The God can think!

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I am just using a catchy title. By God I am referring to that root cause for the existence of this world. The Upanishads refrain from calling it by any name and they just refer to it as ‘Tat’ or ‘Sat’ - literally meaning ‘That’ or ‘Existence’.

Interestingly, many ancient scriptures – whether it is Bible or Quran or even the Upanishads have almost identical definition for God. They define God (or the ‘Tat’ in the Upanishads) as the one from which this world has emerged, the one that sustains whatever exists, and the one into which everything returns.

The major departure is while most non Indian religious ideologies believe in a world that gets created, that remains for some time and returns back to its originator once for all, the Indian schools believe that it is not a onetime happening but a cycle that repeats again and again.

When you walk along the perimeter of a circle, ideas like beginning and end do not make much sense. So when the Upanishads talk about ‘In the beginning’ they are only talking about one of the round trips around the circle.

They declare

“In the beginning there was nothing but ‘Sat’ and only ‘Sat’.”

In that case, how did this world come into existence?

The way the Upanishads describe it is

“That willed to be many”

It is not some external force that brought about the creation of the world. Because there was nothing else other than ‘Sat’. There was no cause that compelled ‘Sat’ to create the world since this ‘Sat’ is beyond causality. It just willed to be many instead of one and only one.

The purpose of Upanishads to make this statement is just to assert that whatever brought out this world is not something unintelligent or devoid of will. Such an assertion was needed to refute the Sankhya claim that the world emerged from some entity – which they called as Pradhana or primordial matter – which is basically inert and insentient and lacking will.

It is difficult to imagine something creating something when it is inert, when it lacks any will and when there was nothing else to motivate that. Moreover, whatever it created is brimming with intelligence and will, when it by itself is devoid of it!

So the Upanishads rejected the idea of a insentient, unintelligent root cause.

That means that the God can think!

The father Uddalaka in our story gives a detailed description of how this one round trip through the creation destruction cycle went about. Keep in mind, the words ‘creation’, ‘destruction’ are used only to mark two stages. Nothing was ever created nor destroyed as we said earlier.

We will get back to the story in the next episode.

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A story of Uddalaka and Swetaketu from Chandogya Upanishad, which is part of Sama Veda. Upanishads are concluding parts of ancient Indian Vedic scriptures believed to be at least 5000 years old. The interpretation is by Dr.King (Copyright © 2019 Dr. King).