveils the mystery. This is the only gift Nachiketas can ask.
Death. There is the path of joy, and there is the path of pleasure. Both attract the soul. Who follows the first comes to good; who follows pleasure reaches not the End.
— Katha Upanishad, Parts 1 & 2, p. 57.
It continues on, very Consolation of Philosophy in bend:
“All pleasures have one quality alike: They drive their devotees with goads. And like a swarm of bees upon the wing, They first pour out their honey loads, Then turn and strike their victim’s heart And leave behind their deep set sting.”
― Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
Granted this sort of talk has little to do with monotheism per se, but tends to come up in all sorts of communities that take two seconds to ponder whether the immortal source of our mortal life has any answer. That in and of itself is something of an analogous or apophatic posture towards the same subject.
And they get there eventually:
What lies beyond life shines not to those who are childish, or careless, or deluded by wealth. ‘This is the only world: there is no other’, they say; and thus they go from death to death.
Not many hear of him; and of those not many reach him. Wonderful is he who can teach about him; and wise is he who can be taught. Wonderful is he who knows him when taught.
He cannot be taught by one who has not reached him; and he cannot be reached by much thinking. The way to him is through a Teacher who has seen him: He is higher than the highest thoughts, in truth above all thought.
This sacred knowledge is not attained by reasoning; but it can be given by a true Teacher. As your purpose is steady you have found him. May I find another pupil like you!
I know that treasures pass away and that the Eternal is not reach by the transient. I have thus laid the fire of sacrifice of Nachiketas, and by burning in it the transient I have reached the Eternal.
…When the wise rests his mind in contemplation on our God beyond time, who invisible dwells in the mystery of things and in the heart of man, then he rises above pleasures and sorrow.
When a man has heard and has understood and, finding the essence, reaches the Inmost, then he finds joy in the Source of joy. Nachiketas is a house open for thy Atman, thy God.
— Katha Upanishad, Part 2. p. 58-59.
Curious to me are several things here. For starters, the high thinking calls to mind Isaiah:
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways And My thoughts higher than your thoughts.
Isaiah 55:9
Another is the unbridgeable gap between the transient and the eternal, something almost Jewish in its construction. The idea that God fills everything, every mystery, Here’s the King James construction on that one:
That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device.
— Acts 17:27-29
Therefore, a spirit of God rests in all of the possessions of the nation, which it loves from the aspect of its national spirit: its land, its language, its history, its customs.
— Shemonah Kevatzim 1:71:5
That will come up again, but I bring it up now predominantly for the indwelling bit. I could point to several parts of the Quran involving breath animating, but that’s such a common motif in both religion and myth that it’s almost the burden of proof to find some other example for how things come to live.
But as for joy in the source of Joy, here’s C.S. Lewis again:
At that very moment there arose the memory of a place and time at which I had tasted the lost Joy with unusual fullness. It had been a particular hill-walk on a morning of white mist. The other volumes of the Ring (The Rheingold and The Valkyrie) had just arrived as a Christmas present from my father, and the thought of all the reading before me, mixed with the coldness and loneliness of the hillside, the drops of moisture on every branch, and the distant murmur of the concealed town, had produced a longing (yet it was also fruition) which had flowed over from the mind and seemed to involve the whole body. That walk I now remembered. It seemed to me that I had tasted heaven then. If only such a moment could return! But what I never realised was that it had returned–that the remembering of that walk was itself a new experience of just the same kind. True, it was desire, not possession. But then what I had felt on the walk had also been desire, and only possession in so far as that kind of desire is itself desirable, is the fullest possession we can know on earth; or rather, because the very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. There, to have is to want and to want is to have. Thus, the very moment when I longed to be so stabbed again, was itself again such a stabbing. The Desirable which had once alighted on Valhalla was now alighting on a particular moment of my own past; and I would not recognise him there because, being an idolater and a formalist, I insisted that he ought to appear in the temple I had built him; not knowing that he cares only for temples building and not at all for temples built. Wordsworth, I believe, made this mistake all his life. I am sure that all that sense of the loss of vanished vision which fills The Prelude was itself vision of the same kind, if only he could have believed it.
…
It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton’s “enormous bliss” of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to “enormous”) comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? not, certainly, for a biscuit-tin filled with moss, nor even (though that came into it) for my own past. [Greek: Ioulian pothô] –and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.
— C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
Finding Joy in the source of joy seems quite accurate. Later in this same part, we find Being — God — Spirit Supreme — called the one who “is never born and never dies. Before him there was nothing, and he is one for evermore. Never-born and eternal, beyond times gone or to come, he does not die when the body dies.”
It is a superabundant excess of kindness for any one to be a beloved friend to the most glorious Uncreated
—The Midrash of Philo 7:5:2
Or:
To the conductor, listen to this all nations” – this psalm is very important, because it explains the light of the afterlife and the undying soul of wisdom.
— Ibn Ezra on Psalms 49:1:1
Similarly, the author of this Veda scoffs at the slayer for the “Eternal in man cannot die.”
If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit.
— Galatians 6:8
What grows most fascinating to me of all in this text, however, comes in a very consistent configuration of all great monotheistic traditions that define God not as a being among beings — a greater one; an infinite series of universes; etc — but rather as the grounds of Being:
Concealed in the heart of all beings is the Atman, the Spirit, the Self; smaller than the smallest atom, greater than the vast spaces.
— Katha Upanishad, Part 2. p. 59
This parallels directly what Augustine says:
Interior intimo meo et superior summo meo.
“You were more inward to me than my inmost depths and higher than my utmost heights.”
— St. Augustine, Confessions 3.6.11
…which is another way of saying he’s more intimate than the most subjective experience of consciousness, beyond the finest motes of quantum mechanics (or its descendants), deeper than anything that could conceivably considered small, personal, particular, specific. And also, at the same time, he’s higher than the largest conceivable exteriority — the vast reaches of an infinite series of universes, of any order of magnitude of any quantifiable series of matters, efficient causes, forms, or purposes.
It’s quite the statement, when one considers it truly: of course the universe from the smallest most personal to the greatest most objective is still, at the end of the day, contingent upon what is not the universe. That too is a very, very classic monotheistic creed.
When the wise realize the omnipresent Spirit, who rests invisible in the visible and permanent in the impermanent, then they go beyond sorrow.
Not through much learning is the Atman reached, not through the intellect and sacred teaching. It is reached by the chosen of him — because they choose him. To his chosen, the Atman reveals his glory.
— Katha Upanishad, Part 2. P. 59.
For the record, the “universal Self” is the “deeper than my inmost being” side of Being (Brahman) and they use several names for the “higher than my utmost heights,” but it’s not unlike the 99 names of God in Islam or similar features in Christianity (The Strongest, The Trinity, The Deepest, Love Divine, Beauty of the Infinite, etc.).
But I want to focus on the elect portion first, because that’s one of those prized possessions that reformed fundamentalists cling to with their grubby fingers behind the security of their whitewashed gated communities:
Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him.
Or most viscerally with Boethius:
‘True, for the Divine vision anticipates all that is coming, and transforms and reduces it to the form of its own present knowledge, and varies not, as thou deemest, in its foreknowledge, alternating to this or that, but in a single flash it forestalls and includes thy mutations without altering. And this ever-present comprehension and survey of all things God has received, not from the issue of future events, but from the simplicity of His own nature. Hereby also is resolved the objection which a little while ago gave thee offence—that our doings in the future were spoken of as if supplying the cause of God’s knowledge. For this faculty of knowledge, embracing all things in its immediate cognizance, has itself fixed the bounds of all things, yet itself owes nothing to what comes after.
‘And all this being so, the freedom of man’s will stands unshaken, and laws are not unrighteous, since their rewards and punishments are held forth to wills unbound by any necessity. God, who foreknoweth all things, still looks down from above, and the ever-present eternity of His vision concurs with the future character of all our acts, and dispenseth to the good rewards, to the bad punishments. Our hopes and prayers also are not fixed on God in vain, and when they are rightly directed cannot fail of effect. Therefore, withstand vice, practise virtue, lift up your souls to right hopes, offer humble prayers to Heaven. Great is the necessity of righteousness laid upon you if ye will not hide it from yourselves, seeing that all your actions are done before the eyes of a Judge who seeth all things.’
— Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy. Book V:IV
But to the other part:
To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen.
— 1 Timothy 1:17
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.
— Romans 1:19-21
He is One, and there is no unity like His, He is invisible, His unity is infinite.
— Siddur Ashkenaz, Weekday, Shacharit, Preparatory Prayers, Yigdal 5
Man — what is he in this God-filled world? What is his place in this throng of creatures of God, this choir of servants of the Lord? Though the Torah were silent, would not the contemplation of creation, would not your own breast tell you? Man, is he not also a creature of God? Should he not also be a servant of God? Every fiber of your body is a creation from the hand of God, formed by Him, arranged by Him, endowed by Him with power. Your spirit, that world of powers, is the creation of God from beginning to end. The divine spark, your personality, which, invisible as Deity, weaves and works in this microcosm, and under whose control stand intellect and body and the power to use the entire realm of nature for its purpose, this mysterious spritual force in you is itself emanation of Deity. Learn to deem yourself holy as creature of God and, while contemplating heaven and earth and the great chorus of servants of the Lord, consecrate yourself to your mission, and proclaim yourself with mingled solemnity and joy, “servant of God!” Since all things, the smallest and the greatest, are God’s chosen messengers, to work, each in its place, and with its measure of power, according to the law of the Most High, taking only that it may give again, should man alone be excluded from this circle of blessed activity? Can he be born only to take? — to revel in lavish plenty or to starve in misery, but not to work? — not to fill any place, nor fulfill any purpose, but to let all end in himself? The world and all which is therein serves God; is it conceivable that man alone should only serve himself? No! Your consciousness pronounces you as does the Torah, צלם אלהים “an image of God.” That is what man should be.
— Nineteen Letters, 4:1.
He conducts every affair from the heavens to the earth, then it all ascends to Him on a Day whose length is a thousand years by your counting. That is the Knower of the seen and unseen—the Almighty, Most Merciful,
— Quaran. As-Sajdah, 32:5
Could continue permanently here in the impermanent, but we’ll move on:
from part 3.
We start to get into some of the interplay of consciousness, which is terribly tricky in any field, mode of thought, or discipline. But it seems to me that the simple formulation here works exceedingly well.
Remember again that Atman is their word for “God within,” and Brahman, most often, is “God at the outmost,” but they’re used interchangeably in the way we use Father and Spirit:
Now the Atman as Lord of a chariot; and the body as the chariot itself. Know that reason is the charioteer; and the mind indeed is the reins.
The horses, they say, are the senses; and their paths are the objets of sense. When the soul becomes one with the mind and the senses he is called ‘one who has joys and sorrows.’
He who has not right understanding and whose mind is never steady is not the ruler of his life, like a bad driver with wild horses.
…the man whose chariot is driven by reason, who watches and holds the reins of his mind, reaches the End of the journey, the supreme everlasting Spirit.
Beyond the senses are their objects, and beyond the objects is the mind. Beyond the mind is pure reason, and beyond reason is the Spirit in man.
Beyond the Spirit in man is the Spirit of the universe, and beyond is the Spirit Supreme. He is the end of the path.
— Katha Upanishad, Part 3. p 60-61.
Several places come to mind:
The whole earth sought the presence of Solomon to hear his wisdom, which God had put into his mind.
— 1 Kings 10:24
You cannot plumb the depths of the human heart or understand the workings of the human mind; how do you expect to search out God, who made all these things, and find out his mind or comprehend his thought? No, my brothers, do not anger the Lord our God.
— Judith 8:14
The human mind plans the way, but the Lord directs the steps.
—Proverbs 16:9
Reflect on the statutes of the Lord, and meditate at all times on his commandments. It is he who will give insight to your mind, and your desire for wisdom will be granted.
— Sirach 6:37
For the contrast:
And the Lord said to me: The prophets are prophesying lies in my name; I did not send them, nor did I command them or speak to them. They are prophesying to you a lying vision, worthless divination, and the deceit of their own minds.
—Jeremiah 14:14
Because your heart is proud
and you have said, ‘I am a god;
I sit in the seat of the gods,
in the heart of the seas’,
yet you are but a mortal, and no god,
though you compare your mind
with the mind of a god.
3 You are indeed wiser than Daniel;[a]
no secret is hidden from you;
4 by your wisdom and your understanding
you have amassed wealth for yourself,
and have gathered gold and silver
into your treasuries.
5 By your great wisdom in trade
you have increased your wealth,
and your heart has become proud in your wealth.
6 Therefore, thus says the Lord God:
Because you compare your mind
with the mind of a god,
7 therefore, I will bring strangers against you,
the most terrible of the nations;
they shall draw their swords against the beauty of your wisdom
and defile your splendour.
8 They shall thrust you down to the Pit,
and you shall die a violent death
in the heart of the seas.
9 Will you still say, ‘I am a god’,
in the presence of those who kill you,
though you are but a mortal, and no god,
in the hands of those who wound you?
10 You shall die the death of the uncircumcised
by the hand of foreigners;
for I have spoken, says the Lord God.— Ezekiel 28
In effect therefore the Priest bids all in that hour to dismiss all cares of this life, or household anxieties, and to have their heart in heaven with the merciful God. Then ye answer, “We lift them up unto the Lord:” assenting to it, by your avowal. But let no one come here, who could say with his mouth, “We lift up our hearts unto the Lord,” but in his thoughts have his mind concerned with the cares of this life. At all times, rather, God should be in our memory but if this is impossible by reason of human infirmity, in that hour above all this should be our earnest endeavour.
— Cyril Of Jerusalem: On the Mysteries, V: On the Sacred Liturgy and Communion (Lecture XXIII)
Man himself, likewise, is viewed in one way by Sense, in another by Imagination, in another way, again, by Thought, in another by pure Intelligence. Sense judges figure clothed in material substance, Imagination figure alone without matter. Thought transcends this again, and by its contemplation of universals considers the type itself which is contained in the individual. The eye of Intelligence is yet more exalted; for overpassing the sphere of the universal, it will behold absolute form itself by the pure force of the mind’s vision.
Wherein the main point to be considered is this: the higher faculty of comprehension embraces the lower, while the lower cannot rise to the higher. For Sense has no efficacy beyond matter, nor can Imagination behold universal ideas, nor Thought embrace pure form; but Intelligence, looking down, as it were, from its higher standpoint in its intuition of form, discriminates also the several elements which underlie it; but it comprehends them in the same way as it comprehends that form itself, which could be cognized by no other than itself. For it cognizes the universal of Thought, the figure of Imagination, and the matter of Sense, without employing Thought, Imagination, or Sense, but surveying all things, so to speak, under the aspect of pure form by a single flash of intuition. Thought also, in considering the universal, embraces images and sense-impressions without resorting to Imagination or Sense. For it is Thought which has thus defined the universal from its conceptual point of view: “Man is a two-legged animal endowed with reason.” This is indeed a universal notion, yet no one is ignorant that the thing is imaginable and presentable to Sense, because Thought considers it not by Imagination or Sense, but by means of rational conception. Imagination, too, though its faculty of viewing and forming representations is founded upon the senses, nevertheless surveys sense-impressions without calling in Sense, not in the way of Sense-perception, but of Imagination. See’st thou, then, how all things in cognizing use rather their own faculty than the faculty of the things which they cognize? Nor is this strange; for since every judgment is the act of the judge, it is necessary that each should accomplish its task by its own, not by another’s power.’
— Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
Similar verses exist about the hearts of men, the spirits of men, and so on. Boethius’s main point is that the donation of mind — and soul — does not infringe upon free will. And many of the other texts could be so read.
from part 4:
Part 4 of this particular Veda focuses on so defining this supreme Spirit within:
This by which we perceive colors and sounds, perfumes and kisses of love; by which alone we attain knowledge; by which verily we can be conscious of anything:
This in truth is That.
When the wise knows that it is through the great and omnipresent Spirit in us that we are conscious in waking or in dreaming, then he goes beyond sorrow.
When he knows the Atman, the Self, the inner life, who enjoys like a bee the sweetness of the flowers of the senses, the Lord of what was and of what will be, then he goes beyond fear:
This is truth is That.
The god of creation, who in the beginning was born from the fire of thought before the waters were; who appeared in the elements and rests, having entered the heart:
This is truth is That.
…
What is here is also there, and what is there is also here. Who sees the man and not the ONE, wanders on from death to death.
…
The Lord of the past and the future, the same both of today and tomorrow.
This in truth is that.
…But as pure water raining on our water becomes one and the same, so becomes, O Nachiketas, the soul of the sage who knows.
— Katha Upanishad, Part 4. p. 62-63
That last part I included not because it’s relevant (I mean, it kind of is, in so far as we come from and return to the ocean of Being, though I maintain that we retain our individuality), but because I’m a Lancelot. And in T.H. White’s rendering of The Once and Future King, he has this to say of Arthur:
For that time it was his destiny to die, or, as some say, to be carried off to Avilion, where he could wait for better days. For that time it was Lancelot’s fate and Guenever’s to take the tonsure and the veil, while Mordred must be slain. The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea.
The cannons of his adversary were thundering in the tattered morning when the Majesty of England drew himself up to meet the future with a peaceful heart.
— T.H. White, The Once and Future King
…so maybe he cribbed this straight from the Upanishads?
Anyways.
As for today and tomorrow:
He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
— Ecclesiastes 3:11
And:
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever.
— Hebrews 13:8
Interesting, again, that Christians apply this to a specific person in history.
Moving on:
The Gaon of Vilna, however, maintains that it refers to God as our Creator, thus describing Him in the tri-epochal aspect of His Unity: past, present, and future.
— Siddur Ashkenaz, Weekday, Shacharit, Blessings of the Shema, First Blessing before Shema 3
…respectively 15, 20, and 25 letters each and that the 60 letters arrived at in such an ascending number, each verse having five letters more than the preceding one alludes to G’d’s presence having extended over past…, present, and future, but that His presence is also felt in an ever increasing measure starting with the past progressing into the future.
— Rabbeinu Bahya, Bamidbar 6:27:6
Wherefore this Divine anticipation changes not the natures and properties of things, and it beholds things present before it, just as they will hereafter come to pass in time. Nor does it confound things in its judgment, but in the one mental view distinguishes alike what will come necessarily and what without necessity. For even as ye, when at one and the same time ye see a man walking on the earth and the sun rising in the sky, distinguish between the two, though one glance embraces both, and judge the former voluntary, the latter necessary action: so also the Divine vision in its universal range of view does in no wise confuse the characters of the things which are present to its regard, though future in respect of time. Whence it follows that when it perceives that something will come into existence, and yet is perfectly aware that this is unbound by any necessity, its apprehension is not opinion, but rather knowledge based on truth. And if to this thou sayest that what God sees to be about to come to pass cannot fail to come to pass, and that what cannot fail to come to pass happens of necessity, and wilt tie me down to this word necessity, I will acknowledge that thou affirmest a most solid truth, but one which scarcely anyone can approach to who has not made theDivine his special study. For my answer would be that the same future event is necessary from the standpoint of Divine knowledge, but when considered in its own nature it seems absolutely free and unfettered.
— Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy. Part V:VI
Here’s the thing: you’re about halfway through this monograph and clearly if you’ve read this far, you already believe it has value and how much time it took.
But if you’ve read this far, you also are hoping for the conclusion…
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