The Lamp Within
The Lamp Within
A Guru's Teaching to a Disciple on Living a Content, Peaceful, Meaningful and Happy Life according to the Upanishads and Vedanta
A Word Before We Begin Four
A Word Before We Begin
A Word Before We Begin
My child, you have come to me as Nachiketas came to the house of Death, as Svetaketu came back to his father, as Narada came to Sanatkumara. You did not come with a small question. You came with the oldest question there is: What is this life for, and how am I to live it?
You tell me you are confused about meaning, purpose and direction. Do not be ashamed of that confusion. In the Chandogya Upanishad the great sage Narada, who had mastered the four Vedas, history, grammar, mathematics, logic, ethics, the sciences and the fine arts, comes to his teacher and says, in effect: "Sir, I know the texts, but I do not know the Self. I have heard that one who knows the Self crosses beyond sorrow. I am in sorrow. Take me across." The greatest scholar of his age began exactly where you are now. That confusion is the real beginning. The Upanishads call it jijñasa, the sincere wish to know. It is the first sign that the soul is waking up.
You have given me a great pile of books, the one hundred eight Upanishads, Swami Paramananda's translations, Sri Aurobindo's commentaries and Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East, and asked me to give you their essence. Here it is. I have not written you a summary of each scripture. I have done what a teacher in the forest ashrams would have done: taken what the seers saw and arranged it as a path, so that you can walk it. Each teaching rests on the verses themselves, and I give you their references so that you can always go back to the source.
The book has seven parts:
Part One: The Question. Why we suffer, and why the old answers to "what is life for?" fail us.
Part Two: The Ten Great Truths. What the Upanishads reveal about who you are and what this world is.
Part Three: The Purpose of Life. Why you are here, and what a meaningful life actually looks like.
Part Four: The Path. The disciplines the seers prescribe, made practical.
Part Five: The Daily Life of a Seeker. A day, a week, a year; how to meet anger, fear, grief, success, money, relationships, ageing and death.
Part Six: The Twenty-One Principles. A creed to live by for the rest of your life.
Part Seven: Passing the Lamp. How to share this knowledge with others rightly.
The appendices hold the verses to memorise, a glossary, a daily self-examination and a plan for reading the original texts.
How to use this book. Read it once straight through. Then read one chapter a week, slowly, and put its actions into practice before moving on. The Upanishads give three stages of learning: śravana, hearing the truth; manana, reflecting on it until every doubt is answered; and nididhyāsana, living and meditating on it until it becomes your own seeing. Reading is only the first of these. The other two are your work, and they will take the rest of your life. That is good news: your life will never again lack a purpose.
One more thing before we begin. These teachings feed the spirit, but they do not replace the care of a doctor, a counsellor or the people who love you when life becomes very heavy. The seers themselves honoured the body and the community. Take help where help is needed. That too is wisdom.