The Ātman in Hinduism: Part 3

Brahman and Divine-Identity: The Theocosm

Like most other ancient civilizations of the world (Greece, Rome, Egypt etc..), ancient Indian civilization too was a polytheistic religion where prayers and sacrificial rituals to many divine gods and goddesses formed an integral part of ritual and cultural life. Different cultures of the world did eventually make a transition from polytheism to monotheism eventually. But they did it differently.

One simple way to make the transition to monotheism is to radically deny that all the gods who have been worshiped by your ancestors for millenia [except one] simply do not exist - and now start worshiping just that one god as the true god who alone exists. This transition was made by the Hebrews initiated during the times of King Josiah (c. 640-690 BCE) and was solidified and reinforced during the times of prophets when the Jews were conquered and exiled by the Babylonian Empire. The Jews in exile started believing that exclusive worship of their national God (Yahweh) will placate him and then make him redeem them from the Babylonian exile. Eventually, the prophets convinced them to not just worship one god (their national god) but also to deny the existence of other gods.  

Another way to make the transition is to elevate one god as “the god” and place the other previous gods subordinate to the one supreme god - this too was did by many cults in the ancient world but was systemically did in Zoroastrianism - the founder of this religion named Zarathushtra reformed the traditional Iranian religion by making it into a monotheism by placing one god as supreme - Ahura Mazda - but the other traditional Iranian gods were not denied of their existence. They still existed but they are either evil (hence not worshipable) or if good, were declared to be subordinate to Ahura Mazda and they are not worthy enough to be worshiped.

The Greco-Roman world, the rest of Europe and Africa, and the Middle Eastern world made a discontinuous and violent transition to monotheism by forced conversion to a new monotheistic religion - Christianity (that started out as a Jewish sect) or Islam (that arose from a heretic form of Christianity prevalent in pre-Islamic Arabia). This is not actually an evolution to monotheism but a rampant revolution.

But in India, the transition to monotheism happened in the most elegant and continuous manner possible. The transition happened through getting convinced by investigation. If you remember from the previous section, the persistent self is devoid of any personal attributes that characterize us as a distinct individual in our everyday world - our thoughts, our desires, our bodies and so on. But even the gods of Hinduism are anthropomorphic - they have desires, bodies and thoughts and behavioral patterns too. Applying this same logic by asking what persists to gods and goddesses, we conclude that there is an underlying sense of identity behind all gods. But by the same reasoning, this persistent self-identity behind each god is divorced from their individual attributes - and hence fundamentally, all gods and goddesses originate in a single underlying persistent eternal reality - the Upanisads call it as ब्रह्मन् (brahman). The word ब्रह्मन् in Sanskrit comes from the verb root “बृह्” that means “to grow, to swell, to expand, to enlarge”. Using the term brahman for this underlying impersonal divinity refers to the process of origination as he is the source from which all other gods and goddesses expand from.

So, all gods and goddesses become a single underlying brahman if viewed and understood only in terms of their bare essence of their own selves. This is not just tolerant but deeply accommodating to all kinds of popular religions - the multiplicity of gods and goddesses are neither denied nor subordinated to one supreme god and their worship continues exactly the same as before. Just that it is understood at a higher level that all these multiplicities of gods and goddesses when understood more perfectly, are actually one.

This is why Hinduism resists classification into monotheism or polytheism. There is an underlying monotheism behind a phenomenal polytheism. Yes, Hindus do worship many distinct gods and yes, Hindus also recognize that there is a base of one-ness in the divine realm.

Sat and World-Identity: The Macrocosm

All civilizations have attempted to understand the outside natural world that we perceive. Everyone must have asked at some point even in their childhood and be amazed by the magnificent changes that take place in our world around us. Change of seasons, change of weather, climate, flow of rivers, movement of celestial bodies and so on. Suddenly there is an earthquake or a tornado that wreaks havoc on millions and then disappears into oblivion. This phenomenal world of change that we observe, is referred to in Sanskrit as जगत् (jagat) which derives from a verb root “गम्” that means “to go, to move”.

For Sanskrit grammar nerds only: The word जगत् is a reduplicated weakened form of the root गम्. Reduplication happens in Sanskrit for example in the perfect tense (e.g. जगाम​  = he went). The disappearance of the final म् is also common in weak forms of the verb (e.g. गत​ = gone).

But is there any underlying constant beyond all of these natural phenomena? This has led to the development of natural science starting from the atomic theory to modern particle physics and general relativity. Atomic theory aims to explain the entire phenomenal world by saying that atoms are constant and all phenomenal change that we observe in the universe is simply due to the movement and rearrangement of these atoms due to their interaction by known physical laws. We are not yet towards a theory of everything in physics but we have come fairly close. We have broken down everything as much as we can to identify the fundamental  particles that constitute everything and have come fairly close to describing all of their interactions through the four fundamental forces. What remains is just to unify one such force of gravitation to the three remaining fundamental forces in a single framework.

Would our Ṛṣis who wrote the Upanishads have been impressed by this? Were these particles and forces what they had been looking for? Not at all - this was not their ultimate aim. The Ṛṣis were looking for not just mere fundamental particles [which can’t be broken down further] and their interactions. This is still the phenomenal world of जगत्  - it is still changing. The atoms move about and interact - just that we have now tamed down our understanding of these changes and restricted them and reduced them to a few fundamental particles and laws.

What is it about these particles that make them persist? This picture of objects or particles are just filters applied on our perceived reality to explain it. If we just are struck in our senses by the flux of this phenomenal जगत् (jagat), we feel just a bunch of momentary sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touches. The particles and forces are simply more sophisticated versions of categorizations and classifications to predict and exploit this world of phenomena. What makes any of these categorizations [these particles and forces themselves] persist? And when we looked for the underlying persistent factor behind the selves and gods and found them all to be a unity, should not there be a unity too into whatever underlies this phenomenal world? This underlying unity in the phenomenal flow of जगत् (jagat) is called in Sanskrit in the text of Upanisads by the term   सत् (sat). The word सत्  in Sanskrit literally means “being” and is grammatically the present active participle (शतृ  न.पुं form in Sanskrit grammar) of the verb root “अस्” that means “to be”. So, we see that the only thing that can be a common attribute of all that is really and persistently there in the world is sheer being and existence - divorced from the changing flux of our thoughts and material bodies.

As the ātman and brahman are bereft of particular human and divine personalities, the sat is devoid of particular categorizations of phenomena. All three of them just share one attribute - being alive, being divine and being respectively.

Thus, सत् is just sheer being and existence that underlies all the flowing reality of the changing world of jagat.

Authored by Rama Seshan Chandra Sekaran. Published by Brhat.