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UPANISAD
us as the source and silently guiding force that animates both the body and the soul? What are we? What can we realistically hope for?
These pressing questions cannot be solved by ontological analysis. Metaphysical arguments end in no solution. The root that underlic's and gives existence to the analyzing, arguing mind as well as to the body that supports it must be touched. The mind itselt is inadequate for this task (cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason) and has to be put at rest.
In the early Vedic age the work of transcending mind was accomplished by the "way of devotion" (bhakti-mārga); wholehearted dedication, that is to say, to the symbolic personalities of the gods and the absorbing rituals of their perpetual worship. During the following centuries the concentration of the philosophers became introverted and the goal was sought along an inner path. But either way, the boon of life's bountiful power was won. A rooted, absolutely firm position was attained, where the dynamism of the phenomenal spectacle and the permanence of the animating principle could be experienced simultaneously as one and the same great mystery-the mystery of that absolutely transcendent, serene being which is immanent, and macie partially manifest, in the phenomenal becoming of the world.
Upanişad
THE CREATIVE philosophers of the period of the Upanișads, examining the problem of the ātman, were the pioneer intellectuals and freethinkers of their age. They stepped beyond
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