THE KNOWLEDGE OF BRAHMAN

“Do not deceive your neighbour, do not despise anyone, never let anyone suffer pain, either by word or thought. Like a mother who keeps her only child with her own life, maintain an immeasurable love for all creatures.

Above and below you, on all sides, keep with all the world, your sympathy and immeasurable love, with no intention to hurt or enmity.

To be inhabited by such a state of mind, whether walking, sitting, lying down and until sleep overcomes you is called living in Brahman, or the Supreme Spirit.” The Buddha

 

Guenther Zuehlsdorf, in his essay, “Spiritual Experience as Reality”, says that by the word Brahman the Hindus understand as the Absolute Spirit, the Supreme Reality, the All-Permeating Consciousness, the one formless, non-dual Absolute substratum of all that exists, from which emanated all beings, like sparkles of fire, like drops out of the sea. Through the knowledge of Brahman, they say, the initiate attains the “summum bonum”, the supreme good, liberation, immortality, the greatest good that a human being must seek, the ultimate goal, and an indestructible peace. In the Bhagavad Gita (the Sublime Chant, or Chant of God), Krishna describes the knowledge of Brahman as the “royal mystery.”

Brahman cannot be known because itself is the knowing principle. Brahman's knowledge presupposes deep intuition. It cannot be achieved either by intellectual means or by moral conduct. It is reached only by faith, meditation, and purity of heart. The ideal of the Upanishads (Hindu scripture which presents the essence of the Vedas) is not the intelligent man, nor the ascetic, but the wise, the one who has attained this intuition.

The knowledge of Brahman transforms man into God. By revealing to him his true divine nature, he is lost in the vision of the Infinite; and the illusion of being separated from the Whole, from which all weaknesses and imperfections are born, disappears. Since Brahman is the last and only Reality, we can neither draw nor add to His Being. Brahman reveals itself when ignorance disappears - just as a rope reveals itself like a rope when the illusion that it is a snake disappeared.

This knowledge does not depend in any way on man, that is, his concepts and ideologies, which, in the final analysis, is nothing other than the images of something existing; knowledge awakens at the moment in which man diverts his spirit from the things of the phenomenal world and directs him to his inner being when he ceases to perceive external noises and plunges into the silence, in the depths of which reveals the identity, the essence of Being.

It is expressed in the words: “Brahman I am”, that is, the individual soul and Brahman are identical, and this identity is not mere fantasy or imagination; in other words: the soul knows itself as God in God. For this reason, the man should never relate Brahman or the knowledge of Brahman with any kind of activity, for Brahman can never be an object, neither by activities nor by human knowledge. In the Vedas, it is often read that the sun is Brahman or that one should meditate on the Spirit. Phrases like these do not contain true knowledge; they are only recommendations and worship. Brahman in itself can never be an object of devotion, worship or meditation, for Brahman is not an entity that man should worship.

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The Vedas are the four scriptural texts of the Hindus: Rig Veda, Sama Veda, Yajur Veda and Atharva Veda. They are essentially a literature of chant, ritual, and recitation for vitalizing and spiritualizing all phases of man’s life and activity. Among this immense text, the Vedas (Sanskrit root meaning “to know”) are the only writings to which no author is ascribed. The Rig Veda assigns a celestial origin to the hymns and tells us they have come down from “ancient times”, recited in a new language. Divinely revealed from age to age to the seers, the four Vedas possess timeless finality.