The Esoteric Significance of the Kathopanishad : 4.12. - Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday, September 02, 2020. 9.34 . AM.
Chapter 4: Overcoming the Limitations of Space and Time -12.
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1.
The great Vaishvanara, about which I said a few words regarding the second boon granted to Nachiketas, is the Universal Being, whose original is touched upon in the third boon asked for by Nachiketas. Self-control is the freedom that we exercise as noumenal realities from involvement in the phenomenal world of externality, which is space-time. So we should not try to contact the objects with the senses. We cannot contact them because they are always outside. A thing that is really outside cannot be contacted. A thing that is really outside us cannot be possessed, cannot be enjoyed. So to expect anything in this world is idiocy. We cannot expect any satisfaction in this world. It will not give us one jot of joy because we cannot really come in contact with the reality of the world. The reason is that we are outside the world; the world is outside us. This is what it says when space-time hangs heavily upon our heads.


2.
Thus, sense control or self-control is a transcendence of space-time itself, in one sense. Patanjali, in his great Yoga Sutras, gives detailed techniques of this practice of sense control or self-control, which is precisely what we call yoga. The Kathopanishad analogy of this chariot is the analogy of the manner in which the senses, the mind and the reason have to be directed properly towards the achievement of the great destination – tad vi??o? paramam padam: Narayana the Almighty, Brahman the Absolute.


3.
Why should the senses be controlled? Because the senses are unnecessarily trying to come in contact with a thing with which they cannot come in contact under the existing conditions. If a rose flower is reflected through a glass window, sometimes honey bees hit their head against the pane without knowing that there is glass which prevents them from touching the flower. Sometimes they hit themselves so hard that they die there. They cannot see the obstruction because it is transparent. The flower is seen, and they want to touch it and go and sit on it, enjoy the honey that is in the flower. They go on buzzing and hitting it, but they cannot go through it. They will die there, but cannot get anything.


4.
Something like this happens to us. We go on hitting our head against the objects of the senses but there is something midway between us and the objects, against which we strike our heads and die without getting the things. This glass pane is the space-time arrangement. It is transparent. We cannot even see it. We cannot imagine that this so-called thing, this space and time, is so hard a substance that it can prevent our contact with realities. Glass is transparent; it cannot be seen. We think that it is not there at all, but it is enough to prevent our entry.

To be continued ....
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