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the Aitareya Upanishad. To paraphrase this description in a language intelligible to us:
The One Being that was from eternity, outside which there was nothing, willed to
materialise itself in the form of creation. It concretised itself, through this Universal
Will, into the Presiding Person of the whole universe. It grossened itself into the density
of the material worlds (which are constituted of the five elements: ether, air, fire, water
and earth).
The process of manifestation of the worlds, originally as the object of subjective
experience, was something like this: From the Mouth of this Universal Person Speech
came out, and from Speech Fire. From His Nostrils Breath came out and from Breath
Air. From His Eyes Light came out and from Light Sight. From His Ears Sound came out
and from Sound the Quarters or the Directions. From His Skin Hairs came out and from
The Ascent of the Spirit by Swami Krishnananda
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Hairs Plants and Trees. From His Heart Mind came out and from Mind the Moon. From
His Navel the Out-going Breath came out and from the Out-going Breath the principle
of Death. From His Virile Member Vital Force came out and from Vital Force Waters.
This description of the origin of cosmic differentiation is intended to give an idea of the
state of consciousness in which the human being particularly finds himself at the
present moment. Though it is difficult to make a complete analysis of consciousness
from this narration given by the Upanishad, there is, no doubt, in it a hint at the method
of the type of analysis that has to be conducted for the purpose of acquiring a correct
knowledge of the exact position of man in the universe. But the Upanishad takes us by a
greater surprise when it does not end the story with this description alone, and goes
further, and makes it a little more difficult for us to understand what has actually
happened to us in the state in which we are today. The individuation of the Cosmic
Being is not merely the separation of a part from the Whole, as a simple reduction or
subtraction of a quantity from a larger measure, so that we cannot say that we as
individuals are small gods, because we are little bits of that very same Supreme Cosmic
Person. We are not small chips of this larger mass of gold, but something worse has
happened to us, so that we have ceased to be the gold that we were once. In fact, there is
nothing in this world that can act as a comparison to what has actually happened to us.
Metaphors, images, examples and similes of every kind fail here. The condition in which
we are is something quite different from what any language can explain. This is the
reason, perhaps, why we cannot understand either ourselves or others, properly. To
baffle us, as it were, with a greater mystery, the Upanishad goes on:
When the individual was separated from the Whole, Fire became the speech and entered
the mouth of the individual; Air became breath and entered the nostrils; Sun became
sight and entered the eyes; The Quarters became sound and entered the ears; Plants and
Trees became hairs and entered the skin; Moon became the mind and entered the heart;
Death became the out-going breath and entered the navel; Waters became the vital force
and entered the virile member.
We should be careful to observe the tremendous reversal of process that has taken place
in the functions of the principles originally at the time of cosmic individuation, and
subsequently at the time of the commencement of the individual s functions,
independently. Let us take only one of the functions mentioned above: when there was
the first isolation of the individual from the Cosmic Being, we are told that from the
Mouth of the Universal Person Speech came out and from Speech, Fire. But, when it
becomes the question of the individual s function, we are told that Fire became speech
and entered the mouth of the individual. What operated as the cause primarily during
the origination of things becomes the effect in the individual, so that, we may say, while
the power that we call Speech is the effect of the location called the Mouth in the
Universal Person and the principle of Fire is the effect of the power of Speech, the
reverse is the case with the individual; that is, Fire, which was the last effect originally,
becomes now the first cause and engenders the force of speech in the individual and
restricts the operation of the vocal organs in the mouth. To take the instance of another
function: Nostrils, breath and air act as cause and effect successively, originally, but
now, in the individual, the process is reversed so that Air, breath and nostrils form the
order of succession in a cause-and-effect relationship. And so on, with the other
functions.
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From a consideration of the above description of the evolution of the individual from the
Cosmic, we have only to conclude that a great woe has come upon man, so that he has
not got a direct means of easily contacting the Cosmic through the faculties or powers
with which he is immediately endowed. For, in the reversal-process of the functions,
described above, the original function operating as an effect turns back upon the
individual as the cause of its functions, as it happens in reflections, wherein the
features either become topsy-turvy or inversed in some way. And how does a reflection
contact its original? There is a partial similarity of this position with the attempt of the
reflection of the sun in water to come in contact with the original sun. In this
comparison, the similarity is that the reflection truly pictures the original even as man is
supposed to be made in the image of God. Now, how can a reflection catch the original
or become the original? What is its relation to the original? Apparently there is no
relation, for the two are far removed by the absence of any real contact, mutually. Yet,
there is a relation; else, the original will not appear in the reflection. The analogy of the
reflection of the sun in water; though it presents the context of the similarity between
the original and the reflection, is, at the same time, partial: it does not represent the
whole truth. This is because the reflection of the sun is spatially removed from the
original by a great physical distance, while, in the case of the Cosmic Being and the
individual, no physical distance can be introduced between the original and the
reflection. The two overlap each other, as it were, which is the reason why the whole
circumstance becomes difficult to investigate and even to understand.
The reversal of the process of the functions in the descent of the Cosmic to the
individual can be explained by another analogy, namely, the reflection of our own face
seen through a mirror in which the right becomes left and the left becomes the right:
what exists as the effect in the Cosmic becomes the cause in the individual. In the
terminology of the Vedanta philosophy, the process of the Universal Being passes
through the stages of isvara, hiranyagarbha and virat, which are the cosmic levels of
the Absolute itself. Here, the latter stage is the effect of the former. But in the individual
these cosmic levels are reversed in the form of the experiences known as visva (waking
condition), taijasa (dreaming condition) and prajna (sleep condition). While the virat
is the lowest effect in the cosmic procession of descent, Visva is the highest cause in the
individual, so that we may say, at least in some sense, that the connecting link between
the individual and the Cosmic, that is, between visva and virat, is the waking
consciousness of the individual. But, beware! The waking individual is not an exact
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