When sociologists of religion go around in post-Christian Europe and ask people what they believe in, a large but ever-dwindling minority will still cite the Biblical theology. They believe in a Trinitarian God, featuring Father, Son and Holy Ghost, of Whom the Son has come to deliver us from Sin through His Crucifixion and Resurrection. Another minority, also dwindling, will declare themselves hard-headed Atheists. Now that the Church is no longer such a large-looming presence, opposing it is no longer deemed worth it. Most people make it a point not to believe in miracles like the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection, but otherwise have no active quarrel with the Christian Churches. Some vague religiosity may still have a place in their lives, they still appreciate the Christian treasures in painting and music, and when making a trip to another city, they still make sure to visit the cathedral. But when asked about their actual beliefs, they prove too proud to bow their heads before a Father in Heaven, and instead will classify themselves as “spiritual but not religious”. They will say to the pollster: “No, a God in Heaven, in that I can’t believe anymore, but yes, there must be Something.”

These people are classified as “Something-ists” or Aughtists (Dutch: ietsisten, iets being English aught, the opposite of niets/naught). They now form a large percentage of the Europeans, and are making serious inroads in the Anglosphere, Latin America, and in the 21st century even in the American Bible Belt. Or if they come from under a Communist regime, they are relieved that religion is allowed again, but mostly don’t go all the way back to reconnecting with the Church. When I left for India a few months ago, the building behind my domicile was a church; today it stads deconsecrated and for sale, literally.

If passively going with the flow, these people will stick to materialism and hedonism. A small-scale alternative, some people find in neo-Paganism: the revival of presumed pre-Christian native religions, a significant movement in Lithuania or Iceland but in most countries quite marginal. The most serious alternative we see emerging is the exploration of the wide variety of Oriental philosophies and disciplines, best-known being Indian Yoga and Chinese Qigong. These have been growing for decades and continue to expand, to the point of becoming part of the standard lifestyle in some educated circles. But a Creed, a counterpart to the Christian list of theological beliefs, is definitely out: in the world up there, we are satisfied with just a general Aught, and the details will take care of themselves.

So people’s outreach to an open-ended “Aught” is very modern. And yet, it is also very ancient. It is there in one of the oldest texts in the world: the Rg-Veda, the “Encyclopedia of Hymns”, composed in Northwest India in arguably 3300-1900 BCE; and in its sequels from the next centuries, principally the other Veda Saṁhitās, the Upaniṣads and the Bhagavad Gītā. This is the word Tad, sometimes phonetically context-adapted to Tat-, Tac-, Taj-, Tan-.

The daily meaning of Tad is, according to German-American top Sanskrit professor Hans Henrich Hock, “that, this; sometimes to be translated as definite article, or as third person pronoun; (neut. also as adverb…) then, there, in this way, therefore, so, on this count” [p.159, An Early Upanishadic Reader, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 2007]. But philosophical dictionaries explain that Tad, “That one”, “He there”, hence “the Target”, “the Focus”, also means “the Supreme up there”, “the Absolute”; or what in Sanskrit is called impersonally Brahmaṇ, personified as Brahmā.

The etymology of Tad is easy: it corresponds to English That. The etymology of Brahmaṇ is not too difficult either: it is related to German Berg, “mountain” (as in Yiddish names like Spielberg, Goldberg, or the German-cum-Scandinavian name Bergman[n], “mountain man”, or the Titanic-related word iceberg), the common semantic root being “big, grow, maximum”. The term Brahmaṇ’s component -maṇ has nothing to do with English “man” but is essentially the formative element of the medial participle, so Brahmaṇ is “the growing one”, hence “the bigness factor”. It is, if we overlook the historical specificity that Monotheism attributes to itself, synonymous with Arabic akbar, “bigger”, so that Allāhu akbar, “(howsoever big anything you can think of is, in every case) God is bigger”. The Brahmaṇ cannot be caught in any known phenomenon anymore, and neither can Tad. It points beyond the horizon of the phenomenal world we know.

“That” is what can only be pointed out, not given a definition. It’s the thing that can’t be described but that you’ll recognize when you come face to face with it. When you notice something you can’t classify but of which you can’t deny the existence, you say: “Look at that!” This makes it an excellent term for what, as Vedānta philosophers will say, can never be an object of observation, only a subject: the “witness consciousness”. It is beyond definitions, unseizable in any verbal formula. In terms of the oldest philosophy, Sāṅkhya (“enumeration [öf the universe’s constituents]”, originally the generic term for “philosophy”, “worldview”, a pre-Vedic thought system of which traces can be found back in other branches of Indo-European culture), it is Nirguṇa, “without properties”, “colourless”.

Later Sanskrit vocabulary has numerous terms for complex concepts, in metaphysics as much as in science, technology and statecraft. Brahmaṇ is on the threshold of this category, but the disarmingly simple word Tad goes back to an earlier time, the time when human beings first started wondering about the Ultimate. Thus, the Śānti Mantra (“peace verse”) preceding the Taittirīya Upaniṣad (“confidential teaching of the partridges”) includes the phrase Tan mām avatu, “May That benefit me”.

But it is not always unambiguous when the word is used as a demonstrative adjunct to a noun, and when as a concept in its own right. Indeed, ambiguity is often the intention of the Vedic poet, witness the many puns characterizing Vedic poetry. So, some prominent appearances of the word are the object of debate.

The Asya Vāmasya Sūkta or “Riddle Hymn”, RV 1.164, is one of the philosophically richest texts from ancient literature, worldwide. It is the cradle of many foundational ideas of Hindu and global thinking, like the Holy Cow, the primeval vibration Auṁ, the contrast between involvement/pravṛtti in and renunciation/nivṛtti from the world (as represented by two birds, one eating from the berries and the other just looking on), the religious worldview of Monism with its underlying unity of all worship; c.q. the concept of Natural Law, the division of the circle into 12 and 360, and the Zodiac. Its verse 42 says that tád viśva úpa jīvati, “[thanks to the buffalo-cow, through the imperishable], that universe comes to exist”. Is this “That, the Universe”, or is it “that universe”? Or “thus, the universe comes to exist”?

The best-known hymn in the Ṛg-Veda is the Gāyatrī Mantra (“Mental Instrument of the 3×8 Metre”, with its 7th syllable, -nyam, being pronounced as 2 syllables, -ni-am, to turn the ostensible 23 to 24 syllables; RV 10:16:3): Tad savitur vareṇyam bhargo devasya dhīmahi dhiyo yo naḥ pracodayāt, usually translated as something like: “Let us interiorize that delectable splendour of the Sun God. May it impel our minds.”

It is at this point entirely from memory that I recollect a teaching by the late Swami Veda Bharati from the Swami Rama Sadhaka Grama in Rishikesh. He regularly came to the Netherlands where I attended his yoga retreats. He explained that the word tad in this mantra should not be analyzed as an adjunct to the noun bhargo, nor to any other noun in sight, but as a pronoun in its own right, as “That [up there]”, or “That [deep down]”, the very object of this song of praise.

The clearest enunciation of Tad, at once one of the profoundest Vedic phrases (mahāvākya), is the assurance Tat tvam asi, “that thou art” (Chāndogya Upaniṣad, “Confidential teaching of the Vedic reciter”,6.8.7), said by sage Uddālaka Aruṇi to his knowledge-hungry son Śvetaketu. This is the conclusion of his explanation that every conscious subject, every witness-consciousness including you, equals emptiness. Logically prior to the moment you get consciousness of something, consciousness filled with an object of consciousness, you have at the root an objectless consciousness. That is your witness-consciousness: after you’ve peeled off the gross-physical and subtle-physical levels from your person, you find that even the mental and the intellectual layers are still outward and superficial compared to your true Self, which is pure colourless consciousness. This is the fundamental insight of what develops into the philosophy of Vedānta, “the Veda’s conclusion”, of which several offshoots have developed in India.

(This includes Buddhism, of which half-wits including top academics perpetuate the misunderstanding that it doesn’t believe in the Self, the notion at the heart of the Vedāntic view of man. In reality, the Vedāntic Self and the Buddhist non-Self are two ways of saying the same thing. Whereas the same people typically paper over the radical difference with Christian or Islamic theology, they make a mountain out of a superficial terminological difference in naming the deepest reality. Traditional, real Buddhists don’t suffer from that confusion, e.g. Chinese Buddhists teach the 自性 Zìxìng, the “Self-Nature”. Both Self and non-Self are Nirguṇa, without properties, colourless: neither black nor white, neither male nor female, beyond the pairs of opposites, neti neti. In mathematical terms: +0 = -0 = 0, a disarmingly simple equation capable of wiping all the learned pontifications over their alleged differences off the table. The contrast between Ātman and Anātman is a perfectly false problem.)

The word Tad thus becomes one of the key terms in the Vedic worldview. As such, it has gotten juxtaposed with other key terms like Sat, “being”, “reality”, and Auṁ, the universe’s root vibration. This status is formalized in the Bhagavad Gita’s verse 17.23, which declares “Auṁ, Tad, Sat etc.” to be the representatives of the Absolute/Brahmaṇ. For this reason, Auṁ-Tat-Sat has become a well-known concluding formula after Dharmic discourses. Whatever we have been explaining about that profound Brahmaṇ, it can all be reduced to a few key terms, such as Tad.

Us historians can’t look beyond the Vedas as the oldest literate source, but context suggests that Tad is one of the oldest pointers to Brahmaṇ, even older than the Vedas. Before spiritual seekers stumbled upon the experience of mental silence and then perfected it into a systematic practice of a sustained zero state of consciousness, commonly known as meditation, for many thousands of years they had been seeking to fill their minds with extraordinary sensations, the “vision quest” (often with the help of psychedelics, of which Vedic Soma was a relic, and still sometimes figuring in Śiva’s imagery). After having realized this special state, they exclaimed “Wow! Look at that!” Philosophers were to develop high-brow terminology like Sat-Cit-Ānanda (“Being-Consciousness-Joy”), and even more recently “the supreme and eternal essence or spirit of the universe” (Collins dictionary of American English), “the absolute reality that is the true essence of all existence” (a Quora whiz kid) etc. And simpler again, Viśva, “the universe”.

For as the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaṇiṣad (2.3.1) says: “The Brahmaṇ has only two forms: embodied and without embodiment, mortal and immortal…” The universe is the embodied form (Mūrti) of the Brahmaṇ. Or as the Buddhist Heart Sūtra says: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Pervasive, infinite, unchanging, you name it: it’s all That.