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THE ROAR OF AWAKENING
donel-Verily, a person is a thing well done. He said to them: 'Enter into your respective abodes.' Fire became speech, and entered the mouth. Wind became breath, and entered the nostrils. The sun became sight, and entered the eyes. The quarters of heaven became hearing, and entered the ears. Plants and trees became hairs, and entered the skin. The moon became mind, and entered the heart. Death became the out-breath, and entered the navel. Waters became scmen, and entcred the virile member." 0
The pupil is taught to apply his knowledge of correspondences of this kind to such meditations as the following: "Just as a jug dissolves into earth, a wave into water, or a bracelet into gold, even so the universe will dissolve into me. Wonderful am II Adoration to myself. For when the world, from its highest god to its least stem of grass, dissolves, that destruction is not mine." 7
There is evident here a total disjunction of the phenomenal self (the naïvely conscious personality which together with its world of names and forms will in time be dissolved) from that other, profoundly hidden, essential yet forgotten, transcendental Self (ātman), which when recollected roars out with its thrilling, world-annihilating, "Wonderful am I?” That other is no crcated thing, but the substratum of all created things, all objects, all processes. “Weapons cut it not; fire burns it not; water wets it not; the wind does not wither it.” & The sense-faculties, normally turned outward, seeking, apprehending, and reacting to their objects, do not come into touch with the sphere of that permanent reality but only with the transient evolutions of the perishable transformations of its energy. Will power, leading
6 Aitareya Upanisad 2. 1-4. (Translated by Robert Ernest Hume, The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, Oxford, 1921, p. 295.)
7 Astāvakra Samhita 2. 10-11. (Translated by Swāmi Nityaswarūpānanda, Mayavati, 1940, pp. 22-28.)
8 Bhagavad Gita 2. 29.
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