The Mandukya Upanishad

The Mandukya is the shortest of the main Upanishads, and its twelve verses deal with a single subject: how to awaken to our intrinsic identity with Brahman, the Absolute, aided, particularly, by practices based on the syllable aum. The Upanishad begins:

The syllable aum is all this... All that is past, present and future is indeed aum. And whatever is beyond the three divisions of time is also truly aum. (Mandukya, one)

The syllable aum indicates all that exists in time and also the ultimate Reality that transcends time. It encompasses both without contradicting either; this is the root of its efficacy as a focus for contemplation. It ‘is all this’ because its three elements contain the seeds of all speech, and here ‘speech’ is used in its fullest sense to mean all that can be known as names and forms, which is the entire phenomenal world. The transcendent is found in the silence from which the syllable appears and into which it resolves. By meditation on aum one can see the world in its right perspective and affirm one’s true identity as the consciousness in which all experience appears. This theme is to be expanded in the Upanishad, as we will see below.

Such an awakening to Self-knowledge is not a special or unusual state of mind, but a return to normality and well-being. Our innermost Self, concealed by an imaginary delusion, frees itself from this state of not-knowing, and recovers its innate knowledge that ‘I am Brahman’. This is expressed in a special way in the second verse of the Upanishad:

All this is surely Brahman [the supreme, Absolute]. This Atman [Self] is Brahman. The Self has four quarters. (Mandukya, two)

Here we find the statement ‘This Atman is Brahman’. This is one of the four mahavakyas, the ‘great utterances’, which indicate the identity of human consciousness with the universal. This has to be understood by discriminating between reality and appearance in human beings and the universe. The ‘four quarters’ referred to in this verse are three aspects of the phenomenal world, plus the fourth, the transcendent, as will be explained later.