The Esoteric Significance of the Kathopanishad - 6.8. Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday,  April   28, 2021. 07:51. PM.
Chapter 6: The Meaning of Not Coming Back -8.
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This ‘I’ that we are, which is not the physical body or the mind, is the mystery that we are. Every person, every organism is a mystery by itself. That is why it asserts itself as ‘I am I’. This is why we want respect, we want a word of thanks, we want to be received properly with a warm welcome, we want to be spoken to with a kind word, we wish that our existence be recognised by others. Otherwise, we feel slighted. “Oh, I was not even looked at. I went there. 

They didn’t speak to me. I was nobody.” Our greatness has not been diminished merely because others have not spoken to us. Our greatness is still there. Yet we feel as if we are disregarded because of the non-recognition meted out to us by other people. We wish that our existence be recognised. There is no other desire in a person except this. This is the last desire that a person has. We may call it egoism in a crude form, but it is a subtle, peculiar, mysterious so-called something which defies definition – this ‘I am I’ which wants to be recognised: I am here.

There is another difficulty with us. When we are there, nobody else should be there. This is why there is a desire to be a despot, a tyrant and a dictator. People wish to be dictators and rulers of the whole world and nobody should stand against them. “I am everything.” This desire to assert oneself as the all is also a reflection of our essential nature, crudely manifested in a distorted way as a tyrant or a dictator, which is an unfortunate morbid manifestation of our essential nature.

Now I will tell you why we wish to be tyrants and dictators. The desire is piously motivated, spiritually oriented, but outwardly it becomes a demon because it passes through the body and social relations, as a clean light from the sun may get split into various segments when it passes through a prism. This ‘I’ that we are, which was the residuum of the last remnant that we could discover in the state of deep sleep, is not a physical body, not a psychological operation, but a mere awareness, a consciousness. 

This consciousness is the reason why we are able to remember that we slept yesterday. “I was sleeping well, and I was happy though I was not thinking anything.” Who is saying this? We did not exist there as a mind to say this, yet memory persists subsequent to the fact of sleeping. By inference from this memory we can draw a conclusion that there was something from which we draw the inference. That something could not have been anything other than the bare principle of experience or consciousness.

Now, this so-called ‘I’ or experience, which is consciousness, cannot be split or cut like the limbs of the body. It is indivisible. Akhanda is consciousness. This consciousness cannot be cut into parts because the very consciousness of the division among consciousness is also a consciousness. To imagine that consciousness is separated into parts, consciousness should be present even in the gap between the imagined parts. This shows that consciousness cannot be separated. It is indivisible, and indivisibility is the same as infinity. Our essential nature is indivisible infinitude. It is not some person sitting here. This is revealed by a very acute inferential logical analysis of our true nature. We are infinite, and there cannot be two infinites. Only one infinite can be there. So this consciousness which is the Infinite, which cannot brook a second, devilishly manifests itself through the body and becomes a dictator, and says “I alone should be; you all go to hell”. 

This is the reason why there is pride and joy in the satisfaction of the ego. The joy of the ego is due to the joy arising out of the Infinite that we are wrongly getting deflected through the limited aperture of our wrongly oriented egoism. That is the reason why we want to be a totalitarian dictator, an emperor of the whole Earth, or the whole universe if possible.

To be continued ....

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