Krishnamurti - The Master that Failed
(Time, Being and Language - 1995)
Illustration credit for the book- Shashwat 2022
The ‘TIME’ of the Master
Some 100 years back Nietzsche, a German philosopher in his book ‘The Gay Science’ announced that after a million years of evolution “God was dead”. ‘Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, the madman provoked much laughter. Has God got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated? Thus did they shout and jeer. The madman condemned them saying, ‘God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it.’ Further he says ‘DEAD ARE ALL THE GODS: NOW DO WE DESIRE THE OVERMAN TO LIVE.’
So what does it mean…The basic meaning of ‘God is dead’ is that the forces that have shaped us and our lives both socially, politically, culturally and have shaped the Earth itself; Our soil, the way we interact with the world, the way we cultivate things, no longer works. That these forces or this particular spirit or this particular understanding that we have about ourselves has ceased to exist and it no longer shapes us. Religion has lost its power to tell us and guide us about our own existence. The fear that I may end up in heaven or hell after death had vanished.
The French Revolution, the arrival of materialistic science, humanism, medical and industrial engineering has killed it. God along with his earthly Sovereign the Monarch and his Nobleman are dead, we no longer look to monks and priests to know what causes lightning to form and strike, how babies are born, how disease spreads and how the body functions.
But this was only a symptom, something more terrible was underway…something else has taken its place and we don't know what it is. At least Nietzsche never gave an answer. Probably he never fully understood the power of this change. He said art may replace religion as the source of spiritual and moral values because there has to be some moral foundation. For him the new man having freed himself from the bondage of ownership and the concept of man defined in the image of god and having overcome this man and in this overcoming he become the overman who owns his own being and whose acts of being is the source of his own moral values. But what is this Being or existence where he imposes his own ownership as value independent of society and the world and engages freely in being the authentic being, that is being himself and not an image of something or someone remained undefined.
…
But since then there were several moments and Theosophical Society was one such moment to re-establish, reconnect the spiritual core with this new which has manifested, which is going to shape us, which is shaping us, is deciding what is right and wrong, what is true and false.
Where Theosophy went wrong is that instead of understanding Gods as material and bodily processes through which the seer disappears into the background to allow the world to shine forth and be experienced, instead it got stuck in platonic forms existing in supernatural mental states whose ordering and control will give rise to a transcendental future, a new world inhabited by new beings.
On the other pole was this growing fervour heating up the human consciousness that the ‘What IS’ is only from the point of view of labor, material resource and economic interrelated processes and only the existential outcomes resulting from its dynamics that the ‘Now’ will be decided. But this ‘New’ which nobody truly understands except the materialist and marxist wanting to own up their own labor as their own source and means of production and by doing so, the material and economic modes of production would be redefined by their needs; and driven by necessity these would inevitably re-define the realities of the market and this in turn would pave the way for the arrival of new communities. And out of its material and economic processes, a new global world order with its own unique meaning and worth would supersede and replace all past political systems.
If all institutions of human society including the political, the government, the religion and sovereign laws are the outgrowth of its economic activity, which means that every society relies on its own mode of production then it is inevitable that all institutions that shape that society must follow from that mode of economic activity and adapt to it, or cease.
And as everything is a by-product of economic production, then to know and unearth the dynamic relations that govern the development of all material forces of production. To know and realize in practical terms, how this economic activity by individuals, people and nations generate historical, social, political and religious realities. And having understood the historical engines one has to register the insights arising from such an inquiry to replace all previous forms of knowledge production as well as its related institutional modes of education. Thus everyone should work to transform the world and the human consciousness of it in relation to the above insights.
What is meaning, what is one's worth, how does this worth exist in a collective and how can this communism of worth floating freely in a world of exchange generate values? These are questions that were never answered as all movements slowly turned into the problem of the will to power. Thus in opposition to the above historical materialism a second determinant is posed over and above Marxist dialectics by Nietzsche.
This second determinant is embedded in reactive attitudes arising in the individuals as a response to an injury or an injustice felt as oppression and domination as well as finding oneself in an impoverished underpowered social position.
This inferiority complex overtime generates a feeling of frustration and acrimony and the resulting hostility and resentment that follows drives change. In an event where weak and inferior values infected with envy and born from deep resentment are posed over and above the strong, as a means of justifying one's own weaknesses as superior against the source of envy, thus the weak instincts are praised and secured against the strong instincts by a dialectics of condemnation. Below and above there is only one fundamental instinct, and that is ‘The will to power’ the struggle of everyone against everyone for all out dominance.
What do these ideologies do to us, what does it make us into and how do we the noble ones fired with these ideas of Science, Government and Power behave when we deal with others.
What happens when communities who are fired with the idea of common good and universal equality engage in war with other communities. That is, when we translate our beliefs into communities and when these beliefs go into action...how would these ideas act out, how would they behave and conduct themselves when they encounter the other, the different and unique.
Thus societies arise, dominate and disappear as the modes of economic production and underlying resentments evolve and change and new laws and rights are demanded and realized by the necessity of time and consequently change follows. From feudalism to mercantilism to communism or master slave, the weak against strong to something…
What is this unknown something? You can call it historical materialism, you can call it the essence of science, you can call it universal reason, you call it technology which basically is a combination, you combine your physical aspect to your workforce to operate tools, like you have fingers. The way your brain connects to your fingers and your legs and the know-how involved in that. So technology is something which combines or is a total understanding which from now on is going to govern and shape us, not just shape us but shape our planet.
So technological determination occurs on a planetary scale, everything prior to this event was similar to, no matter where you are, whether you are in India, or you are in Greece, or you are in England, or you are in France, or wherever you are the basic things that shaped us and our life were similar. We have different names and different concepts for it but the basic Force, the spirit, the core, the motor of change and its historical necessity remains the same everywhere.
So what is this mysterious change? What exactly has replaced all that when we say God is dead, which basically means that the past has lost its power and force to shape us. And what is shaping us? We don't know what it is.
The problems we find ourselves in are challenging, especially once our bodily capacities have been freed from its metaphysical and sacred leanings, the faculties and capacities that previously served the gods have now been made available in the name of progress as material resources to be exploited in the service of the common good. But what is this common good freed from all personal, political and social representations?
This mystery needs to be experienced, its various aspects explored and why all philosophers, all thinkers, all saints, all gurus have failed. They have failed because they are all seeking to repackage the past as that is what they know and with it light up your present, but it's not working.
You cannot stop the onward march of whatever is shaping us, we don't know what it is. All we see are semiotic cybernetics in motion as computers, platforms, interfaces that shape our time around its algorithms in the name of social space and forums. The change is no longer coming, you cannot imagine a future without taking its power into consideration, but we don’t know its movements. It's as if our destiny has been whooshed out from our hands and we realize that our freedom was an illusion, that in reality we were never in control. All we ever had were explanations, grand narratives and stories. So we ask ‘what is controlling us’.
It is the fundamental base of change and it's affecting everything, every aspect of life and the more it's affecting us, the more we try to run back into the past, into religion, into communalism, into fanaticism, into all kinds of things because we feel quite secure in it. We feel at home in the familiar, we don't understand what's happening, we don't know what the future is or what it is going to make us into.
So you find this massive revival happening all over the world, politically, socially, religiously against industrial, material and technological thinking.
Meeting the Master
I remember hearing a lot about Jiddu Krishnamurthy from my 'would be' father-in-law who was a big fan of Krishnamurti. One day he asked me “Do you want to come?”
I asked “Where?”
He said, “I'm going to attend a Krishnamurti lecture at his place”
I said “Yes fine.”
A year back he had given me a book by Krishnamurti ‘The first and last freedom’ which I had tried reading but to be honest, I liked the introduction by Aldous Huxley better than Krishnamurti's own lectures. Having heard so much about him I was eager to meet the Master.
I think it was somewhere in South Mumbai. I don't exactly recall what place it was. I faintly remember that we took a bus to Bandra station, caught the Local train, got down at Grant Road and walked for 10 minutes before hopping onto another bus to reach our destination.
We must have sat for a few minutes and behold, here he was, this wonderful person, dressed in white kurta and jacket. Having arrived he walked gracefully to the raised platform and sat straight and still.
I had never seen a person so radiant. So beautiful, so peaceful, and so much in command and everybody who was sitting there were completely mesmerized by his presence. The whole assembly was so silent that we could hear distant birds and even the flutter of wind. He looked around and spoke. You come here thinking that I can give you insights, that I am some old wise man who knows some ultimate truth. But you will get nothing out of me, and then slowly he started speaking about things, about Honesty, about being true, about love and a lot of things.
The whole audience sat mesmerized, Seeing them in such a state I wondered whether they were awake to what was being said, or had they slipped into some sort of trance.
I myself sat lost and not able to make much sense of his words. He spoke about Identity and distance and why the perfume of love does not choose who smells it. “You cannot own it and say its mine, the individual who wants to capture it, seeks to possess the truth is incapable of loving, there can only be hate, violence, and destruction with yours and mine. We are divided as Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, this or that. We carry our Gita, the Bible, the Koran and it tells us to love your neighbours, but the fact is that you do not love. Look at the intolerant and contemptuous way you talk of others… Watch carefully what I am going to say. Let's inquire together into this. Now… Watch carefully, Thought creates God, and then thoughts worships it. So we create God and we then worship it… and over time we and the world and all the multitudes, we all of us develop our own puny little private understanding of what it is. What is God? We politicize it, write it down and call it the sacred and even when we initiate an inquiry into the sacred, we do so only to reassert our own beliefs in it. So the facade of enquiry is initiated only to reconfirm and reassert what we already know. And so we are unable to break the vicious circle using our own understanding. So the same questions get asked to reassert the same answer that we already know. We are afraid to analyze because the analyzer is afraid to know that he may not find what he was looking for in there in the first place…
The observer is the observed. Watch carefully…Thought is fear and seeks security in time…”
I turned around and saw that everyone was stiff and frozen. His words had a mesmerizing effect on all who were present, and here I was listening to him word by word and I could visualize each word, and I can see it. So I got up and asked the master, “Sir, I have a question.”
The master's flow was broken. He stared at me, stone faced as he always was with not a particle of emotion gleaming from his wrinkled cheeks.
He looked at me, a boy in his 11th or 12th year and said, “here! why..look, a child is asking a question.” And so, when he spoke to me it appeared as if everyone had suddenly snapped out of their trance and now they were back in the real world. So I said to him, "Look, there's something missing, something wrong in what you're saying.”
He asked “ What is missing? what exactly do you mean.”
And I said, “I could see the words flowing out, and I could see the source of it. These words were coming out from a source, and nothing was being spoken about the source. The words themselves were empty, because once you separate it from the source, It made no sense because it was not he who was speaking, It was the source that was speaking and only the source made sense.”
And then he smiled and almost chuckled. And when he smiled and chuckled then everyone who was sitting there smiled and chuckled.
Then he said “You stay where you are, don't move, stay there, fix yourself. Whatever source you are talking about, whatever it is, fix yourself in that.”
I noticed that my father-in-law was staring at me with surprise as if I was behaving like an undisciplined child not honoring the seriousness of the event. So when I insisted on going the next day, he politely refused as the previous visit was enough of an embarrassment for him.
The Mysterious Circle
The next day I went for the lecture again and quietly listened to what he had to say without interrupting him. When the lecture was over and the master had left, a young girl roughly in her 18th year came over and said: “Yesterday you spoke about the source, we too are actually trying to explore that source! We have formed a group and the group meets every Saturday, so why don't you visit us and join the exploration with like minded folks.
I asked her where and she told me that the next meeting is at a restaurant called Chetna which is opposite Jehangir Art Gallery.” I asked “what time”. She said 2:30 in the afternoon.
I said fine, I will be there.
So I visited Chetna restaurant on Saturday afternoon and found her already seated along with two more gentlemen in their late 60s. I was offered tea and then she said, “I'll show you something fantastic!” and she took me inside the restaurant where there was a door and inside the door was a bookstore and it was full of spiritual books. The store had a magical quality and almost any spiritual books ever published anywhere in the world was there. She walked over and picked up a book from the rows of hard bound stack. It was Madame Blavatsky voluminous ‘The Secret Doctrine’. This she said is the Ariadne thread to unveil the Labyrinth; this is the Dionysus art of divine wine making, and we would be exploring it first.”
I said “I dont know anything about the author or her book.”
She said, “Look you come over, sit down, listen to what is being discussed and if you are interested, the book can be arranged.”
The owner of the Chetna was also there. And she asked him, “how much would the book cost?”
And he looked at me and said, “don't worry about the cost dear child. If you want to read it, it’s yours.”
So I took the huge three volumes and read every chapter thoroughly. This went on for almost a year, we would meet at Chetna, discuss and explore the spiritual world as explained in the book.
Since I was regularly going there and discussing the secret doctrine, I had stopped visiting krishnamurti’s talk. But then one fine day it all came to a halt.
As we were discussing the various states and powers of masters, yogis, magic and different ages of Manu to the arrival of Krishnamurthy, and how Krishnamurthy is the bridge that is suppose to reconnect us to the source through which we could know and master this unknown and mysterious thing that is shaping us today. And through him and the insights of Theosophy we would be able to tame, fashion and engineer a future of extraordinary magnitude, an extraordinary spiritual world that is waiting to arrive.
“All these rockets and space planes”, explained one of the elder, “all the computing technology, all this stuff is happening at an accelerated pace, the old world will be dismantled and so the burden has fallen upon us to prepare man to inherit the new age which is on its way to us.”
“In 200 years” he continued “not just your life, but things around you, including your house, the way you structure your house, the way you walk, the way things are designed, everything will be unrecognizable.”
“or unrecoverable,” I said.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“You fail to see the source behind all experiences and states, the ground that holds, supports and makes possible the masters and yogis as what they are in the first place. And that ground that makes all beings and experiences possible is not in time”. I said “Time is a human measure born from the experience of his being. It does not exist. The ground does not undergo any change. You cannot host the spiritual in material terms and thus the future you are waiting for will never arrive.”
“What are you talking about” he said
“Human arrival and departure” I said “happens within, but our coming and going, and all building and construction to secure our being is made possible by it. It first opened up a world for us to be, and as the backdrop of all possibilities, the things it has made possible can never have any access to it by calculating it into existence through the matrix of space and time.”
“Are you saying that Space and Time are illusions”
“Yes” I said, “in a way they are and in a way they are not. The knower and the process disappears behind the known.”
“I don’t understand anything that you are saying.” he said..
“Like we were discussing the other day”, I said “In Vedic poetics, the chandas cover the sense of the Mantra. What is a Mantra? It is Speech, It's made up of three steps, the head, the bodily process and the feet. The knower are the Rishis, the structure of knowing is the Devata, the Chandas hides or covers the knower and the process of knowing to let the known shine. In all this the 'Sat' or the true is the Knower in whom the process of knowing and the known occurs. But if the knower loses itself and starts identifying with the known or for that matter the process of knowing, it can never know itself. And that is why all this, the occult and the means to tame and master the processes to achieve, to will, to manifest the known is pure nonsense. The Nāsadīya in the 10th Mandala 129 Sūkta makes this very clear.”
Seeing the elders and Masters agitated she intervened and said “Do you even realize what you are saying? You are going against the wishes and visions of the Masters.”
Over time our peaceful discussions had turned loud, and so after a year or so I dropped out of the group saying “What you are after makes no sense to me. All these meaningless discussions will lead us nowhere, you cannot affect and master it.”
The elderly man said “you're on the right path child but you are going to come back to us here, because this is the only source. So no matter where you wander into, you have to come back here, if you want to make sense of Krishnamurti you have to know this because he is the bridge. He is supposed to channelize the essence that will spiritualize the modern world. Whatever this world is, whether it is technologically dominated worlds, a place measured by science, a zone designed via mechanics, whatever the world he is supposed to channelize and spiritualize, one thing is certain that by our spiritualizing activity a brilliant future of unimaginable goodness will arrive, a new age will be born.”
I said “even Krishnamurti has stopped making any sense to me anymore. And from his actions it was clear that he is least interested in this theosophical source and the involved processes which you are after. Krishnamurti on the other hand needs to be thoroughly investigated as he appears to be basically juggling the same thing that he has absorbed over time and even though he is very good at probing our vulnerabilities and is a born master in the art of exposing the insecurities that we people seek in an attempt to secure for ourselves a stable and suitable future…and despite all his talent and oratory skills, his sources remain rooted in west, in Oxford to be precise. And between Harvard, Oxford and Moscow and the lack of seeing as to how we are embedded in it, that language saturates and shapes us. And the lack of deep understanding of language and what it is doing to us. And how this ignorance is giving birth to the new house of the Metaphysical…so gentlemen it is time for me to move on.”
The Master Revisited
It is obvious of us to ask whether Krishnamurti is still relevant to us or not. My short answer is yes. but I say yes with a lot of caution because there are few things we need to understand and once we do, then you will find that Krishnamurti is very liberating. But before we go deep into this topic we have to first understand how words are born, what they do to us and what we should do if the word is lacking.
Now let's imagine that you are Krishnamurti and you have a spiritual experience. An experience which equips you to speak confidently and with authority on things related to others belief including their modes, methods, processes and means of experiencing the same thing. But you refuse to coin a word for it. You refuse to give an account for it. Which means that you can speak with authority but you have nothing to say or speak about the very thing that gives you this authority.
Poets struggle with words and if a word is lacking and there is something which they want to describe, the choice of word that you use will dictate the meaning and sense it gets embedded in. So the existence of specific words are shrouded in a mystery and that is why in the west when you find something new which you do not understand but you want to name it you refer back to Latin or Greek. Usually you search for a root meaning and from that root you derive a word.
In relation to spirituality, The Theosophical Society tried to do the very same thing but found itself lacking so it first reached out to Egypt and Neoplatonic enrichments which occurred there and finally traced all that to here.
Coming back to Krishnamurti one has to understand what sort of world saturated his being, for example he absorbed much that was happening in the west, especially Nietzsche’s existentialism and the new Consciousness that was arising there. But he would do so by avoiding anything Indian and by avoiding the mistakes of those who brought him up, that is the Theosophical Society and their masters.
He wanted to Englishize the whole spiritual system and to do so he chose certain English words. But words are vehicle’s of meaning that present their form as thought. But thought can be anything, for example it can be forms created in the mind. There are all sorts of forms appearing to us when we talk or when we describe ‘I saw this and I heard that, I experienced this’ but when you ask where are all these things happening you say it's happening in my mind.
If the name and their associated form appears in my mind, then we have to understand what this mind is. Where are all these images appearing? ‘This’ is the essence of this and ‘That’ of that, the observer is the observed and the imagining of what that is or means is instantly found to be exploding within us. Now because the West lacks a deep understanding of language, it was always searching for a word like my thought, my mind, my being, observer, witnesses and so on; thus an image in my mind is this and in the Indian system it is simply called language or Vak.
As soon as we posit a metaphysical entity or a concept we lose ourselves into the labyrinth that the west finds itself in. It can mean a process within language and that is why in the Indian tradition the poets were considered Rishis, the seers who saw the Veda, the word, the this of this, the thing of things and from here the enrichment of language began. When the vedas say, lead me from what is dark to light. it means give me, show me, to show itself means to reveal, to give, to appear in words, to appear in language with increasing clarity. We see in light, we don't go astray, don't lose our way.
In the east the whole poetic process is called murti vivarth, kriya vivarth and bhavna vivarth. So vivarth here means that whatever is appearing, whatever is showing itself, shining and hailing you to it, one is challenged to ask as to what it is that I am seeing, I am experiencing. So murti vivarth means to experience the manifestation consisting of different objects of the world located in space, kriya vivarth means to experience the manifestation consisting of action and processes taking place in time, and bhavna vivarth means to experience the manifestation consisting of cultivating, developing, building and in the claiming of the pleasurable and pleasing. Poet or a creative personality and artist are constantly doing these three and that is why you say that being and thinking, the experiencer and the experienced are the same, that is, thinking and being are not different, the observer and the observed are same.
If Thinking and Being are one and the same, then what is this being and where is this thinking located. How is this experience being referenced? Krishnamurti had no answer to this thought and thinking enabling source,, this access granting location because his vocabulary, thinking and speech essentially remained locked to the Oxford referential system. It was this, the background intelligence, the language mandala in and through which all his thinking occurred and through which he was able to give an account of his existence and through and by which he unwittingly framed the world of your experience.
This does not mean that one is denying Krishnamurti's spirituality. But what is he doing…Just like when we look at modern art, we see just a circle, a square on a white canvas, so basically what that artist is doing is denying the past to possess the present. Michelangelo was inspired by biblical stories, Picasso and others were inspired by the Communist Revolution and to express themselves they developed their own unique independent style free from past referentiality.
When Modern Art abandons everything classical to a point of absurdity where a toilet seat placed in a particular way in a museum becomes an art, an expression of being a modern self, not a religious, not a communist but a simple individual self-expression of what it thinks a true art freed from its past referencing is and we see a tap, an open book, a torn shoe, a crumpled glove, a dentist syringe, an antibiotic glass capsule…
Where does all this lead us? We have to understand that Krishnamurti was born in British India. Britain ruled all over the world and the Growing Power was America and somewhere down he felt that the Indian system is inferior. That we are still caught in the past and the ‘new’ is ‘this world’ which is unfolding through the English word, through an account of our being that can best be Expressed only through English, a Modern English just like a modernist painter, a scientist, an engineer, a physicist etcetera etcetera.
We cannot blame him because he was brought up by the highest class of English people and England will always reference back to itself, to its own referential whole. For example let's say I'm born and brought up in an Indian culture and my ‘Being’ is saturated through language in Indian civilization and I use Hindi as my first language, then Hindi will reference to its own referential whole to find a word, to how and where we can use it, so for example Atman or Brahma Vach,Vak, Shabd Om etcetera etcetera..
This process of being wet and saturated is to be worded and naturally I'll end up using these words which are specific, which refer to deep referential states that wet and soak me in its liminal moisture letting image and sense arise that mean something to me. So even though I may use English I may not abandon these words and keep using आत्मा, ब्रह्म, वाच, वाक्, शब्द, ॐ etcetera etcetera because I don't find anything equal in English that can express or account for my experience. Now not only is English different when it comes to very specific words. These are words which are experiential in its content especially when one wants to give an account for or speak about the experience of One's Own being. And to do so one instantly reaches out for some specific words like thought, like thinking, like process, mind so on and so forth.
For example, even when you use the word called existence, to exist, etcetera etcetera, it means something very different than for example Sanskrit or Hindi अस्तित्व which does not actually mean identity per se, but to get the full import and sense of the expression one has to combine BeingIdentity+RealityWorld that is shaping and determining my existence.and in the same manner instead of Being Non-being one would use सत असत। Now even the inner grammar is different for example if I say fetch me that book and I speak the same thing in Hindi मुझे वो किताब पकड़ाईये। You will notice that the verb and noun structure has reversed and that is a fundamental quality of English and Hindi and Sanskrit. So fetch me comes first and then comes book और हिंदी में किताब पहले आता है फिर दीजिये या पकड़ाईये।
And words, objects, the signifier, the signified. वाच and वाचक and so on and so forth. They each reference each other and so it's not very easy to just take the word आत्म and replace that with Self or Soul or spirit of spirituality or God. Even the word god carries a lot of load which references itself back to the Bible or in some cases it references itself back to the Greek experience of their own existence in which gods show up as something or someone whom they can address, who addresses them and indirectly shapes things around them.
So when Krishnamurti uses a word to cancel ईश्वर or to cancel भगवान or to cancel प्रभू which are basically substitution for ब्रह्म and आत्मा, so शिवा is आत्मा and पार्वती is वाच. Allah is आत्मा Quran is वाच. God is आत्मा and Bible is वाच, Krishna is आत्मा and Gita is वाच so on and so forth, one can keep substituting these to Infinity.
So Krishnamurti's project rests fundamentally on the fact that whether western culture and civilization will survive because his speech, his work, his grammar is deeply integrated within that referential structure that we call an English world. On the other hand Krishnamurti will always be alive in the Indian system because his inner thinking remains close to us which is Vedantic.
But it's dangerous to blindly accept anyone as a Master without first investigating his being. Because the Master can only reference itself to what saturates and wets him. And as the West lacks the core from which spiritual insights can arise. Its forte is in something else as mentioned at the very beginning. To arrive at the idea that Thinking and Being is one and the same, and that we are self-expression of आत्मा and as the background intelligence of that which is expressing itself as the world we are ब्रह्म itself.
