Preface

What has India to offer to the world — this dynamic world of ours, which hungers at once for money, power, fame, peace, love, satisfaction? To this crying world, India offers her inexhaustible treasure, her all-loving power, her perennial glory, her unfathomable Peace, ineffable Delight, and eternal Fulfilment. India offers the Upanishads, "India's Soul-Offering".

Do you want money? The Upanishads will teach you how to get it. Do you care for power, honour, name and fame? The Upanishads will show you how to acquire them. Or do you prefer the higher realities — inner Peace, Light, and Bliss? These too — especially these — the Upanishads will teach you how to achieve. Whether you care for the temporal or the eternal, the Upanishads embody the path which will lead you to your goal.

Upanishad means "Brahma-Knowledge" or "the Knowledge of God". This knowledge illumines earthly darkness and transforms human ignorance. At the end of our spiritual journey we see darkness growing into Light, and ignorance into inner Wisdom.

In this book, The Upanishads: The Crown of India's Soul, Sri Chinmoy, renowned philosopher and spiritual Master from India, offers his illumining light on the principal Upanishads to all seekers of the Truth. From the vast sea of wisdom offered in the Upanishads, Sri Chinmoy isolates and expands the most inspiring and illumining truths. From his thirteen talks on the Upanishads the aspiring reader can derive tremendous assistance in understanding the secrets recorded by India's ancient sages.

Brahman, the Self, the nature of man's life-force, the essence of sacrifice, being and non-being, the evolution of the soul, the Gayatri Mantra, life and death — these are just a few of the subjects with which Sri Chinmoy deals. His penetrating intuitive vision shows him the very heart of the Upanishadic wisdom, and in his sublime and soul-elevating language he clarifies philosophical problems which may puzzle even great scholars and advanced seekers.

In Sri Chinmoy his disciples, followers, and admirers find the most sincere concern. His inner Wisdom and divine Light love, serve, and guide the searching human mind and the aspiring human heart. It usually happens that one experiences the Truth, and another, without experiencing the Truth, explains the Truth. The Indian sages of the hoary past experienced the Truth. Later, very few Indian spiritual masters had the experience of that same highest Truth. But many Indian scholars and writers have become exponents of the Vedic and Upanishadic lores without having had an iota of inner experience of the Ultimate Truth. This is not at all true of Sri Chinmoy, for he has experienced this Ultimate Truth. His understanding of the Upanishads comes not from mere intellectual application, but from direct personal experience of these inner truths.

In Sri Chinmoy sincere seekers see not only the embodiment of the eternal Truth in its purest life and soul, but also its spontaneous revelation and soul-stirring manifestation.

The Upanishadic seers are proud of Sri Chinmoy because he is. Sri Chinmoy is proud of them because in his inner existence he is always with them in the glowing Dream of the Supreme which is becoming the manifesting Reality of the Supreme.