Becoming Esemplastic: Being and the Oneness of Consciousness(es) in Early Upaniṣads

Abstract

There can be two ways of analysing consciousness depending on what view of it one takes. One of the two ways would be the objective way, which is almost a ‘surgical’ way, treating consciousness as an external object to study; and the other would be a subjective way or feeling and knowing and understanding that consciousness is something that characterises and connects all that exists in the manifested world. The first of the two ways, namely the objective way, is also the psychoanalytical way. This has been quite amply demonstrated in the last one and a half century in pre- Freudian, Freudian and post-Freudian approaches to consciousness studies. However, if consciousness is understood as the entity or the spirit that pervades and/or connects all that has been and can be perceived through senses or through thought or through some other means or agency, its analysis would have to take another form and course which is not clinically objective at all. This is precisely what consciousness appears to be in the discourses of the early Upaniṣads: an entity that connects the Creator with the Creation, the palpable with the impalpable, the being with the non-being, and the phenomenal with the non-phenomenal. Therefore, the character of the discourses on consciousness in the Upaniṣads deserve special attention. Among others, a major objective of this essay is to study and strive to understand the Upaniṣadic discourses on consciousness and thereby derive some concrete insights, to understand the (concept/idea of) essential ‘oneness’ that characterises the Vedāntic thought.