Lower Stage of Knowledge
The lowest stage of awareness is vaishnavara(sometimes called jagarita-sthana), the normal state of being awake, and hence open to sense perception and rational thought. This is also a state called maya.
Higher and lower knowledge are subjects addressed directly in the Man-dukya Upanishad (1:1.3–9). The passage begins:
There are two kinds of knowledge, higher and lower. The study of sacred texts, of religion, of astronomy, and of all the arts, is lower knowledge. Higher knowledge is knowledge of the soul.
The eye cannot see the soul, and the mind cannot grasp it. The soul has no race, and it does not belong to any social class. It has neither eyes, nor ears, nor hands, nor feet. It is vast and tiny; it is eternal and changeless. It is the source of all life.
As the web comes forth from the spider, as plants sprout from the Earth, and as hair grows from the body, the universe springs from the soul. The universe is the energy of the soul; and from this energy comes life, consciousness, and the elements. The universe is the will of the soul; and from this will comes the law of cause and effect.
The immortal soul sees all; nothing escapes the soul's gaze. From the soul one became many; but in the soul many are one.
Later, the Song of the Lord (Bhagavad Gita) set forth three basic paths for living: knowledge, selfless action, and devotion to God. When used today, the path of knowledge implies an awareness of reality that is one and spiritual, the Brahman, with which each soul is identical, and which is sat, chit, and ananda — pure being, intelligence, and bliss. But the entire phenomenal world — that world we apprehend with our senses — is illusion (maya), which possesses only a relative reality compared to Brahman.
In the Mandukya Upanishad (3:1.1–5, 7), a verse asks us to, “Imagine two birds perched on the same tree. One bird eats the fruits of the tree, both the sweet and the bitter. The other silently looks on. The first bird represents those who are attached to the things of this world, and so experience pleasure and pain; the second, those who are detached from the things of this world, and so are free from pleasure and pain.”
The philosophy of pleasure and pain is clear: “As long as you pursue pleasure, you are attached to the sources of pleasure; and as long as you are attached to the sources of pleasure, you cannot escape pain and sorrow.”
What is missing in this level of knowledge is the awareness of anything higher.
The following passage from the Chandogya Upanishad (6:9. 1–3; 10.1–3; 11.1–3) shows this distinction.
The Seed and the Blindfold
“Bring me a banyan fruit,” Aruni said; and his son brought him one. “Cut it in two,” Aruni said; and his son cut it in two. “What do you see?” Aruni asked. “I see some very small seeds,” his son replied. “Take one of the seeds, and cut it in two,” Aruni said; and his son cut the seed in two. “What do you see?” Aruni asked. “Nothing at all,” his son replied.
Aruni said: “Within that seed is the essence which makes the entire tree grow — yet it cannot be seen. In the same way the soul is the essence which gives life to every being in the universe — yet it cannot be seen.” “Tell me more about the soul,” his son said.
Aruni said: “A man was once blindfolded, taken far from his village, and abandoned. The man wandered to the east and west, to the north and south, but he had no idea which way he was going. He called out for help. Eventually someone heard his call and took off the blindfold. The man now went from one village to another, asking directions, and he found his way back home. In the same way a good teacher takes the blindfold from the spiritual eyes of his pupils. Then they are able to find their way to the soul — which is their true home.”
Maya
Maya is the lowest form of knowledge there is. How low is it? So low, that the alternate term for maya is avidya, or ignorance. This ignorance is of a special sort. It is ignorance of the unitary nature of all reality. A person who fails to see that all reality is one is in maya. It is as if such a person looks at reality through a veil of illusion or looks out at the world through gauzy material.
Metaphors may be necessary, since we are dealing with talk about the phenomenal world and the spirit world. Maya, the world as we sense and know it, disappears like fog does when the light of knowledge of the singular nature of ultimate reality moves forward in our consciousness.
A person is in the grip of an illusion when she sees the world as dual. This duality is separateness; it is the sense of a self set apart from everything that is not self. It is a sense of twoness — of self and world — rather than oneness. Not far removed from this sense of duality are the distinctions made by sense: hot and cold, strong and weak, light and dark, pleasant and unpleasant, winning and losing, life and death, and on and on.
In the midst of these changes, we yearn for something changeless among all the changing things. We long for an end to this perceived division between self and not-self. The real duality is not our personal “I” separate from the universe; rather, it is our spirit separate from matter.
In Hindu mysticism, these two are called prakriti and purusha. Prakriti is the phenomenal world, the world of matter, of things that are subject to change. This change includes growth and decay, life and death. But prakriti doesn't merely describe the world of material things; it also includes energy and any other entity. By contrast, purusha is spirit, pure consciousness. This is also known as atman, our real self. But this self is not a malleable, perishable substance, such as a brain, for the brain is part of the created world, of prakriti.
Many philosophies, including Western philosophies, draw a distinction between matter and spirit. These systems of thought are dualistic. The separation gets made between unconscious matter and conscious spirit, but Hindu mysticism goes further. It actually posits a third element, which confuses the other two. This element mixes up the roles of the other two and confuses their proper categories. This third element is called maya.
Maya is often translated as “illusion,” but it is much more than that. It is the mistaken idea that each of us, each self, thinks of itself as a finite, destructible being that, as Shakespeare put it, “struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.” Maya is the mistaken notion that reality lies beyond the tip of your nose, “out there.” Maya is distortion; it can be compared to trick glasses that color each perceiver's reality, tainting it until it is distinct from what it truly is.
Maya sets up an obstacle between self and world, knower and known. Maya leads each individual to see himself as just that — an individual, and not part of the seamless web of the whole. A person in the grip of maya divides the world into as many things as there are grains of sand on the beach, multiplied by the number of stars in the sky. A person in maya fractures the world, instead of seeing it as one.
But seeing the world as one is easier said than done, for duality lies behind most perceptions of the physical world. We make so many distinctions between self and not-self: Trees, cars, rainbows — all can be termed beautiful, but all are also not-self. Only a meditating mind, calm and apart from the speeding duality and separateness of momentary existence, can allow us to see life as one.
The mystical experience is a unifying experience. In this unified state of mind, life is seen to be one; outside that state, it is infinitely diverse. It seems odd that the world can be both, but it can be. It all depends upon the mind that is doing the perceiving. It is the distorting lens of maya that makes us see the one as many.
There are reasons enough to adopt this view of life. The world that physics describes is a world of things. We see trees and mountains, sand and rocks, refrigerators and footballs. We see these objects as many, not one, and this makes sense. After all, each makes a different sense impression on us. Greek philosophers in the sixth century
In Hindu philosophy, this mode of perceiving separateness is maya. Maya is active, not passive. It is a creative force and one that interprets the world. It is the creative power of consciousness or shakti.One reason this maya has such a tight grip on us is because of our desires. We see things and people in the world that we desire; the world is a material place, a cornucopia of sights, sounds, shapes, and smells that we desire to experience and possess. These objective realities we perceive to be transient, changing, and finite, in opposition to a self that is eternal and changeless. It is this confusion over what is real and what is passing that characterizes maya.
Mystics in several traditions maintain that there is no relationship between matter and spirit. We are the self, pure spirit, and once the veil of maya falls, the illusion of being involved with this world and its creatures falls away. But this spiritual monism leaves matter out of the picture entirely. The Shvetashvatara Upanishad holds a different view:
Conscious spirit and unconscious matter
Both have existed since the dawn of time.
With maya appearing to connect them,
Misrepresenting joy as outside us
When all these three are seen as one, the Self
Reveals its universal forms and serves
As an instrument of the divine will.
But what is this self of ours? It is the whole of life, nothing more and nothing less. It is not separate from the world. On the contrary, it is a self united with all, Jaganmata, “Mother Universe,” alive with the power of God.
This is a frequent vision of mystics. The Blessed Angela of Foligno had a similar experience, which was related in her Book of Visions.She wrote:
The eyes of my soul were opened and I beheld the fullness of God, in which were comprehended the whole world, both here and beyond the seas, and the abyss and ocean and all things. In all this I saw nothing but the divine power, in a way beyond the power of words to explain; so that my soul, through excess of marveling, cried out with a loud voice, This whole world is full of God!
This vision isn't merely a matter of spiritual preference. The recognition that we are not separate creatures but all one means that we are not living for ourselves but for all. To reach this state is to be awake. That is the meaning of the name Buddha — “the awakened one.” According to the mystics, once we are awake, we never fall asleep again. Our environs — our complete world — is the same as it has always been, but we look at it anew. We never lose sight of the unity underlying the apparent separateness.
Lower Knowledge in the Twelve Verses of the Mandukya Upanishad
In the Mandukya Upanishad the self — described as being Brahman, which in turn is all — has four states of consciousness. The first of these is called vaishnavara, in which:
One lives with all the senses turned outward,
Aware only of the external world
Those who know this,
Through mastery of the senses, obtain
The fruit of their desires and attain greatness.
The waking state is unexpectedly praised here, but the only kind of success that awaits this state of consciousness is material success. For here, all of the human spirit is poured out and spent on a multitude of objective things, bound to space and time and to the laws of the physical universe.
The philosophy here is an echo of the Mandukya Upanishad, where it says:
Rituals and sacrifices are expressions of lower knowledge. If you wish to become wise, ignore all rituals and sacrifices, and go in search of all higher knowledge. In crossing the sea of birth and death, rituals and sacrifices are like leaking rafts.
And again, in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (2:4.7–9, 11–14), there is a discussion of two states of consciousness, a lower and a higher:
The sage continued: “As human beings we have two states of consciousness: one in this world, and the other in the world beyond. There is a third state between these two; in this third state we are aware of both worlds, with their sorrows and their joys.
“When we die, it is only the physical body which dies; we continue to have a non-physical existence, in which we retain the effects of our past lives. These effects determine our next life. During this period between lives we experience the third state of consciousness.
“In this third state of consciousness there are no chariots, no horses drawing them, and no roads on which they travel; we make up our own chariots, horses and roads. In this third state there are no joys and pleasures; we make up our own joys and pleasures. There are no ponds filled with lotus flowers, no lakes and no rivers; we make up our own ponds, lakes and rivers. That which we make up, is determined by the effects of our past lives.”
Those who practice meditation and who conquer their senses and passions purify their hearts, thereby acquiring knowledge of the soul — which is the source of all light and life.
