Brahman as Akasha — Infinite Space of Consciousness
The Chandogya Upanishad's image of Brahman as infinite Akasha (space/sky) — in which all things arise, exist, and dissolve — is Advaita's most vivid cosmological metaphor.
The Chandogya Upanishad (8.1.3) uses Akasha (space, sky, ether) as one of its primary metaphors for Brahman: 'Verily, this entire universe is Brahman, from which it emerges, in which it dissolves, and by which it breathes. Know Brahman through the tranquil mind.' The Akasha metaphor captures several key features of Brahman: it is spacious enough to contain everything (infinite); it is unaffected by what arises within it (unchanging); it is not created or destroyed when clouds appear and disappear in it (independent of its contents); and it is the same sky in all locations — there is not a separate 'inside-the-room sky' and 'outside sky.' Similarly, Brahman is the same consciousness in all beings — there is not a separate 'individual consciousness' and 'universal consciousness'; what appears as individual is the same infinite awareness wearing the costume of apparent individuality.
All this universe is Brahman. From it everything is born, by it everything exists, into it everything returns.
Physicist David Bohm's concept of the 'quantum vacuum' — an active, energy-filled ground state from which all particles arise and into which they dissolve — provides a modern physics parallel to the Chandogya's image of Brahman as the primordial space in which the universe arises and dissolves.
Chandogya Upanishad
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- What Advaita Vedanta says about loneliness
The space metaphor does work no doctrine can: there is no separate inside-the-room sky. Sitting alone, the awareness in you is not a smaller ration of something larger; it is the same akasha, undivided by the walls that divide the room.