The Chandogya Upanishad - 4-2- 32 Swami Krishnananda.

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Friday 24, July 2026, 05:00.
Chapter 4: An Analysis of the Nature of the Self
Section 3: The Space Within the Heart
Mantram-3.
Sa va esa atma hrdi, tasyaitad-eva niruktam hrdy-ayam iti, tasmad-hrdayam, ahar ahar va evam-vit svargam lokam eti.
Post-32.

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Mantram-3.

Sa va esa atma hrdi, tasyaitad-eva niruktam hrdy-ayam iti, tasmad-hrdayam, ahar ahar va evam-vit svargam lokam eti.

There is a peculiar etymological derivation of the meaning of the word hridaya, which usually means heart. The Upanishads are very fond of these kinds of etymological extractions of meanings for certain words giving the significance of the words. As I said, hridaya means heart. It is a Sanskrit word and the Upanishad now explains why the heart is called hridaya. "Here inside is He." This means to say, Truth is inside you; it is the abode of that which is, and therefore, it is called hridaya. One who knows that one's heart is the abode of Truth attains to the highest heavens in experience. Our day-to-day experiences are not merely empirical or secular, as we normally dub them. There are no secular experiences or worldly experiences or physical experiences. They are only names that we give to the one experience of Truth. And these names are given only for the purpose of convenience in language to distinguish one type from another in our empirical dealings. In fact they are all one mass of experience, like a single body of an ocean of waters with different sizes and forms of waves. In every experience we can plumb into the depths of Truth, even as in every wave we can have water. With every perception we perceive That only. In every kind of cognition there is a cognition of Reality. But unfortunately we mistake the Being for objects on account of the habit of the mind to define things in different ways.

Mantram-4.

Atha ya esa samprasado'smac-charirat samutthaya param jyotir-upasampadya svena rupenabhinispadyate, esa atmeti hovaca, etadamrtam abhayam, etad-brahmeti, tasya ha va etasya brahmano nama satyam iti.

When a person rises above body consciousness, there is a serenity of experience. It is as if he is free from a drug effect into which he has entered and to which he has been subjected for long. Consciousness gets muddled on account of the influence of an external toxic matter due to which there is no proper thinking and understanding. As this toxic effect subsides, there arises serenity, tranquility and composure of experience. He feels as if something new has come into his life. He wakes up as if there is a new daylight before him. This is samprasada, the composure of consciousness which arises on account of the freedom of consciousness from bodily shackles. The moment this consciousness is freed from bodily attachment it rises upwards, as it were, like a flame of brilliance. It is the supreme luminosity. It is light by its own right, a light that does not require another light to illumine itself, paramjyoti. When one attains to this supreme luminosity which is one's own real nature, one is established in one's self. Then one is in one's true form. As we wake up from dream and recognise our true nature as being different from what we felt ourselves to be in dream, so does one recover one's real nature and shake off the old notions of connections with bodies, one differing from the other. One state of consciousness imagines that it is an animal, another state of consciousness imagines that it is a human being, and so on and so forth. Various states identify themselves with various forms of experience which are called the bodies. They may be animals or human beings or celestials. Whatever they are, those forms are cast off on account of Consciousness extracting itself from those shackles and it stands by itself as a liberated being. This is the Atman. The real Atman is that which is free from entanglement in any kind of form. This is the Immortal. It is the disidentification with the body that is the cause of immortality. This is what we call Brahman, the Absolute, ultimately the universal nature of this Atman. What we call Truth, about which we have been speaking up to this time, is Brahman Itself. We may call It the Atman or Brahman. It makes no difference. This is the Truth, because That alone is, That which is in all the three periods of time. That knows no distinction of the passage of time. That is perpetually what It is without distinction either in space or in time. That is the Atman, and that is what we call Brahman.

Mantram-5.

Tani ha va etani triny-akasarani satiyam iti, tad-yat sattad-amrtam, atha yat-ti tan-martyam, atha yad-yam tenobhe yacchati yad-anenobhe yacchati tasmad-yam, ahar-ahar-va evam vit svargam lokam eti.

Again here we have the usual symbolic meaning of the word satyam, etymologically derived. What is satyam? Satyam is, says the Upanishad, a word which can be dissected into three syllables-sa, ti, and yam -and from the point of view of this interpretation of the Upanishad, sa, the first letter, stands for what is immortal; the second one ti stands for what is mortal, and yam, the third one, is that which holds the two together. The mortal and the immortal are both comprehended in something which is different from the mortal and the immortal, which means to say that as the antaryamin, or the indwelling principle, this Supreme Reality, holds together in itself both the subject and the object, consciousness and matter. What we call immortal is consciousness and what we call mortal is matter. Both these are held together in this Universal Being. It is something transcendent to our concepts of mortality and immortality. Even the word 'immortal' is relative in its significance, because to say that something is immortal or deathless would be to relate it to a phenomenon called mortal or death. When death is not there, deathlessness also is not there. Hence, these two concepts are connected with the two aspects of experience, the subjective side known as consciousness and the objective side known as matter. The whole world of experience constituted of these two aspects, subjective and objective, are brought together into a single comprehension in the supremacy of the Absolute. This is the significance of the word satyam, says the Upanishad. One who knows this secret reaches the highest heavens of experience even in the little daily perceptions which one passes through or undergoes. In all our daily experiences, we have the experience of this satyam, Truth only, in various forms, various ways and various circumstances.

Section 4: Life Beyond:

Mantram-1.

Atha ya atma sa setur-vidhrtir-esam lokanam asambhedaya naitam setum ahoratre taratah, na jara na mrtyurna soko na sukrtam, na duskrtam, sarve papmano'to nivartante, apahatapapma hy-esa brahma-lokah.

It is this Atman which holds together in a state of harmony the various worlds in the cosmos, so that they may not create chaos. The various elements, earth, water, fire, air and ether, the different worlds, the realms of being, as we call them-all these are held in position on account of the law of the Atman. The law ordains that what passes for a particular form should maintain that form until the duration of time prescribed for it is exhausted by it in experience. If this Atman were not to exert its law by its very presence, there would have been no system or order or method of any kind. What we call system or method, symmetry or systematic action, internally or externally, is due to the presence of this all-comprehending Being, the Atman. The integration that we feel in our own body, in our minds and the orderliness that we see in nature outside, all these are due to the presence of the Atman. Else there would be confusion everywhere. Anything could be anything. Anything could happen at any time in any manner, without any kind of relevance whatsoever. But this does not happen. There is a cause and effect relationship between one experience and another. There is a relationship vitally established between various things in this world, on account of the symmetrical balancing character of the consciousness of the Atman.

This bridge, as it were, which is the Atman that connects one world with another world, is also like an embankment over which days and nights cannot pass, which means to say that time cannot touch this realm. Days and nights represent the time factor. There is no time here. When you cross this bridge which connects the world of ordinary experience with the realm of pure Being, there is a transcendence of time. This Upanishad says that in the Atman there is no contact with anything that is phenomenal. Anything that you call temporal cannot touch this Being. Neither old age, nor death, nor sorrow can touch it. Actions of any kind cannot touch it, whether they be virtues or vices. Neither good nor bad, nothing that we regard as valuable here, no kind of regulation of this world can have any validity in that realm of Supreme Integrality. Every evil turns back after having touched this embankment. This supreme world we call Brahman is untouched by evil of every kind. Evil is nothing but the consciousness of body and consciousness of objects. This type of consciousness cannot be there. So it is free from every kind of contamination.

Mantram-2.    

Tasmad-va etam setum tirtvandhah san anandho bhavati, viddhah san aviddho bhavati, upatapi san anupatapi bhavati, tasmadva etam setum tirtvapi naktam ahar-evabhinispadyate, sakrdvibhato hy-evaisa brahma-lokah.

Even a blind one becomes free from the evil of blindness the moment he crosses this bridge which is called the Atman. Wounded ones are no more wounded there. People who are distressed are no more distressed there. And grieved ones have no grief there. Even night looks like day there. Night does not exist there. Because time does not exist, night and day cannot exist. Eternal light is this Brahman. It is eternal, perpetual, unending Self-luminosity. This is Brahma-loka. Here, Brahma-loka does not mean some world or realm comparable with the one in which we are living. Brahmaiva loko brahma-lokah-Brahman, the Absolute Itself, is called the world of Brahman. It is a symbolic way of representing its own Being as the totality of experience. The field of experience is called loka.

 Mantram-3.   

Tad-ya evaitam brahma-lokam brahmacaryena-nuvindanti tesam evaisa brahma-lokah, tesam sarvesu lokesu kamacaro bhavati.

Freedom untrammelled is the blessing of those who have reached this realm of Brahman through practice of continence, and no limit can be there either to their powers or to their capacities to visualise things, or to their knowledge, or even to their own existence. It is limitlessness from every side, as the concluding portions of the third chapter have already told us.

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Section 5: Importance of Brahmacharya
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