Upanishads are the ancient Indian texts believed to be dating back to at least 5000 years. They are parts of the Vedas. They formed the main philosophic texts of Ancient India, at least before the advent of Buddhism.
Some of the thoughts expressed in these Upanishads are amazing, seen even from today’s point of view. My intention is not to say that whatever expressed in them is right. I just want to highlight how wrong we are when we try to assign a chronology to intellectual evolution.
Unlike the biological evolution, intellectual evolution does not follow any linear order. At least that is what is apparent when one studies these Upanishads. The thoughts of ancient seers expressed through these Upanishads resonate with the thoughts of many of our modern scientists or intellectuals.
Many modern scientists debate on how this world, as we see today, actually emerged. Some say that this world emerged from nothing! That sounds quite absurd, at least from common sense point of view. How can something come out of nothing?
But some scientists explain it by saying that ‘nothing’ does not actually mean ‘no-thing’ but a neutral state arrived at by combining of matter and anti-matter. When matter and anti-matter come together, what results is ‘nothing’ since they cancel each other. And from this ‘nothing’, matter somehow got separated, and the material world that we see now, emerged. That is what they mean by saying that this world came out of nothing. For modern science, this is just one of the many unproven conjectures.
Now look at the following verses from one of the Upanishads namely the Chandogya Upanishad. In that Upanishad, a sage wonders
“Some say that before the world emerged, there was absolutely nothing.
From that ‘nothing’, this world emerged.”
“EkE aahuh asat Eva idam agra aaseet – Ekam eva advitiyam.
tasmaat ‘asatah’ sat ajaayata”.
The sage disagrees and asks
“But how can that be possible? How can ‘something’ emerge from ‘nothing’? “
“kutastu khalu Evam syaat? katham ‘asatah’ ‘sat’ jaayEta ?”
And the sage goes on to express his firm opinion in this regard
“Even in the very beginning, this world was ‘something’ (and not ‘nothing’). And that ‘something’ or the ‘Sat’ was the only one that existed.”
“‘sat’ Eva idam agra aaseet, Ekam Eva adviteeyam”.
But how did this diverse world emerge from that one and only ‘Sat’? Was this ‘Sat’ sentient or insentient?
Upanishads strongly reject the idea that some sentient thing can emerge from insentient thing. Since the world we see around is full of sentience, the one that started it, namely the ‘Sat’, also has to be sentient. Though insentient things can emerge out of sentient thing, the other way is not possible. This was their reasoning.
So, these Upanishadic sages rejected all possibilities of a sentient world emerging out of insentient primordial substance. They rejected the claims of the Samkhyas and Vaisheshikas who both said that this world emerged out of insentient thing, just like our modern-day scientists.
Modern day scientists have no commonly agreed upon notion of what constitutes sentience. Most scientists believe that a complex organization of insentient things gives rise to sentience in the same way a complex organization of neurons in the brain give rise to apparently sentient mind. But how exactly does a sentient thing emerge out of insentient things is not very clear.
At a low-level, scientist have difficulty in defining what constitutes sentience since at those levels feeling etc. make no sense. So generally, a sentient thing is assumed to be something that can replicate itself. A Corona virus, however menacing it is, is insentient unless it attaches itself to a living cell. That is when it can reproduce and show signs of life.
With all the advances in science, we are unable to create a sentient ‘thing’ from inert things no matter how complex their organization is. At least as of today, we need something sentient to create another sentient ‘thing’. We only hope that someday we would succeed in creating sentience from insentience.
But the Upanishadic sages had no doubt that a sentient thing cannot be created from any combination of insentient things. They used this strong argument to reject the ideas of Samkhya and the Vaisheshika who claimed that such a thing is possible.
So, whatever existed in the ‘very beginning’ has to be sentient since the world that emerged from that is full of sentience. For these sages, sentience is not some emergent property of some complex organization of insentient things, the way our scientists seem to think. They considered sentience as a totally different category, distinct from insentient things. While insentience can emerge from sentience, they asserted, other way is not possible.
The well-known example taken from Mundaka Upanishad is
“The way hair grows from the body of a living person”
“yathaa satah purushaat kEsalOmaani”
The hair on some person’s body is lifeless. But the person on whose body these hairs grow is alive. If the person is dead, no hair can grow. So, insentience can emerge from sentience and not the other way around.
What is sentience after all? These sages attributed consciousness to whatever is sentient. What is consciousness? It is the ability to respond, ability to think, ability to feel, and ability to exert free will. Non sentient things have none of these properties no matter how well you organize them. If at all, they can only mimic a sentient thing in its presence, but cannot become totally sentient.
This was the line of thinking when the Upanishadic sages declared that the original ‘one and only thing’ was sentient – it could think, it could will etc.
Now, how did this one and only sentient thing which existing in the very beginning create this world? The Upanishadic sages said that this original ‘thing’ never created any world!
Instead, it just replicated itself and took on infinitely many forms. It neither created anything nor it got transformed into something. But it just ‘became’ many forms – sentient as well as insentient.
The Chandogya Upanishad says
“It thought ‘let me be many’”.
“tat aikShata ‘bahu syaam prajaayEyEti’”
Here, the ‘it’ refers to that ‘one and only thing’ that existed in the very beginning. Once it decided to replicate itself, first it took the form of three basic elements. These basic elements which are insentient, combined with each other in various proportions and gave rise to the material world. But this material world is insentient.
Next that ‘thing’ replicated itself as several sentient forms and got associated with the insentient forms in the material world. That is how a world brimming with sentience came into being. Neither the original ‘thing’ create the world, nor it got transformed as the world, but it replicated itself into a world of animate and inanimate things.
Even after this animate and inanimate world was formed, the original ‘thing’ remained as it was. How could that be? The Upanishads say that ‘that thing’ is beyond space and time! So, it can be in more than one place, in more than one form, all at once!
Does it sound more like our modern quantum theory? 😉 If you understand it, then surely you have not understood it 😉
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