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Updated: June 26, 2025
In the Hindu scriptures, AVATARA signifies the descent of Divinity into flesh. "Babaji's spiritual state is beyond human comprehension," Sri Yukteswar explained to me. "The dwarfed vision of men cannot pierce to his transcendental star. One attempts in vain even to picture the avatar's attainment. It is inconceivable." The UPANISHADS have minutely classified every stage of spiritual advancement.
That which is described as the abode of heaven, earth, &c. is none other than the highest Brahman, on account of a term which is 'its own, i.e. which specially belongs to it. The clause we have in view is 'he is the bank of the Immortal. This description applies to the highest Brahman only, which alone is, in all Upanishads, termed the cause of the attainment of Immortality; cp. e.g. Up.
So our daily worship of God is not really the process of gradual acquisition of him, but the daily process of surrendering ourselves, removing all obstacles to union and extending our consciousness of him in devotion and service, in goodness and in love. The Upanishads say: Be lost altogether in Brahma like an arrow that has completely penetrated its target.
There is the same difficulty in assigning definite dates to the Upanishads, though many of the later ones bear the post-mark of the various periods of theological evolution with which they coincided.
For few old ideas have entirely perished: new deities, new sects and new rites have arisen but the main theories of the older Upanishads still command respect and modern reformers try to justify their teaching from the ancient texts.
On account of the connected meaning of the sentences. In spite of the conclusion arrived at there may remain a suspicion that here and there in the Upanishads texts are to be met with which aim at setting forth the soul as maintained in Kapila's system, and that hence there is no room for a being different from the individual soul and called Lord.
I am only pointing out that this psychological identification of the observer with the object observed runs through the Upanishads, and is I think worthy of the deepest consideration. In the 'Bhagavat Gita, which is a later book, the author speaks of "him whose soul is purified, whose self is the Self of all creatures." A phrase like that challenges opposition.
After describing here following the ancient philosophical writings, the Upanishads how the Jivatma or Soul comes up through the various existences of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms until it reaches the human stage, the Text-book proceeds to describe the further upward or downward process. A very strong and excessive attachment to an animal may have similar results."
Goethe, at the beginning of the century, moulded into one the ideals of the Middle Age and of Hellas, and so Wagner at the close, in Tristan and in Parsifal, has woven the Oriental and the mediaeval spirit, thought, and passion, the Minnesinger's lays and the mystic vision of the Upanishads into a rainbow torrent of harmony, which, with its rivals, the masterpieces of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Tschaikowsky, make this century the Periclean age of Music as the fifteenth was the Periclean age of painting, and the sixteenth of poetry.
The first reference to Krishna occurs in the Chandogya Upanishad of perhaps the sixth century B.C. Upanishads were 'forest sittings' or 'sessions with teachers. Sages and their disciples discussed the nature of life and strove to determine the soul's exact relationship to God. The starting-point was the theory of re-incarnation. Death, it was believed, did not end the soul.
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