I begin to read The Upanishads. I have spent three days reading the Introduction, and am tempted to copy down every single sentence. It is a timely remainder for me to see where I am now in my search for happiness, for the ultimate union with Eternity. The Introduction, written by Juan Mascaro in Summer 1964, is calm and inspiring. The joy to be closer to the One is much greater than the joy in gaining more knowledge of the One (when reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance last week).

First, a list of the words appeared in Introduction for the One, recognized by the capital letter, in alphabetical orders. Totally interchangeable.

All, Atman, Being, Beloved, Brahman, Consciousness, Eternal, God, He, Infinite, Knower, One, Self, Spirit, That, Universe

Second: some paragraphs I like, with my notes in blue. Many passages are from poets and other books of wisdom. So many people have been in the Presence of the One?

Gold made the rivers to flow. They feel no weariness, they cease not from flowing. They fly swiftly like birds in the air. -- Rig Veda 11.28

Brahman in the Universe, God in his transcendence and immanence is also the Spirit of man, the Self in every one and in all, Atman.

God must not be sought as something far away, separate from us, but rather as the very inmost of us, as the higher Self in us above the limitations of our little self.

Definition of God: "Not this, not this"; "Thou art That". (That which cannot be defined is God, like Quality in Zen and Art, like Tao...)

Only the Eternal in us can lead us to the Eternal, only when the transient has become Eternal can a man say, "I am He".

... Why? For the joy of creation. Why is there evil? For the joy of good arising from it. Why darkness? That light may shine the more. Why suffering? For the instruction of the soul and the joy of sacrifice. Why the infinite play of creation and evolution? For Ananadam, pure joy. (Creation and evolution are pure joy.)

In the rising from non-Self to Self, from unconsciousness to consciousness, and from this to supreme Consciousness, there is a process of unselfishness. The more the lower self is forgotten in good works, and in the realization of the beautiful and the true, the quicker becomes the process of evolution.

The self-training for the vision of the unity of Atman and Brahman is called Yoga.

The law of evolution called Karma… since our Spirit that was never born and will never die must come again and take to itself a body, that the lower self may have the reward of its works. The great evolution flows on towards perfection.

Who knows God becomes God. -- Mundaka Upanishad

After the death of the lower self, when the small drop of human consciousness has become one with the ocean of Consciousness... (My ocean. The Ocean. It is a nice analogy.) It is not a death, but a victory over death, a rising and resurrection.

The joy of the final union is felt... "water falling from heaven into a river or fountain, when all becomes water, and it is not possible to divide or separate the water of the river from that which fell from heaven; or when a little stream enters the sea so that henceforth there shall be no means of separation".

"All seemed a world in flower, and I was the soul of this world." -- Margall. (Tot semblava un mon en flor / I l’anima n’era jo.) (Beautiful!)

Each one of us is a centre of life, a unique event in the universe, and whatever our external relations to people and things may be, the absolute fact remains that we have to live our inner life alone even as we have to die our own death. In the infinite struggle of man to know this world and the universe around him, and also to know the mind that allows him to think, he comes before the simple fact that life is about thought.

Love is infinite liberty.

Atman, the mystery of our life, the light of our soul, the love which is the source of infinite joy, the vision of the good and the beautiful which is the source of everything beautiful or good that man can create upon this earth, is something which is above reason and therefore it an never be attained by reason alone. "He is unknown to the learned and know to the simple." Kena Up. (Unlearn everything to gain true Knowledge.)

"You can never come to the reality of creation by contemplating it from the point of view of destruction." Rabindranath Tagore

"It is not thought which we should want to know; we should know the thinker."

To the soul the flower is an object of joy, and to the poet it can be a thing of beauty and truth: a window from which we may look in wonder into the Beauty and Truth of the universe, and the Truth and Beauty in our own soul.

All things on earth, from a flower to a human being, can be an object of love or contemplation, an object of intellectual interest, and an object of possession. In the first case they give us the freedom of joy in the Infinite; in the second they give us that knowledge which is power; in the third they give us the chains that bind us to matter, drag us down to the darkness of death, to the miseries of competition for selfish power, instead of cooperation for unselfish joy.

"When one sees Eternity in things that pass away and Infinity in finite things, then one has pure knowledge.

"But if one merely sees the diversity of things, with their divisions and limitations, then one has impure knowledge.

And if one selfishly sees a thing as if it were everything, independent of the One and the many, then one is in the darkness of ignorance." -- Bhagavad Gita: VXIII. 20-22

What a wonderful relation do we establish with a human being when in spite of his limitations we see his Infinity! But if we merely consider him as an object of intellectual curiosity, a fixed number in static statistics, or even as a mere machine whose work we can buy and sell, we degrade both him and ourselves.

To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
-- Blake