By Whom? The Mind Beyond Mind and the Delight That Draws All Creatures

Ask the one question that turns the eyes from the visible to the Seer, and let the asking itself become the door: by whom is the mind sent forth, and what is the Life of our life?

Some Upanishads open with an affirmation and some with a vision; the Kena opens with a question, and the question is nearly the whole of its teaching. Kena, “by whom?”, is its first word. Sri Aurobindo, who first translated the Upanishad at Baroda about 1900 and afterwards gave it a commentary in fifteen chapters in the Arya, between June 1915 and July 1916, saw in that word what he saw in the opening words of the Isha: the subject and the spirit of the whole fixed at a stroke. Here the seer does not survey the world; he turns round upon the one who surveys it, and asks what stands behind the mind, the breath, the word, the eye and the ear.

The Isha, he tells us, takes in the whole round of world and life and works; the Kena approaches a more restricted problem and a more precise inquiry, and “concerns itself only with the relation of mind-consciousness to Brahman-consciousness.” Matter is taken for granted, hardly named. The Isha begins with the all-inhabiting Lord and speaks to the awakened seeker; the Kena speaks to the soul still attracted by the external life, not yet wholly awakened nor wholly a seeker, and points it upward. Yet it closes where the Isha closes, on the summit of felicity, with Brahman named as the Delight. Its four parts are like four breaths of one ascent: the question and its first answer, the paradox of knowing and not knowing, the parable of the gods, and, after Uma’s word, the naming of That Delight.

Sri Aurobindo’s writings on it · 20

The text · 34 passages

Translation by Sri Aurobindo.

By Whom? The Mind Beyond Mind and the Delight That Draws All Creatures

The text · 34 passages

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