The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s9.2

v2.c40.s9.2

The philosophical importance of the doctrine⁴ lies in the effect which the investigation of the stages of the soul must have had on the conception of the soul itself. The early identification of the soul with Prāṇa as breath must have been suggested by the fact of the permanence of the breath despite the cessation in sleep of the activities of the mind; death overcomes the voice, the eye, the ear, but while these are sunk in sleep the breath perishes not.⁵ It is a further step, but one intelligible enough, to the conclusion⁶ that, though the body perishes in death, yet the breath remains, for the breath is invisible and there is, therefore, no ground to assume that the falling to pieces of the body affects its being. We attain thus the conception of the self as something which does not perish, which, therefore, is without beginning and without end, and as the essential element in man we find all activities resolved ultimately into Prāṇa on their cessation. On a higher level of thought we have the concept Prajñā, intelligence, substituted for the breath, in recognition of the psychic side of man and of the fact that it is consciousness or intelligence which is aware of breath and of all man’s life, and in it also all else is resolved. Advancing still further on the path of abstraction, we attain the concept of the Ātman as that which knows, without possessing any empiric object, suggested inevitably by the condition attained in deep dreamless sleep. The identity of such an Ātman with the Brahman is obviously an easy step, and this may well have been a factor in achieving the identification. Obviously also the tendency to attain the unity in question by means of artificial processes of mental suppression arises immediately from the desire to imitate artificially the condition achieved in deep sleep, but under natural conditions inevitably only for a limited period, and subject to the possibility of dreams.