Hindu Worldviews: Theories of Self, Ritual and Reality by Jessica Frazier

Author:Jessica Frazier [Frazier, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-02-08T18:30:00+00:00

It is this person who knows and ‘enters’ the whole world, both identifying with it and transcending its particularities. Again, there is a striking difference from the self-as-consciousness conceived in later Vedānta as a non-dual reality without content, divorced from perceptions and thoughts. This is a self that unifies with the world precisely insofar as it imagines and understands it. This is an idea echoed in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, which also takes language as its medium for thinking about the extension of self into the world:

Now, then, man is undoubtedly made of resolve. What a man becomes on departing from here after death is in accordance with his resolve in this world. So he should make this resolve: ‘This self (ātman) of mine that lies deep within my heart – it is made of mind; the vital functions (prāṇa) are its physical form; luminous is its appearance; the real is its intention; space is its essence (ātman); it contains all actions, all desires, all smells, and all tastes; it has captured this whole world; it neither speaks nor pays any heed . . .

‘This self (ātman) of mine that lies deep within my heart – it contains all actions, all desires, all smells, and all tastes; it has captured this whole world.’ (3.14.1–4)

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