The self or I speak through the Upanishads. There was once a great mahatma, a realised soul. He was intensely flipping through the pages of an Upanishad. When someone asked him why he was stilly reading the Upanishads, he said, “I am seeing what they have spoken about me in this book.”
Here in the Amrita Bindu Upanishad’s concluding verse, Vasudeva or the one divine light that lives in each one of us like a person who lives in a home says, “I am that which resides in all beings. I am also the dwelling space for all human beings. I bless beings with my presence. That Vasudeva am I.”
The affirmation is repeated twice not because the rishi was lacking any other words to express, but to highlight the importance of the point that the one divine force or Vasudeva is present in all. It is existing in the body and the body itself is existing completely owing to the presence of the life field.
The word anugraha, which is referred to as blessing in this Upanishad verse and in other places, has a very special meaning. Graha means to hold something. The body and its subtle components of mind and intellect are held together with a particular physical and thought pattern. Anugraha means to be an additional special hold of the ideas that we are holding on to. When we go before the lord in a temple with some desire in our heart, may be to successfully pass the examination or seeking a good job, the hand that blesses called the Varada or Anugraha Hasta is completely facing us. Our own desire or idea falls on the idol of the lord and comes back to us with charged energy.
Since it has the divine sanction in the form of energy, the thought will completely manifest in life as a successful event or fulfilled desire. We all stay in our homes of brick and mortar.
However, the life energy is present in the home completely just as water fills a vessel and existence is possible in the most beautiful home, only because of that life force. It is that force which fills up each home called the physical body.
The presence of that life force itself is grace. It blesses our existence, supporting the physical form, the incoming and outgoing breath, as witness for our thoughts, as deciding intellect and as the anvil on which all experiences are experienced.
Every verse in the Upanishad is a thought form that presents itself in consciousness. Every thought serves two purposes. One is to give us an experience of an idea and the other to grant us freedom of thought by bestowing the right understanding. As an experiential presence, the verse helps us to meditate on the presence of that life in every being—a tree, an animal, a bird or a human. As an understanding, the thought itself merges into our consciousness and disappears as an individual entity when it indicates that it is the life force within that blesses every individual.
So next time we go in search of blessings from outside, we may remind ourself that the act of blessing from a deity or a person is only a reminder of the presence of divine life within us, because of which we can even walk around in search of blessings.
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