Gita IV...Ultimate Reality

The Gita does not give any arguments in support of its metaphysical position. The Upanishads affirm the reality of a Supreme Brahman, one without a second, without attributes or determinations, who is identical with deepest self of man. Spiritual experience centres around a sovereign unity which overcomes the duality between the known and the unknowing. The inability to conceptualise and experience leads to such description as identity, pure and simple. Brahman, the subsistent simplicity is its own object in an intuition which is its very being. It is a pure subject whose existence cannot be ejected into external or objective world.

Brahman cannot be described. Silence can be the only way to it. One of the Upanishad says: “Where everything indeed has become the self itself, whom and by what should one think? By what should he be known, the universal knower?” The duality between knowing and knowable is characteristic only then discursive thought is transcended. The eternal one is so infinitely real that we dare not even give It the name of One since oneness is an idea derived from worldly experience. We speak of It as the non-dual, advaita, that which is known when all dualities are resolved in the Supreme Identity. According to Bhagavad-Gita, The supreme is said to be “unmanifest, unthinkable and unchanging.” “Neither existent nor non-existent.” Contradictory products are attributed to indicate the inapplicability of empirical determinations. “It does move yet it moves. It is far away yet it is near.” The twofold nature of the supreme as being and as becoming has been brought out by these predicates. He is para or transcendent and apara or immanent, both inside and outside the world.

The Supreme is that “from which these beings are born, that by which they live and that into which, while departing, they enter.” According to the Vedas “He is the God who is on fire, in water, who pervades the entire universe; He who is in plants, in trees, to Him we make our obeisance again and again.” “Who would have exerted, who would have lived, if this Supreme bliss had not been in the heaven?” “He, who is one and without any colour, by the manifold wielding of His power, ordains many colours with a concealed purpose and into whom, in the beginning and the end, the universe dissolves, He is the GOD. May he endow us with an understanding which leads to good actions.