Immortality is Freedom from The Self

Here we are with the Mundaka Upanishad of Atharva Veda. The name is interesting: Mundaka Upanishad. It is surmised that ‘muṇdaka’ comes from ‘muṇda’, and ‘muṇda’ points towards the shaven head of the Brahmins who would practice austerity, the disciples of old carrying bald heads. We have seen those images. So, that is called a muṇda. From there comes the name Mundaka.

This Upanishad throws light on the path of knowledge. We call the Upanishads as belonging to the path of knowledge, Jñānamārga, and then we say the Bhaktimārga is the mārga of love, the path of devotion is synonymous with love. One should refuse to buy that distinction. The Upanishads are overflowing with love. If love is real, it can’t be sans discrimination or knowledge. And if you really have knowledge, you would be a very loving person. It’s just that your love would not be of the type you see all around.

After reading Mundaka Upanishad one can say poets are at work here. In fact, the Upanishads several times call the Rishis as kavis, poets. Not without reason: they are bringing to words that which is very abstract, and that is what a poet does; they are giving a face to that which is very conceptual, that is what a painter does. And then, when you give it a face, obviously you also give it a name, and that becomes the name of a god. So, those gods don’t really exist. They are names of something virtuous within.

In this course we will explore following topics in-depth:

The Bridge to Immortality: Remember one thing and dispose of everything else. What is to be remembered? That Ātman contains everything. Everything is inwoven— which is an approximate translation—everything is within that container. Even better than containment is the concept of the sky. Everything is happening within the sky, but the sky is not the boundary; the sky is also the substance that is enabling everything to happen.

At the center, the divided stands united: You have a wheel and the wheel has a lot of spokes, and apparently the spokes are all getting progressively distanced from each other, are they not? From the center they all radiate radially outwards along the radius, and as they radiate outwards, what happens to the separation between them? It keeps increasing. That’s the existence of the person.

What lies at the end of the story of knowledge: Only those who go right till the end of knowledge realize that knowledge is a very unreal story, and then they laugh at the story. They do not hate the story, by the way; they enjoy the story. They enjoy the story as a story. Don’t we read stories? Don’t we read fairy tales? They often contain a lot of fiction, but still, it is lovely to read. The one who goes right till the end of the knowledge story realizes that it is just fiction—nice fiction maybe, useful fiction maybe; nevertheless, just fiction.