The Self is motionless, and even faster than the mind. The senses cannot reach Him because He goes before them. In His quietude, he exceeds the speed of any runner. Because of this, Mātariśvan, the activities of every living being is maintained.

From this mantra to the eighth, the Upaniṣad describes the Self, the soul or Brahman. This kind of upaniṣadic descriptions are spiritual treasures and eternal religious monuments of the humanity, because as they constitute direct testimonies of the experience of the Truth, they transcend the borders of the mind, as well as of traditions and cultures.

Motion is a purely physical phenomenon that is defined as the change of position in space undergone by bodies of a system, relative to themselves or to other another body that is used as a reference point. For this definition we draw on mechanics, which is the branch of physics that describes the movement of bodies and their evolution in time, when subjected to forces.

The Self is motionless, complete in the tranquility of his perfection because, just as we have pointed out, motion includes evolution, change and transformation in space and time, and Brahman is immutable as it is transcendental to these... the omnipresent is obviously static, as it is present in every place, and as there is no place where it is absent... that is to say that the term "motionless" in this mantra does not have to be understood as a limitation of God, but rather on the complete contrary, it refers to its omnipresence. It remains absolutely clear that the omnipresent can be only that which does not undergo changes of any kind and is essentially static, although this motionlessness is related to its preexistence...

Upon reading the Upanishads we frequently find apparent "contradictions", just as in this mantra, because the part, when it tries to relate itself to the Whole from its own perspective, that is, taking itself as a part, is only capable of grasping fragments and pieces, never the Totality... When seeing parts, without realizing the Whole, they appear contradictory. However, upon realizing the Complete, or upon seeing in Totality, we realize these polarities not as contradictory but as coherent and complementary... Because in spite of the diversity and multiplicity in movement that we perceive through our senses, only the reality is... only the existence is... The whole, which we call Brahman...

The objective world of names and forms is movement... the "objectivizer" is motionless and static... However, these cannot be understood as two phenomena separate from each other, the movement of the wheel is intimately connected with its static axis, one cannot exist without the other, they both form two interdependent polarities of one unit...

Brahman is the unchangeable, infinite, immanent and transcendental reality, the source of matter, energy, time, space, as well as all that transcends the universe. In fact, Brahman is the concept of God in Hinduism, which nature is described as transpersonal, personal or impersonal by different religions lineages, as it is established in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (1.2.11):

vadanti tat tattva—vidas

tattvaṁ yaj jñānam advayam

brahmeti paramātmeti

bhagavān iti śabdyate

"The sages who have realizad the Absolute refer to It as Brahman, Paramātmā or Bhagavān."

Awakening or enlightenment consists of the existential realization of Brahman as our authentic and true nature, or Ātman...

Anejad ekaṁ manaso javīyo nainad devā āpnuvan pūrvam arṣat... "The Self is motionless, and even faster than the mind. The senses cannot reach it because He goes before them".

The mind and the senses are instruments adequate to experiment the dual reality of forms, to search in the relative world of objects. However, these will be futile in whatever is related to the search for our authentic nature, the Ātman or the subjective...

The mind is ātma—śakti, it is a mysterious power of the Ātman, it is an enigmatic capacity of the Self, who reveals himself as mind, because it is through the mind that the Divine is expressed as a reality of names and forms, in movement, as diversity, as the universe, God manifests Himself as the very same cosmos, as our whole reality, through the mind.

It is through and by means of the mind that Brahman reveals itself as the reality of diversity in names and forms... However, however fast the it may be, wherever it goes, will only prove that the omnipresent Brahman is already there...

Wherever the mind is directed to, it will only find that existence has already reached there, that life was already there before, since always and forever... because existence is its origin... just as it is expressed by the Brahma Sūtras ... athāto brahma jigñāsa... and then... janmādy asya yataḥ... The realization of that authentic "I am" or "self" which we find in the Bhagavad—gītā (10.8):

ahaṁ sarvasya prabhavo

mattaḥ sarvaṁ pravartate

iti matvā bhajante māṁ

budhā bhāva—samanvitāḥ

"I am the origin of all. Everything emanates from me. This is known by the sage who worships me wholeheartedly"

The realization what we really are is a state transcendental to the mind... yogas citta vṛtti nirodhaḥ... and therefore, transcendental to the senses...

The mind is not something solid, it is movement and activity, the Self is peace, silence, quietude.

In this verse the word devas refers to the senses, as it comes from the sanskrit root div which means "to illuminate", the senses are able to grasp all that is located in a certain distance from them, the objective world of forms...

The senses cannot reach him, they are not capable of catching him, not because of remoteness, the reason is not that the Self is found beyond the limits of the universe, but because the Ātman is before them, he is their origin and source, just like the Self cannot be defined with words, not because it would be complicated but because He is found before them, before their source, before the thoughts... The Self cannot be caught by the senses because there is no distance between us and what we really are, Ātman is closer to us than ourselves...

The search for the Truth is not about apprehending something but about being... being what we really are...

DESCRIPTION OF BRAHMAN

Trying to describe Brahman is an attempt to describe reality, life, existence... what is...

It is an effort meant for failure from the very basis...

In this sense, I have always thought that any enlightened person has felt and experienced failure, with every explanation he had experienced the impotency and frustration of not being able to verbally define what happens...

The reason is because realizing the reality, the Self, God, and describing it or "speaking about", are completely incompatible. To realize the Whole is... to emerge, to be that Whole...

On the other hand, in order to describe or speak about something, the existence of a certain separation from that which we describe is indispensable. To describe is to situate oneself in a distance. To study, think, speak and converse "about" is to create distance between the describer and the described... You can describe a watermelon, because you are not that watermelon. Speaking about life is difficult as long as you cannot situate yourself outside of it. The Self is realizable... but not describable...

Any lecture, discourse, book, satsang or attempt made by enlightened masters along the history to offer explanations about the Truth, has never been an effort destined for intellectual understanding, they have only been pretexts in order to offer us marvelous possibilities to associate with the Truth and thus create the appropriate situation in order to be infected with God...