[Das Wasser des Lebens. (Chāndogya Upanishad.)]

 

From the Chāndogya Upanishad,

 

Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl[1]

 

Nārada came to Sanatkumāra and said: “Master! Teach me to recognize the soul; for I have heard from the wise that whoever knows the soul gets across the sea of sorrows. But I, O Master, am grieved; lead me, therefore, over to the shore that is beyond tribulation.”

          The master answered him and said:

          “All you have learned so far is nothing but words; but you should seek to find the truth; for when a man knows, he bears witness to the truth; but unless he recognizes them, he cannot witness them. Therefore you should strive for knowledge.

          “When he gains insight, he gains knowledge; without knowledge he cannot understand, but through insight he understands. Therefore you should strive for insight.

          “When a man strives diligently, he comes to understanding; without striving, there is no insight; but insight comes through striving. Therefore you should seek, strive.

          “That from which man develops is that which he strives for; if he does not develop from this, he cannot strive for it; but he strives, because from this his development takes place. Therefore you should seek the source from which you spring.

          “When a man is active, he develops; if it is inactive, he cannot grow, but he grows through activity. Therefore you should follow activity.

          “If he finds joy, he will be active; if he finds none, he will do nothing; but he is active when it pleases him. Therefore you should seek to find joy.

          “There, where the limitless is, there is joy; there is no joy in what is limited; but the infinite is bliss. Therefore, seek to recognize the limitless.

          “When man sees, hears, or perceives nothing but the soul, this is the limitless; but when he sees, hears, or perceives anything other than the soul, there is limitation. The limitless is immortal, but the limited is subject to death. The Infinite is rooted in its own greatness, but not in what people call “greatness”; for they call such things great as oxen and horses, elephants, gold, slaves and women, lands and houses. But this is not the size I am talking about.

          “It is below and above, it is west and east, south and north; it is the universe; but I myself am this. I am below and above, I am west and east, south and north; I am the universe I am the soul; the soul is below, the soul is above, the soul is west, the soul is east, the soul is south, the soul is north; the soul is everything.

          “Whoever sees that it is so, and so comprehends it, and so knows it, to him the soul is his delight, the soul his delight, the soul his friend, the soul his joy; he is master over himself and works in his will through all worlds. Those who do not realize this are subject to others; their world is passing away and they cannot work through the worlds in their desire.

          “The seer sees neither death, nor sickness, nor sorrow; the seer sees the All, and he finds the All in all things.

          “He who attracts only what is pure from the world becomes pure in his nature; then he attains clear remembrance, and from this clear remembrance springs the resolution of all the entanglements of the heart.”

          Now when Nārada’s error was gone, Master Sanatkumāra showed him the shore which is beyond the darkness. That is why it is said that he reached the opposite shore.[2]

 

Explanations.

 

          A German theosophist, Meister Eckhart, says: “Put away from you everything that is not God, and nothing remains but God.” What he calls “God” is thus the divine soul, that of everything that is not is divine in nature, purified, free, the unlimited Self, which the Indian calls “Ātma,” and that of Śaṅkarāchārya as “Sat-chit-ānandam,” i.e., existence-knowledge-bliss, in other words, the bliss of the consciousness of the all-encompassing, all-pervading divine existence. This alone is the true essence and reality; all that springs from it or is connected with it is transitory appearance, and in itself, without God, without the Self, has no essence and no existence.

          The soul is thus bliss itself and inseparable from it. We have sprung from it and would also be constantly in this state of joy and bliss here on earth if we had not sunk into the realm of matter, like in a swamp, through our “incarnation” and embodiment, whereby the memory reminds us lost to the divine state we were in prior to this “materialization” and captured by external sensuality. But even here, behind all the sensations and ideas that the sensory world evokes in us through its charms, the presentiment of this bliss still dawns, like a half-forgotten dream, and without being clearly conscious of it, every good person feels it himself, the urge to return to that state, to cast off all earthly things, and to find his soul, his true Self, again.

          But even if, as Goethe says, a good person, in his dark urge, is well aware of the right way, there are still so many obstacles standing in his way that he will not easily overcome them through this dark urge. Only through one’s own insight and recognition of the divine nature within him does this urge, this spiritual faith, become a self-confident, living force that can help him overcome all obstacles and lift him up. As long as he draws his wisdom only from books, he can only be the echo of what others have said. Only when the truth has been revealed in him and its light enlightens him can he bear witness to it from his own experience. Without this self-knowledge (Theosophy), all knowledge consists only of changing opinions and superficial assumptions. Certainty comes only from one’s own experience, both internally and externally. Anyone who enters the blissful knowledge of eternal being is above all suffering and all grief.

          But this knowledge is not so easy to obtain; it does not spring from imagination or ideas, but consists in the awakening of the consciousness of existence as a whole, in God, and it requires a zealous striving to attain this consciousness. Whoever comes to the realization that the basis of his own being is the highest happiness, he should strive with all zeal to fully understand the feeling of the highest existence in himself, to let the tree of eternal life unfold in himself, so that the highest ideal, which he dreamed, can be realized in him. It is not a question of investigating external things in the manner of scholars and philosophers, in order to satisfy curiosity and enrich one’s knowledge; Rather, we must renounce our own selfhood in its limitations and enter into what is true in order to come to truth ourselves. The truth is reality, it is the ground of our being, the source from which we have sprung. In her we will find our lost bliss again. This is the activity of the disciple of wisdom.

          But this true self that we strive for is not locked up in our body, any more than sunlight is locked up in a plant on which it operates. Vital activity appears in every form in this peculiar way; but life itself, which is the cause of all vital activity in the various bodies, is but one. Personality-consciousness comes into being through the life activity restricted to a single form; through the awakening of the consciousness of being one with the One Life that animates and moves all, man rises above the limitations imposed by his personality and enters the freedom of infinity.

          When he sees the greatness of God in the universe, he sees the greatness of the soul, and that greatness is his own; for there is no difference between the soul of the world and the soul of man; God in the heart of the universe and God in the heart of man is but one God. Anyone who recognizes the divine soul within himself also recognizes it within all creatures; he no longer lives for himself but for the soul, and in living for the soul he lives for all, and is himself the soul that lives for all.

          For him there is no death, sickness or sorrow, for these states do not concern the soul, but only the forms in which it manifests itself. Appearances come and go and are subject to the circumstances that befall them; but he is himself the light from which these phenomena spring; World origins and world demises pass before him like reflections in a panorama; they do not touch him because he is above all worlds.

          But he who does not know the soul lives in deception and is subject to deception. The dream he dreams comes to an end and he disappears with it. In essence, everyone is what they became. Whoever attracts the perishable, absorbs it, and grows out of it is perishable, for the perishable is a compound thing and cannot endure, but is subject to change and decomposition. But whoever attracts the divine, absorbs it and grows out of it, lives in unity and is himself unity, which is not subject to change. When this unity has reached a clear consciousness in him, the clear memory of that bliss in which he was before he sank into the sea of ​​the material appears in him. He recognizes himself as the creator of those personal appearances (reincarnations) in which he has appeared on the stage of life, one after the other, playing now this, now that role, while in his innermost being he is, albeit unknowingly superior to all appearances, in God, and inseparable from the eternal unity.

          The rediscovery of the unity of one’s being, which necessitates his re-entry into his highest state of existence, his undisturbed bliss and immortality, is thus man’s highest destiny and the most important activity he can undertake; everything else is secondary, and everything else that is good, charity, good works, etc., arises from this one activity as a necessary concomitant. Finding yourself in God and God in you is far more important than all greedy, scientific research and philosophizing; for God is truth itself, and without the knowledge of truth all knowledge and fantasies have no basis and no value.

          Knowledge strives for unity, curiosity seeks to dissect. In unity there is nothing to dissect; it cannot be known otherwise than as a whole. The thirst for knowledge can therefore only find nourishment in the realm of phenomena, and the more a person clings to composite and transient things, the more he loses consciousness of the eternal unity, without which no thorough knowledge of the world of phenomena is possible. Then the philosopher gets into a labyrinth of errors and science goes astray, where nothing is sacred anymore because it tries to analyze everything. By disregarding the sanctity of life she loses her own sanctity, descends from the lofty standpoint which she must assume if she is to know the truth; sinking deeper and deeper into the swamp of the material and into the night of ignorance of the good, she destroys everything that comes close to her in the fire of passion, driven by a thirst for knowledge, and by renouncing the ability to recognize the truth and herself in the When multiplicity loses, it ultimately annihilates itself.

          Anyone who can see that the light of truth is contained within himself will strive for this light, and if he finds it, he knows that he himself was born from this light, and that this light is himself. In this light he recognizes Unity from which everything springs, in him he recognizes his own essence, the essence of the Creator who is himself and of all his works. And this is also the occult meaning of the saying in the Bible, which says: “Seek first of all the kingdom of God (which is in you), and everything else will be given to you.”

 

Notes

[1] The Water of Life. From the Chândogya Upanishad, with commentary by Franz Hartmann. [Das Wasser des Lebens. Franz Hartmann, M.D. Lotusblüten 14, no. 85 (October 1899), 655-666] {This article was reformatted from the original, but with the content unchanged other than fixing minor typos. Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl, ©2025}

[2] “Theosophical Forum,” May 1899.