The Esoteric Significance of the Kathopanishad - 6.1. Swami Krishnananda

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Sunday, February 14, 2021. 09:51. AM.
Chapter 6: The Meaning of Not Coming Back - 1.

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Great truths appear mysterious because the intellect of man is not endowed with the necessary apparatus to grasp them. There is no mystery in the teachings of the great Master who initiated Nachiketas in the Kathopanishad. We are afraid of mysteries, as if they exist. The facts which rule the world are not necessarily intellectual and logical. The mathematics and the geometry of the human understanding does not seem to be the method according to which the world operates. This is a startling discovery which was made by leaders of science, such as Einstein. The world does not work according to human arithmetic, and our calculations are not the calculations made by the universe. This is the reason why the world appears as a mystery to us, while in fact it is not a mystery. We do not have the necessary endowment to grasp this structure of things as their object.

The world does not seem to be an object of our intellect or understanding. The thing as it is in itself cannot be grasped by human understanding. There does not appear to be anything in man which is adequate to the purpose of what is called a mystery, which is the nature of things. Everything in the world is a mystery because the essential nature of things is not an object of the senses or the understanding of man. What we see with our eyes or think with our minds is not the truth of things. Thus it is that we are not able to understand what it was that great Master Yama communicated to Nachiketas. Whatever be the explanation and the effort of the teacher, what can be grasped only by an intuitive apperception cannot be subjected to the mould of logical thinking.

It is futile on the part of man to make the Ultimate Reality come down to his own level and enter the apparatus of his frail intellect which dissects reality into the subject and the object, while the nature of reality is not so divided. But unless it is so divided, it cannot be grasped by us. This is the reason why we cannot understand why the three angles of a triangle need not necessarily always be equal to two right angles, and how parallel lines can meet in infinity. We can never accept with the mathematical apparatus that we have that parallel lines can ever meet – else, they would not be parallel. But they are said to meet under a different condition of things which is not necessarily the three-dimensional spatial Newtonian scientific structure.

This I am trying to place before you as a sort of analogy to explain why great mysteries cannot be grasped by unprepared, untutored, untrained minds. Sadhana chatushtaya, the fourfold equipment requisite of a student, is a necessity for every one of us. When we approach a great Master or a Teacher or a Guru and attempt to get initiated into super-physical mysteries, we should also be cautious to see that we have the receptive capacity within us to absorb these mysteries which are not necessarily human and limited to our way of thinking.

To be cntiued ....

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