The Esoteric Significance of the Kathopanishad - 6.9. Swami Krishnananda.

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Sunday, May 16, 2021. 06:35. AM.
Chapter 6: The Meaning of Not Coming Back - 9.
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Now I am coming to the point of the practice of yoga. This little ‘I’ in us, in spite of the fact that we are only a crawling insect like an ant, is nevertheless a whole. The Infinite cannot be cut into parts as bees, ants, human beings, etc. It is wholly present even in the fragment of the body. The Infinite is wholly present even in a part. This is a difficult thing for the mind to understand. Inasmuch as the total Infinite is present even in the smallest grain of sand, every creature feels that it is a whole in itself and it is not a part. This wholeness which persists even in the little individuality of a human individual, a human personality, is to be taken advantage of in the practice of yoga.

So when we concentrate on whatever be the object of our meditation, the whole of us should go towards it. True love is the whole being of ours pouring forth in the direction of that object which we truly love. But in our affections, we are not wholly loving anything. We have always a reserve; we always fragmentarily love things, with dissected affections scattered over different things in the world. So it is that we are not honest lovers of anything in this world. There is always some little bit of reservation on our part. But in yoga, no such reservation is permissible.

In self-surrender, in the dedication of oneself to the Guru, for instance, we cannot reserve something for ourselves and give a part to the Guru or a god. This wholeness in us is that which contemplates in the art of meditation. It is not merely the mind or the body; it is us that contemplates the great Reality.

Now, in the same way as this great Infinite is manifest entirely in each individual, it is manifest in every other individual also. This is the reason why we are expected to give due respect to everybody else and consider others as ends in themselves and not a means to our end. We are not the only end. Others also feel like that.

The Infinite that presses itself forward as the real ‘I’ and the wholeness in us does this action in everybody else also. So everybody asserts himself or herself: “I am important. I require respect and recognition.” Everybody is an end and not a means. Nobody can exploit another person in this world. Nobody is a servant of another. We become apparently subservient servants of other people due to pressure of circumstances socially or perhaps physically, but really, in the heart of our hearts, we would not like to be satellites of anybody. We would not wish to serve any person. We would like to be served by others.

The reason is that we are wholes, and a whole cannot become a part of somebody else, as a servant of a boss. So we resent being a servant. But willy-nilly we grudgingly become a servant of a boss because other reasons are there which have restricted our empirical existence. We are not metaphysically surrendering ourselves to the boss, though we empirically become a satellite of the boss because of reasons well known to us.

To be continued ....

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