Seeing the Unseen

The seers of the Upanishad wrestled with words, trying to show us that which cannot be seen. The Katha Upanishad endeavors to explain :

Beyond the senses is the mind. Beyond the mind is the higher intellect. Beyond the intellect is the Inner Self. Beyond the Inner Self is the vast unmanifest reality, the primal energy from which all things emerge. Beyond the unmanifest is the Supreme Being, who exists everywhere yet cannot be seen. One who realizes the Supreme is liberated. Yes, that one becomes immortal.

No one can see the Supreme with  the eye. The only way to know Him is through deep meditation, after the intellect has been completely purified. Those great souls who know the Supreme One, they are liberated from suffering and delusion. Yes, they become immortal.

Remember that in Hinduism immortality does not mean immortal life in a physical body. It means the Inner Self becomes free from the process of death and rebirth, relaxing into undying divine consciousness.

The somber Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman liked to compare God to a spider. It was meant to be creepy image, suggesting a malevolent being who captures us in an inescapable web and eats us alive. The Upanishads use the image of a spider repeatedly but in a different sense.

To the seers, the Supreme spins the entire universe out of its innate being, just as a spider generates a web from its own mouth. At the end of a world cycle, the Supreme One dissolves the universe back into itself. The nature of that awesome eternal being is far beyond the ability of our intellects to understand. Yet the unseeable one is the very one pervading awareness in which our awareness abides, our own innermost truth.

We cannot see Nirguna Brahman, yet we are Nirguna Brahman!