The Esoteric Significance of the Kathopanishad - 6.7. Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday,  April   21, 2021. 11:34. AM.
Chapter 6: The Meaning of Not Coming Back - 7.
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The knowledge that we have that we exist is an intuition; it is not a perception. Even if we close our eyes, plug our ears, and desensitise all our sense organs, we will know that we are. This knowledge that we are is an indication of what we consider as intuitive grasp. We need not require a proof to demonstrate that we are existing, while we may require a proof to show that other things are existing. What is the proof that we are existing? There is no proof because every proof proceeds from the fact of our existence. The fact that we exist does not require a proof inasmuch as it is the basis of every other proof. I am. There is no proof for this I am-ness.

Now, forgetting for the time being the way in which we proceed with arguments and logical analysis on the basis of this assumption of our existence, we have to pinpoint our attention on what this ‘I’ is to which I made reference as the wholeness in us. By communion of this wholeness with the wholeness of other things, we find ourselves in a state of yoga. This wholeness in us is the ‘I’, which cannot be dismembered, cut into parts. We cannot cut the ‘I’ into two parts – half the ‘I’ is there, half the ‘I’ is somewhere else. A limb can be severed, but the ‘I’ cannot be so split because the ‘I’ is not an object. It is not a substance, it is not a thing, it cannot be grasped even by the mind itself because the mind was not there in sleep and yet we know that we were. We knew that we were only by our ‘I’. The ‘I’ knew itself: I am I.

The ‘I’ was known not by the senses or the psychological apparatus of knowledge, but by an intuitive self-identical consciousness. We are poverty-stricken in words here. Language cannot explain what this is. Self-identical means the ‘I’ is one with the ‘I’; it cannot be identical with anything else. This union of the ‘I’ as a subject with its own self as an object is called intuition. This must apply to everything else in the world also in the way the ‘I’ in us, the ‘I’ that we are, is the subject as well as the object. It knows itself as existing in the state of deep sleep, not as something outside in space and time. There was no consciousness of space and time in deep sleep.

What was that ‘I’ which existed in the state of deep sleep? This is ‘I am I’. Even the ‘am’ should not exist there as a verb; that also is a dichotomy. We are splitting the ‘I’ into two parts, as it were, logically though, by introducing a verb called ‘am’. I said language is not intended to explain reality. Ananya-prokte gatir atra n?sty (Katha 1.2.8), says the Upanishad. A non-separate person, non-separate consciousness, non-separate being only can communicate this non-separate knowledge to the non-separate disciple. Nai?? tarke?a matir ?paney?, prokt?nyenaiva sujñ?n?ya pre??ha (Katha 1.2.9): No amount of argument will suffice here. The argument has to cease. The disciple has to unite himself or herself or itself, or whatever we may call it. All he, she, it ceases here when the disciple stands as a naked spirit before the Guru. It is not a man or a woman that is a disciple; it is a spirit, a spark of light that inwardly surrenders itself to the light that is Guru – who is not a body. Remember this point again.

To be continued ....



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