07/06/2023
🌬️Quarrel among the Senses
💮From the Chandogya Upanishad 5.1.6-15
Once upon a time all the sense organs had a dispute among themselves as regard to who was superior. Each one boasted saying: “I am superior, I am superior.” It went on until finally they all decided to approach Prajapati, their father.
They asked him: “Sir, who is the best among us?”
Prajapati replied: “He by whose departure the body looks the worst – he is the best among you.”
Following his words the organ of Speech first departed, and having stayed away for a whole year it returned and said, “How have you been able to live without me?”
The other organs replied: “We lived like a dumb being who lives without speaking, but breathing with the prana, seeing with the eye, hearing with the ear and thinking with the mind.”
Then the eye, ear and the mind, one by one, left the body leaving it at first blind, then deaf and at last without intelligence .
They all came back and the body somehow made it through.
Now, when the prana, or breath was about to depart, tearing up the other senses, they all gathered round him and said: “Revered Sir, be thou our lord; thou art the best among us. Do not depart from us.” Then the organ of speech came and said to the Breath, “Sir, that attribute of being most excellent which I possess is thine.” So said the eye, the ear and the mind. Hence these (the organ of speech, the eyes, the ears, the mind) are not simply sense organs, but they are all signs of life - the Prana.
For Prana alone is all these.
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