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THE UPANISHADS


 L

Much of our distress is around what is happening right now. We’ve got ten things to do and the boiler has stopped functioning; we’ve split some red wine on our white trousers; our partner has just said something almost designed to upset us. Yet, very oddly, we know that — with time — most of these frustrations will melt away. As time sweeps on they'll be submerged in the bigger picture. It always happens. Remember that time ages ago when our flight got canceled in Canada and we got incredibly agitated? Now the anxiety feels like it happened to someone else. It’s one of the most tantalising aspects of existence: we suffer now, yet we know that when we see these things from afar we won’t care so much.  The Upanishads is the collective name for around one hundred philosophical reflections, mostly originating in northern India between about 2500 and 2000 years ago. The ideas, which form the intellectual core of Hinduism, were transmitted orally for many generations. The name Upanishad implies the intimate knowledge that is available only to those who are in personal, direct contact with a teacher.  Their therapeutic project is to instill in us a permanent sense of the entirety of the cosmos and the vast, endless ocean of time: the more this vision becomes native to us the less the annoying incidents of life, which are tiny in comparison, will be able to disturb or distress us. Instead of being obsessed with here and now in which a stain on our trousers and a heating system that won’t function loom large, we’ll be attuned to always and everywhere — and much happier for it.  The Upanishads constantly invite us to move away from immediate sensation to timeless thought. Suppose — as one major meditation asks us to — someone ‘loves’ sunshine. What do they really love? Not sunshine itself but the sense of life-giving power it stands for. So they really delight in an idea. And that idea is independent of the sun. Or — to take a modern version — suppose some ‘loves’ fashion - what they really love is the sense of having a special appreciation of beauty. And that is much bigger than fashion itself. Everything that excites us now points to a larger, more-timeless idea. A meditation gets us to focus on the idea. In fact all regions and all art may be seen as attempts, more or less successful, to do this; which is why Hinduism has, at times, claimed that everyone in the world is actually a Hindu.  All the outward features of Hinduism — the names of divinities, the myths and the rituals — are, ultimately, mechanisms for helping us reach a state of enlarged perspective in which we identify with the totality of the cosmos. 

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