Vedanta, A Letter

Greetings.

After the philosophy class, I shared with you my experience of learning the Isha Vasya Upanishad earlier from another teacher. That teacher who taught me earlier used the first line of the Isha Vasya Upanishad, ‘Isha Vasyam Idam Sarvam,’ as advice to experience that the world entirely belongs to God, and he is watching us lurking in everything. He said we have to approach it with that detached and obedient mood. Ever since he said this, I have always had the image of a boss spying on the world in my subconscious mind. Although I have enormous respect for the vision of the Upanishads, that subconscious image was a barrier to reading them further. In truth, I never knew there was such a barrier.

When I learned how to approach the Upanishad in the third philosophy class conducted by you, that barrier started to dissolve. I encountered the first line of the Isha Vasya Upanishad as extremely poetic—a mantra for meditation. When I heard the line that God lives in everything here, there was an indescribable liberation in me. That old spy boss disappeared, and I grew up in my imagination with that God present in every drop of creation as beauty and goodness. That one line made me weep throughout the class; it was like a lifeline in me. The word dry Vedanta is no longer in my dictionary; it has become colorful. Thank you very much.

Tejas Srinivasan

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