The Esoteric Significance of the Kathopanishad : 2-2

10/10/2018
Chapter 2: Nachiketas’ First Two Boons : 2.

The first thing that we aspire for is a very comfortable, happy reception by the world. We wish to be received by the world with gratitude, with a word of thanks, with affection and regard. We do not wish to be slighted by people, spat at, condemned or criticised, looked down upon or cowed down. The world has to receive us with respect and honour and love. This is a slightly nobler and more sublime interpretation of the way Nachiketas asked for his first boon from the great Master. “May I be well received by the world when I go back. Now I am in another world, in the land of the Lord of Death, which is other than the world of physical experience. When I return, may I be received honourably with love and affection by my father, and let his eyesight be granted.”

In an obvious and outline form, it is a request that the father may forget his annoyance, if at all he was angered at the import-unities with which Nachiketas had pressed his question: “To whom will you offer me?”

Nachiketas never asked anything for himself. When we become competent in our spiritual achievements in an appreciable measure, we come back to the world. Spiritual experience is not an abandonment of the world. It looks like a renunciation and a detachment from things in the earlier stages. It is a withdrawal for the sake of an entry back into the very thing from where we drew ourselves. We withdraw ourselves from the world for the sake of communing ourselves with the world once again in a better way than the manner in which we are encountering the world now.

We are at present not in communion with the world. We are not friends of the world. We are having a suspicious attitude towards people and things in general, so the world also looks upon us with some suspicion. We are not fully trusted by people. The world does not favour us one hundred percent because we do not trust it. Though we may have affection, love, regard for people, it is not true that we are trusting anyone one hundred percent. Always something is in reserve, even with a family member.

When we achieve a spiritual status by profound inner experience, we gain a greater knowledge of our relationship with the world, and we shall be once again in the world. When we wake up from dream, we do not go to a world which is outside dream. The dream world has not been abandoned by us, though it appears as if we have got over it. We are in the same place that we were while we were dreaming that particular world of apparitions. This waking condition is not a different place from the place where we were dreaming. In whatever sense we may define this location of one’s existence in waking and dream, they are not different places.

They are only different space-time coordinates, a point that is insisted upon repeatedly in such scriptures as the Yoga Vasishtha. The so-called world is nothing but a space-time continuum, a word with which modern scientists are very familiar. The world is not made up of mountains, stones, trees, and the solar system. It is made up of space-time – nothing more, nothing less. Even the solid objects of the world are only configurations of the space-time continuum. From akasa came vayu, from vayu came agni, from agni came apas, from apas came pritvi, says the Upanishad.

Space is the original cause, which projected space and air as its effect. From air came fire by friction, and by condensation it gave birth to water. Water solidified itself into the solid matter we call the earth principle.

To be continued ..