Kena Upanishad / Sri Aurobindo

CWSA 18 · Translations and Commentaries from Manuscripts

Three Fragments of Commentary on Kena Upanishad

pp. 313–314

The first two words of the Kena, like the first two words of the Isha, concentrate into a single phrase the subject of the Upanishad and settle its bounds & its spirit. By whom is our separate mental existence governed? Who is its Lord & ruler? Who sends forth the mind—kena preshitam, who guides it so that it falls in its ranging on a particular object and not another (kena patati)? The mind is our centre; in the mind our personal existence is enthroned. Manomayah pranasariraneta pratisthito 'nne, a mental guide and leader of the life & body has been established in matter, and we suppose & feel ourselves to be that mental being. But what guides the mind itself? Is it the mental ego as the unreflecting thinker usually & naturally supposes? As a matter of fact, it is perfectly within our knowledge and experience that the mental [ego] guides our actions only partially and imperfectly; it is governed by other forces, it is driven often by impulses that it cannot understand, it receives indications from a superconscious source; it is associated in the body with an immense amount of subconscious action of which it is ignorant or over which it has only a partial control. Guide & leader, perhaps, but certainly not the master. Who then is the master? Mind is not all we are. There is a vital force in us independent of mind. For although the two work together & act upon each other, they are still different movements. Our life goes on or ceases, rests or is active caring nothing, after all, about the mind & its notions. It serves it as a master whose interests it cannot afford to neglect, but does not always obey it & insists on the rights of its own separate existence. Who sent out this life force, who yoked it or applied it to these bodies & these actions, kena praiti yuktah Pranah prathamah—the epithet is used to indicate the essential life force as distinct from the particular life-functions called in Vedantic psycho-physics the five pranas.

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