Kena I and Aitareya II

He by whom It is known, knows It not. It is known by those who do not know It. “Neither do I not know, nor do I know.” This is the essence of Brahmah. It is “the Mind of the mind, the Speech of speech, the Life of Life”– you must detach the Self from the sense. It is not the result of things; Brahmah is not hearing words, it is what makes you hear. It is not life, it is living. It is not speaking, it is what makes you speak.

When you accept this, Telos learned, you know Brahmah, and thus knowledge, thus immortality. If it is speech though, it must also be writing: Brahmah is here right this moment as I write, and it is with you as you read. But words cannot construct Brahmah for you, it is undefinable.

All of society is created by definition, by language. The only way we understand our social reality is by defining it: this is a house, this is my car, this is eating, this is food, this is my beautiful wife. A house is a construct that someone I paid built, and I live there, I put my things there. To build is to create with raw materials. But how do you define that which is, by nature, undefinable?

How do you accept it as real? Can it even be real? Or is that the trial of faith? Telos looked to the sky and tears filled his eyes. He was no longer sure he could embrace these studies fully. But his consciousness can’t be defined; language cannot define that which happens in our minds, that which happens in the worlds we can’t see or the lives we haven’t experienced. Telos is choking now, he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe!

Can the Brahmah, that inexplicable life force, can that answer everything? But it can’t be known, it is known through knowing it can’t be known! Telos collapses to the ground, he can no longer see straight, he can no longer perceive reality, oh fuck, where did it all go, ugh, fuck, fuck, stop the pain, my eyes are closing over and over again and they cannot go any further, my throat refuses to open, oh night, you have come, you have come for me, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Katha I

Confronted with death, all men will relinquish their goods for one more day. Yama offered gold and vast domains, he offered fair maidens and to be King of all the Earth, but Nachiketa refused all, “O Death, these endure only till tomorrow.” Even the longest life is short indeed!

“The good is one thing, the pleasant, another. Both of these, serving different needs, bind a man.” And Telos raged! Yes, they bind a man, as everything he had experienced had bound him. He had been bound to bullets and ideals, he had been bound to Cavillace and danger, he had been bound to the city and its glamorous life. He wants to rip it all away!

But what more can he ask, than to live with people and their ways? Are their ways full of mistakes, or are mistakes only arbitrary judgments? Society deems the good from the bad, and his life in Damascus had been quite good. But is this social good an actual good or is it less? Is there an actual good or is it something less?

He lashes out now: he smashes his lamp, and throws it out the window. The struggle has found root in the physical world. As he pants, watching the lamp fall, he understands, there are two goods. There is the good of society, determined by everyone and in compromise with everyone. There is the good within him, determined by Atmah, by his true Self. He embraces both of them, he can interact with the social good by understanding his inner good. He can affect society and its goals by his participation: Brahmah is the collection of all goods and rights within itself. It is the summation of all Atmahs, it is the cohesion of selves.

It is glorious, he thinks, as the lamp shatters on the ground.

Isha I

Telos broke out of his meditations. He looked around and saw everything around him: the sun, the mist on the mountains in the distance, the sad waters of the Dead Sea. He saw the people in the village nearby, and the monks working in the monastery, further up the hill. Suddenly, pangs of hunger struck his belly and he realized he had been meditating for at least two days. He picked himself up and moved towards the monastery for respite.

Everything in this universe is transitory. All this, whatever moves on the Earth. We flow out of each other, out of the Earth, into each other, into the Earth.

This brought him peace. He felt liberated from Syme, Minos, and more importantly, Cavillace. Pounds of glorious weights were flying off his shoulders, into the sun, to burn up into irrelevance, not even dust would be left to remember them by, and when Telos died all memory would be lost of these weights, these doubts and regrets, they would all be swallowed back up by nature, twirling away, away, like ripples in water, to the edges of the universe, gone, dead, gone.

He stopped himself: his thoughts were wandering again, as if he perpetually would slip into meditation. His readings had unlocked various doors in his head that apparently allowed freely for thought. He could no longer stop the thoughts, he could no longer stave off questions of life and reality. They walked right up to him like a hungry dog. It was as is if his self was suddenly faster than his thoughts, and it would grab his mind and pull it along, like a speedboat hauling a person.

Come, come, lets go, faster and faster to where I don’t know, but we must get there, and oh I know what the place is, the place is happiness and we are there, as long as we don’t stop moving, as long as I can keep going forward. And when I stop, you stop; and when we stop, happiness dies and we are lost.

Brihadaranyaka I

I am Telos. I am Brahman.

The creation of the world, by the speech I use and the knowledge you integrate, the creation of our world, together, tells us that we are Brahman. When you embrace this oneness with the Brahman, indeed, by being the Brahman, you become the universe. But it is more than that: it is not that you come to embody the universe, it is that the universe comes to embody you. One and the same.

The speech, the language that creates this is utmost: understanding is both implicit and demanding. You cannot be Brahman if there is confusion between you and the world. “When a man thinks he is about to die, he says to his son: ‘You are Brahman, you are the sacrifice and you are the world.’” It is necessary to understand the Brahman, the sacrifice, and the world.

Only through discussion, through speech, through that holy union of conversation can you understand the Brahman, the sacrifice, the world. “‘Whatever has been studied by me (the father) is all unified in the word Brahman.’” Thus, Brahman is the merging of knowledge and the past: it is the consummation between learning and understanding. When the father dies, all these things are passed into the son, the son is the propagation of the father.

The father does not die, he lives on in his son. His son is his continuation, his perpetuality. One life is continued as long as it furthered within another. Telos is his father, his father’s father. No. Telos’s father was Telos. Thus, his life is not the twenty-odd years he has been alive, it is the entirety of human existence.

Telos read all this in his book, and knew he would have to think more on the Brahman. In order to be Brahman, for the universe to embody you, your speech must be in line with all that has been said. You must form to the past institutions. You must understand your father and all that came before him.

Aitareya I

My speech is fixed in my mind, my mind is fixed in my speech. Telos walked for a long time through the Dakota plains, thinking this one thought. He locked in on it like a tomahawk missile. Speech is one of the true representations of the self; like painting or music, it is self expression, and thus by speaking you are embracing yourself.

But speech is also limited. Speech is constructed of words, words are constructed of meanings, meanings that are limited by speech and other words: I say rock and you know what I am speaking of, but that is not the true essence of the rock. I can’t express the true essence of the rock, and indeed I probably don’t even know the true essence. Maybe there is no true essence, maybe the idea of some actuality behind the mask of language is a false hope: merely an idea that language is an imperfect representation of an unknowable reality.

And I will never know the truth of this matter, I will never know more than my speech and my feelings, so thus my speech must remain fixed in my mind and my mind in it. By using my speech and my mind intertwined, I am creating the world for myself– and for you. By speaking of a rock, I bring it to life. Before I spoke of it, there was no rock, but now there is.

And now there is a Damascus, and now there is a Venice, there is a Rocky Mountain range and there is the Lakota tribe. I speak of them and they are created for you. You speak of them and they are created for me. We speak of them together and create them for each other. Much in the way a child is created between two lovers, knowledge, ideas, worlds, are created between two people engaged in conversation.

You and I, though you may not have realized it, are engaged in conversation. Together we are creating a place. I speak of Damascus and you imagine it; I speak of Venice and you imagine it. Let it be manifest to me. Let it all be manifest to me. Let it be manifest to me so that I may reveal it to you, and that you may reveal it to me.