The Aitareya Upanishad

Picture a moment when nothing yet exists. No sky, no air, no fire, no water, no earth, no one who sees, nothing to be seen. A single conscious being sits alone, the one the rishis call the atman (that original consciousness which is the true self of all). The opening sentence of the Aitareya Upanishad, which comes down to us from the Rigveda, lifts the curtain on exactly this scene: in the beginning there was only the atman, and nothing at all stirred. Then, in the mind of that solitary being, a resolve rises, the resolve to create the worlds.

Swami Krishnananda reads this beginning as a singular kind of drama, one in which the same being is the sole director, every actor on the stage, and the only spectator too, because no one else sits before him to watch. He sees himself as the whole of creation and says that all of this is nothing other than me, the way clay might say that all these pots are only me. As Swami ji puts it, the creator does not stand outside his work the way a potter stands apart from his pots. He lives inside every pot the way clay does, and this is what Swami ji calls the cause hiding within its effect.

This text is called the Aitareya Upanishad, and across three short chapters it tells the whole journey of creation. First it recounts how the worlds and the gods emerge from the atman, and here Swami Krishnananda returns again and again to one fine point: the function appears first, the god who governs it comes after. First the mouth opened, then speech came forth, then Agni the fire-god arrived; the eye formed, then sight, then Surya the sun.

Then the gods enter the human body, then comes the account of the atman’s three births, and at the end the great utterance of the Rigveda rings out, प्रज्ञानं ब्रह्म (consciousness itself is Brahman). Yet the root question that beats beneath this Upanishad, Swami ji frames like this: the One became the many, then the One’s awareness of itself was severed from the many, and it is right here that all our sorrow begins.

So the question stands: how do we pass behind that fallen curtain and once more recognize the one consciousness that is our own atman? For Swami Krishnananda this is the whole purpose of the Aitareya Upanishad, to gather the scattered gaze and carry it back to that original selfhood, where the one who sees and the thing seen become one again.

The main characters of this Upanishad

The Atman (the Supreme Person): the solitary being in whom the resolve to create arose, and who fashioned the worlds, their guardians, and the human being.

Vamadeva: the rishi who won self-knowledge while still in his mother’s womb, the living proof of the mystery of the three births.

The story of creation

“Let me create the worlds”: the resolve of the solitary atman

The story begins where no story should be possible. No witness, no stage, no difference between before and after. In its very first sentence the Aitareya Upanishad carries us into the hour when only the atman was (the conscious being who is the source of all), and beside it nothing at all. No sky, no wind, no one to open an eye. With great calm the Upanishad says that in the beginning there was just one, alone.

Within that solitary atman a resolve arose (the mind’s firm determination that turns something toward coming into being), “Let me create the worlds.” The atman made four worlds: Ambha (the realm of the waters above), Marichi (the realm of the rays of the middle air), Mara (Martya, the dying earth), and Apas (the waters below). Then it reflected that the worlds now stood made, yet who would watch over them. So it wished for lokapalas (the guardian gods of these worlds). For this it drew a Purusha out of the waters (a primal human form, the original figure) and heated it with tapas. From limb after limb of that heated Purusha the gods were born. The mouth broke open, and speech came from it, and from speech, Agni the fire. From the nostrils came breath, and Vayu the wind. From the eyes came sight, and Surya the sun. From the ears came hearing, and the quarters of space. From a single Purusha the whole household of the gods burst forth.

Swami Krishnananda, an expositor of the highest truth, does not treat this whole creation as an event that happened somewhere outside. In his reading, the Aitareya tells us just this: one atman alone existed, and outside it there was nothing whatsoever. That same atman became the many, spread out into a form that fills the cosmos, and then entered the very creation it had made. It projected itself as the different gods, and it became, of its own accord, the jiva (the limited consciousness seated inside a body). The one who creates, the thing created, and the one who dwells within the creation are all the same one.

Swami Krishnananda calls this a graded descent, what he names the cause pouring itself into its effect. In his words, creation means the atman sinking toward ever greater particularity (a splitting into separate fragments), ever greater outwardness, and ever greater grossness. First it was subtle, then it became the gods, then it became the senses, then it became the objects of the senses. What we call creation is really the supreme consciousness descending deeper and deeper into its own self, until it lies all but buried in matter.

And here he says the thing that is the heart of this section. The Agni that came out of the mouth is the very fire now seated in our mouth as speech. The Vayu that came out of the nostrils is the very wind now moving our breath as prana. The Surya that came out of the eye is the very sun now seeing through the pupil as sight. Swami Krishnananda says that this same cosmic consciousness sank completely into matter, then emerged again as a reflection (a shadow of itself), became the jiva, and now looks at its own body as though it were some external object apart from itself. The gods outside and the senses within are limbs of one and the same Purusha. We have forgotten that the sun outside and the eye within are two ends of a single event.

This, in Swami Krishnananda’s reading, is why the story is the story of our own making. The Upanishad speaks of no distant world that God assembled off in some far place. It says that the consciousness by which the worlds were created is the very consciousness reading these lines at this moment. The whole cosmos spread out around you and this small “I” seated within both issued from the resolve of that one being, who once said, “Let me create the worlds.”

The gist: creation is the work of no distant craftsman seated far away. One atman, in its aloneness, made a resolve, became the many, and entered that very many. The fire that burns outside is the speech within; the sun in the sky is the sight within. What you take to be a world separate from yourself is the scattered face of your own origin, the one that said, one day, let me create the worlds.

The gods descend into the body, and hunger

Here is how things stand. Just now the atman (the one conscious being who was alone in the beginning) has given birth to the gods out of its own self. Here the word deva points to no figure enthroned up in the sky. It names the divine powers that will later work behind our senses: Agni (the power of fire), Vayu (the power of air), Surya (the power of light), the directions, and many more like them. Born they were, but they had nowhere to lodge. The Aitareya Upanishad says these newborn gods pitched about in a vast ocean, battered by hunger and thirst. With no home, no body, where were they to hold?

Then the atman shaped a dwelling for them. First it set a cow before them; the gods said it was too small. Then a horse; that too did not suit. At last the atman shaped the human body, and the gods cried out that yes, this was right, in this they could settle. Then each god descended into it through its own gateway. Agni became speech (the power to speak) and took its seat in the mouth, Vayu became prana (the power of breath) in the nostrils, Surya became sight (the power to see) in the eyes, the directions became hearing (the power to hear) in the ears, and in this way every power slipped inside through its own casement. Life came into the body, yet one question remained.

The atman reflected: with all these powers the body will manage to function, yet without me how will it hold together, and to whom will all of this belong? So it split open the pathway at the head, the seam that tradition calls the simanta (the fissure of the skull where the parting of the hair sits), and by that very road it entered within and took its seat inside. Now the body was no longer a mere assembly of senses; at its center sat that one atman from whom all these gods had first come forth.

Swami Krishnananda holds this whole event in a single thread. In his account, at first only that one atman was, and beyond it nothing external existed at all; it became the many, spread itself out as these gods, and it became the jiva (consciousness bound to a body). This creation, he says, is really the atman’s step-by-step descent, growing more and more particular, more and more external, the cause thickening within its effect until it turns solid. The gods descending into the body are one rung of that descent.

Swami Krishnananda goes on to say something piercing. This cosmic consciousness sank so far into matter that it then came back out of that very matter as a reflection, became the jiva, and began to stare at its own body as though it were an object lying outside. From this, in his view, the hunger for objects awakens. That hunger is really the atman’s hunger for its own self; what it reaches for is nothing other than itself, though it can never quite close its hand on it. And the limbs, in Swami ji’s words, cut off from one another, have been sealed into this small cell of a body, in which the atman lodges as though the body were its own private property. Behind every sense stands a divine power, yet seated within them all is that one atman, which has forgotten that it is both the house and the one who lives in the house.

The gist: every sense of ours is a casement for some divine power, Surya in the eye, Vayu in the nose, Agni in the mouth. Yet the one for whose sake they have all gathered is the atman seated within. And what we call the hunger for objects is really the atman’s hunger for its own self, wandering outside, searching for the very home that it already is.

Recognizing the atman

The three births of the atman: one consciousness, a new garment worn again and again

Here is the scene. The Aitareya Upanishad now steps down from the story of creation and settles on every person’s own experience. The rishi Mahidasa Aitareya (son of a mother named Itara, the seer on whose name this Upanishad rests) seizes one plain fact: what we call our life is really the story of a single consciousness taking birth over and over. It is in this context that the name of Vamadeva arrives, the rishi who grasped this secret while still lying in the womb.

The Upanishad says that the atman (the conscious principle seated within) takes birth three times in a human being. The first birth is when it grows as seed inside the father (as virya, the subtle form of offspring), and then comes into the world as an infant from the mother’s womb. The second birth is when that same child grows up and gives birth to a child of its own, for the father, as it were, rises to live again in a second form, in the form of his son. Tradition reads father and son as two ends of a single current, one being flowing onward. And the third birth comes after death, when this body falls away and that same consciousness sets out to put on a new garment.

Swami Krishnananda opens up the machinery behind this third birth. He says the body we have been given cannot last forever, because it is built of material fragments, and so, when its time comes, breaking apart is its destiny. The body falls when that same momentum of desire, the one that first raised this body up, draws its force back in. Yet that momentum of desire (the motion of the samskaras, the old imprints of past deeds) does not stop here. In Swami ji’s account, that momentum is never spent; it sets out again to seek satisfaction in some other corner of creation, in some other direction. From this comes rebirth (the taking on of a body once more), and the whole play begins again: discontent, birth, death, and discontent once more. This turning wheel is what he calls the samsara-chakra (the wheel of birth and death).

Swami Krishnananda stresses one point over and over: our real hunger has never been a hunger for bread, lentils, and flatbread. However much we eat, he says, however much we hoard, the mind is not filled, because the thing we need is not any of that at all. The true thirst within is the thirst to become one again with that fullness (the whole, Brahman) from which we were cut off and set apart. Forgetting this cause, Swami ji says, is avidya (the forgetting of one’s own reality). And as long as this hunger stays unfulfilled, every body tires and falls, and consciousness moves on to ask for the next body. This is the hidden thread behind all three births.

Now comes the shining moment of this section, Vamadeva. Tradition says the rishi Vamadeva, while still lying in his mother’s womb, before he was even born, came to know the secret of all these births, that all of it is the play of the atman alone, one consciousness wearing garment after garment. The instant he knew this, he broke the walls of bondage, and the moment the body dropped away he rose up and became immortal. Swami Krishnananda takes this liberation to be a message full of relief. In his view this is no event of history in which God, sulking with us, once threw us out of a garden in heaven. All that happened is that a cramp came into consciousness, a sickness took hold of the mind. And just as a mentally ill patient can be treated, so too the sickness of this consciousness can be cured, and then it returns to its true condition.

Swami ji explains this with the parable of a knot in a rope. He says that even if a hundred knots fall along a long rope, every knot is made of that same rope; a knot is nothing apart from the rope. Yet if a knot is aware only of its own small knot and holds no awareness of the long rope stretching out behind it, that is bondage, that is samsara. We have taken our name and form (our name and this frame) to be our everything, and forgotten the real essence. Swami Krishnananda says these very knots of name and form are to be untied, slowly, and the road to untying them is yoga (the discipline of joining), from yama-niyama (restraint and discipline) all the way to samadhi (the complete stilling of the mind), by which the walls of awareness keep widening until that same immortality comes to hand which Vamadeva found while still in the womb. One single thread, the same consciousness birth after birth, only the garments keep changing.

The gist: every birth is a new garment, yet the consciousness that wears it is one and the same, running like a thread from father to son and from one body to the next. The momentum of desire that spins this wheel is really the thirst to join the fullness once again. Whoever, like the rishi Vamadeva, recognizes even in the womb that the knot is not separate from the rope breaks his bondage on the spot and becomes immortal.

“प्रज्ञानं ब्रह्म”: consciousness itself is Brahman

By now the Aitareya Upanishad has told a long story: how the atman was alone, how this entire world came out of it, how the mouth split open and speech came and from speech Agni the god appeared, how the eye opened and sight came and from sight the sun. But now the rishi (the seer of the mantra) sets down a plain, piercing question. Even after knowing this whole creation, the real question remains: what, after all, is that atman we are to worship? The one we point to and call “this is the atman”, what in the end is it the name of?

The Upanishad’s answer is bold, and intimate too. It says, look within yourself. That by which you see, by which you hear, by which you smell, by which you speak, by which you tell sweet from bitter, the one who sits inside and lends its light to every sense, that is the atman. Its name is prajnana (pure consciousness, the awareness by which everything is known).

And then, in one breath, the Upanishad counts off the many forms this prajnana takes as it works within us. What we call mind, what we call buddhi (the understanding that decides), sanjnana (perception), ajnana (the understanding that directs), vijnana (particular knowledge), medha (the power to retain), smriti (memory), sankalpa (intention), all of these are different names of that one prajnana. A single current of mind, doing different work, is called by different names, yet behind them the consciousness is one. More than that, the Upanishad says that gods or humans, beasts or birds, all rest upon this same prajnana. Prajnana is the eye of the world, prajnana is its ground. And then the great utterance rings out, the one that is the gift of the Rigveda, “प्रज्ञानं ब्रह्म”, consciousness itself is Brahman.

Swami Krishnananda opens this turn with great depth. In his account the atman is no distant creator shaping the world from outside, the way a potter shapes a pot or a carpenter builds a table. It is like the clay present inside every pot, like the wood that lives in every table. The cause never stays cut off from its effect; it sits hidden within it. This is what Swami Krishnananda calls the cause being immanent in its effect (dwelling inside every single thing). And the same holds for prajnana: consciousness is no one object seated in a corner; it is the light flowing inside every seeing, every hearing, every knowing, the light without which no experience could occur at all.

Swami Krishnananda points to one more fine thing. He says that when a thirst for some high value, for truth, for the supreme, rises within us, it is really the cause calling to itself from inside the effect. When we ask for God, it is God who is speaking from within. So the same prajnana that shows us the world is also, from within, the call to return to itself. This is why it is wrong to shrink consciousness down to merely “one of our faculties”; it is the very Brahman that is knowing itself inside every living being.

Tradition (the mainstream that follows Shankara) makes this saying clearer still. Prajnana here is no single fragment of knowledge; it is the pure awareness that lies at the root of all knowings and stands in need of no other light. The sun shines by no borrowed lamp, only by its own radiance; in the same way prajnana makes everything known yet leans on nothing else to make itself known. When we find this self-luminous consciousness within and call it our own atman, and recognize it outside as the ground of the entire world, the two turn out to be one. This is the full weight of “प्रज्ञानं ब्रह्म”: the prajnana within and the Brahman without, two names, one thing.

The gist: the consciousness by which you are reading this line, by which you see, hear, and remember, that same prajnana is one within all beings and is the ground of the entire world. Mind, buddhi, memory, and intention are its names, and in Swami Krishnananda’s reading, when the thirst for the supreme rises from within, it is that very ground calling to itself. This is why the Upanishad says, “प्रज्ञानं ब्रह्म”: the consciousness within you and the Brahman that is the root of all are not two separate things.

And in the end, toward yourself

The Aitareya Upanishad took us on a long journey, and now it carries us home. In the beginning the solitary atman (the one conscious being from whom all sprang) made the worlds, then shaped a body, and descended into it through the gate of every sense, Agni as speech in the mouth, Vayu as prana in the nose, Surya as sight in the eye. Yet after the whole story the Upanishad sets a plain question before us: what, in the end, is this atman? The one we are to worship, what being is it? And in answer it gives the three-word great utterance, “प्रज्ञानं ब्रह्म” (consciousness itself is Brahman).

Swami Krishnananda (a teacher of the Divine Life Society, on whose exposition this reading rests) opens this point with great care. He says that consciousness (prajnana) is not a thing produced by the eye or the ear or any object. The eye is only a window, the ear only a road; the one who truly sees, hears, smells, tastes, and knows is that single consciousness seated behind them all. In his account, objects and senses are no more than a spade, digging out and bringing to the surface an experience already lying buried within; the spade is not the root of the experience. Mind, buddhi, memory, sankalpa, intention, all of these are different names of that one prajnana.

And here is Swami ji’s real emphasis. He tells us that this same consciousness is one and the same in the gods, in humans, in beasts and birds, in all; the whole of creation rests on this prajnana, as if this were the very eye of the world. The thirst that sends us running toward some pleasure is really, in Swami ji’s account, the inner call to rejoin that vast consciousness from which we have imagined ourselves apart. There was never any real division, only the sense of one. Let the recognition return, and that recognition itself is liberation.

So pause a moment and look. The light that is right now reading these lines, understanding them, saying yes or no, is that very knowing consciousness. It is the same light shining in the ray of the sun, waking in the flight of a bird, flowing in the going and coming of your every breath. You will not have to go searching for it anywhere far away; the very thing you would search with is what you already are. The whole invitation of “प्रज्ञानं ब्रह्म” is just this: recognize that knowing light within yourself, and the true first step of self-discovery lifts off from right there.

The gist: the consciousness by which you are reading and knowing this is the same one awake in the sun, in the bird, and in every breath. There is no need to search for it outside; to recognize that knowing light within yourself is the invitation of “प्रज्ञानं ब्रह्म”, and it is the first step of turning toward your own self.

This reading is based mainly on Swami Krishnananda’s (Divine Life Society) commentary on the Aitareya Upanishad.