What is the reward for knowing this?  One obtains worlds, unchanging happiness, brahma; or, with some circumnavigation, one goes to the moon, and eventually reaches brahma or obtains the worlds of the blessed (5. 10. 10).  The round of existence, sams[=a]ra, is indicated at 6. 16, and expressly stated in 5. 10. 7 (insects have here a third path).  Immortality is forcibly claimed:  ’The living one dies not’ (6. 11. 3).  He who knows the sections 7. 15 to 26 becomes [=a]tm[=a]nanda and “lord of all worlds”; whereas an incorrect view gives perishable worlds.  In one Upanishad there is a verse (Cvet. 4. 5) which would indicate a formal duality like that of the S[=a]nkhyas;[29] but in general one may say that the Upanishads are simply pantheistic, only the absorption into a world-soul is as yet scarcely formulated.  On the other hand, some of the older Upanishads show traces of an atheistic and materialistic (asad) philosophy, which is swallowed up in the growing inclination to personify the creative principle, and ultimately is lost in the erection of a personal Lord, as in the latest Upanishads.  This tendency to personify, with the increase of special sectarian gods, will lead again, after centuries, to the rehabilitation of a triad of gods, the trim[=u]rti, where unite Vishnu, Civa, and, with these, who are more powerful, Brahm[=a], the Praj[=a]pati of the Veda, as the All-god of purely pantheistic systems.  In the purer, older form recorded above, the purusha (Person) is sprung from the [=a]tm[=a].  There is no distinction between matter and spirit.  Conscious being (sat) wills, and so produces all.  Or [=a]tm[=a] comes first; and this is conscious sat and the cause of the worlds; which [=a]tm[=a] eventually becomes the Lord.  The [=a]tm[=a] in man, owing to his environment, cannot see whole, and needs the Yoga discipline of asceticism to enable him to do so.  But he is the same ego which is the All.

The relation between the absolute and the ego is through will.  “This (neuter) brahma willed, ‘May I be many,’ and created” (Ch[=a]nd., above).  Sometimes the impersonal, and sometimes the personal “spirit willed” (T[=a]iit. 2. 6).  And when it is said, in Brihad [=A]ran. 1. 4. 1, that “In the beginning ego, spirit, [=a]tm[=a], alone existed,” one finds this spirit (self) to be a form of brahma (ib. 10-11).  Personified in a sectarian sense, this spirit becomes the divinity Rudra Civa, the Blessed One (Cvet[=a]cvatara, 3. 5. 11).[30]