The Upanishads - An Introduction

"You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny"

The Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Dhammapada - are among the earliest and most universal of messages, sent to inform us that there is more to life than the everyday experience of our senses.

The Upanishads are the oldest, so varied that we feel some unknown collectors
must have tossed into a jumble all the photos, postcards, and letters from this world that they could find, without any regard for source or circumstance.

Thrown together like this, they form a kind of ecstatic slide show - snapshots of towering peaks of consciousness taken at various times by different observers and dispatched with just the barest kind of explanation.

The Dhammapada, too, is a collection - traditionally, sayings of the Buddha, one of the very greatest of explorers of consciousness. In this case the messages have been sorted, but not by a scheme that makes sense to us today. Instead of being grouped by theme or topic.

"If the Upanishads are like slides, the Dhammapada seems more like a field guide " 

And the third of these classics, the Bhagavad Gita, gives us a map and guidebook. It gives a systematic overview of the territory, shows various approaches to the summit with benefits and pitfalls, offers recommendation, tells us what to pack and what to leave behind. 

These three texts are very personal records of a landscape that is both real and universal. Their voices, passionately human, speak directly, to you and me. They describe the topography of consciousness itself, which belongs as much to us today  as to these largely anonymous seers thousand of years ago.