The Esoteric Significance of the Kathopanishad - 6.6. Swami Krishnananda.

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Friday,April   02, 2021. 12:14. PM.
Chapter 6: The Meaning of Not Coming Back - 6.
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The yoga practice is an attempt at the coming together in union of the essentiality of ourselves with the essentiality of everything else. Only in this real union can we be true friends of anybody. At present we are only artificially concocted relative friends of people, due to which reason we can be separated from our friends. There can be bereavement, which is so common in this world.

Yoga is not physical contact, it is not sense perception, it is not coming in contact with the physical nature of things because, remember, the physical nature is not the real nature of things. It is an investiture, it is a cover, a shroud, which has been put on by another mystery which is that we are not able to understand what we really are.

What are we really? Philosophically conducted analysis reveals that we are more than the body. What else have we got within us other than the body? Let a psychologist or biologist answer this question: What else can a human being be if he or she is not the physical body? ‘The mind’ may be an answer. But we seem to be existing even when the mind is not operating. There are illustrations from our own life where the mind need not necessarily actively participate in our existence. For instance, in deep sleep the mind does not operate. We do not think. We are not aware of any object. There is no perceptional activity of the mind in the state of deep sleep. Nevertheless, we know that we existed. The existence of a person is not annihilated in the state of deep sleep though the body and the mind do not actively participate in this existence. Do we exist in the state of deep sleep? We do exist – not as a body, as we are not aware of it; not as a mind, as it was not working. Minus the body, minus the mind, minus the intellect, minus the reason, what else are we?

We cannot directly apperceive the nature of our true existence because, as I mentioned earlier, we are involved in the phenomenal world and, therefore, we have only phenomenal appurtenances by which we are able to perceive ourselves – wrongly – as objects of sense, as we erroneously perceive objects of sense outside. In the same way as I look at you, I am looking at myself. In what way am I better than you? If you are an object of sense for me, I am equally so. But by inference, by a sort of deductive logic, we may say, we infer that we can exist under certain conditions even without the association of the body and the mind as, for instance, in the state of deep sleep, which is a very important phenomenon through which we are passing every day but it misses our attention, for very inscrutable reasons.

How do we know that we are existing in deep sleep? Not because our eyes are open, not because our mind is thinking or our reason is operating. When nothing was there, who knew that there was a person existing? We are a mystery. It is not that the teaching of the Kathopanishad is a mystery; we ourselves are a mystery. We cannot know what we ourselves are. We are stifled in our existence by certain operations which are hanging heavily upon ourselves. I mentioned the space-time-cause relation. These are the difficulties before us. This is Ravana, Kumbhakarna, Inderjit, whatever we may call it, or space-time-cause. They cannot be overcome by any effort of any person because every person who is trying to put forth an effort in the direction of overcoming space, time and cause is already involved in space, time and cause. So there is no ordinary, empirical, sensory, physical, material way of getting over this mortality of existence. We have to seek a super-natural method which is not an intellectual, rational, scientific method. ‘Intuitive method’ is the name we give to it. Though this word is uttered, we will not know what it actually means.

To be continued ...

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