God & universe

The main obstacle that stands in the way of accepting the straightforward meaning of the Isha Upanishad and rightly understanding its inner truth about the Brahman, the self and the divine, is Mayavada, Illusionism, preached by Shankaracharya and the commentary he wrote on this Upanishad.

The one-pointed drive towards withdrawal that is Illusionism and the much-praised inaction of the sannyasi are completely at variance with the Isha Upanishad.
The Upanishad in which it is written: “Doing verily works in this world one should wish to live a hundred years”, and again: “Action cleaves not to a man”  — the Upanishad which proclaims with courage: “Into a blind darkness they enter who follow after the Ignorance, they as if into a greater darkness who devote themselves to the Knowledge alone”; and again says: “By the birth one enjoys immortality”, how can that Upanishad be reconciled with Mayavada, Illusionism and the path of withdrawal? A highly erudite person, who was possibly the chief sponsor of Monism in south India after Shankara, expunged it from the list of the twelve Upanishads and installed the Nrisimhatapini in its place. Shankaracharya was not so daring as to alter the prevailing canon. The Upanishad was a “sruti” (heard scripture), and Illusionism was a subject for inquiry in the “sruti” and as such, he assumed, the meaning of the “sruti” could not but be favourable to real Illusionism.

In the language of the Upanishads, the word sarvamidam signifies all the visible objects of the universe, not of the earth. Therefore we must understand by the word jagati the shakti in movement manifested as the universe and by the word jagat all that is a movement of motion of the prakriti whether present as a living being or as matter. The contradiction lies between these two: the Ishwara and all that is in the universe.

From Aurobindo Ghosh’s writings