Kena Upanishad / Sri Aurobindo

CWSA 18 · Translations and Commentaries from Manuscripts

Kena Upanishad: An Incomplete Commentary

pp. 297–310

As the Isha Upanishad is concerned with the problem of God & the world and consequently with the harmonising of spirituality & ordinary human action, so the Kena is occupied with the problem of God & the Soul and the harmonising of our personal activity with the movement of infinite energy & the supremacy of the universal Will. We are not here in this universe as independent existences. It is evident that we are limited beings clashing with other limited beings, clashing with the forces of material Nature, clashing too with forces of immaterial Nature of which we are aware not with the senses but by the mind. The Upanishad takes for granted that we are souls, not merely life-inspired bodies—into that question it does not enter. But this soul in us is in relation with the outside world through the senses, through the vitality, through mind. It is entangled in the mesh of its instruments, thinks they alone exist or is absorbed in their action with which it identifies itself—it forgets itself in its activities. To recall it to itself, to lift it above this life of the senses, so that even while living in this world, it shall always refer itself & its actions to the high universal Self & Deity which we all are in the ultimate truth of our being—so that we may be free, may be pure & joyous, may be immortal, that is the object of the seer in the Kena Upanishad. Briefly to explain the steps by which he develops and arrives at his point and the principal philosophical positions underlying his great argument, is as always the purpose of this commentary. There is much that might & should be said for the full realisation of this ancient gospel of submission & self-surrender to the Infinite, but it is left to be said in a work of greater amplitude and capacity. Exegesis in faithful subordination to the strict purport & connotation of the text will be here as always my principle.

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