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Eknath Easwaran

From Commentary to Bhagavad Gita

The Upanishads Atman & Brahman

Even while India was making breakthroughs in the natural sciences and mathematics, the sages of the Upanishads were turning inwards to analyze the data that nature presents to the mind.  Penetrating below the senses, they found not a world of solid, separate objects but a ceaseless process of change - matter coming together, dissolving, and coming together again in a different form.  Below this flux of things with 'name and form', however, they found something changeless: an infinite, indivisible reality in which the transient data of the world cohere.  They called this reality Brahman: the Godhead, the divine ground of existence.

In examining our knowledge of ourselves, the sages, instead of a single coherent personality, found layer upon layer of components - senses, will, intellect, ego - each in flux.  Change is the nature of the mind.  The sages observed this flow of thoughts and sensations and asked 'Then where am I?'  The parts do not add up to a whole they just flow by.  Like physical phenomena, the mind is a field of forces, no more the seat of intelligence than gravity or radiation is.  Just as the world dissolves into a sea of energy, the mind dissolves into a series of impressions and thoughts, a flow of fragmentary data that do not hold together.

For these ancient sages, these were not logical conclusions but personal discoveries.  They were actually exploring the mind, testing each level of awareness, by withdrawing consciousness, to the level below.  In profound meditation, they found when consciousness is so acutely focused, that it is utterly withdrawn from the body and mind, it enters a kind of singularity in which the sense of a separate ego disappears.  In this state, the supreme climax of meditation, the seers discovered a core of consciousness beyond time and change.  They called it simply Atman, the Self.