The Esoteric Significance of the Kathopanishad - 6.10. Swami Krishnananda.

 

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Tuesday, May 25, 2021. 7:15. PM.
Chapter 6: The Meaning of Not Coming Back - 10.
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In the practice of yoga, the true ‘I’ in us rises into action. Now, here is a little bit of psychology to know how we can bring this ‘I’ to the surface of consciousness. Normally the whole ‘I’ does not come to the surface of consciousness in our daily life. We are buried beings, like a huge iceberg. The major part of it is inside the ocean and only a little fragmentary crust is on the surface, say psychoanalysts. We do not behave wholly with anybody in our life because the larger part of our personality is in the lower levels of our being, unconscious mostly, call it subconscious or pre-conscious, etc. The conscious personality of ours, the little intelligence that we are exercising, the reason that is operating, is a deflected apparition, as it were, of the rootedness of us in our unconscious being.

When we go deep into psychoanalysis, our unconscious seems to be connected with the whole race of people. Psychoanalysts such as Carl Jung are fond of saying that there is such a thing called racial unconscious; we may call it the Universal Unconscious. We are slowly touching the border of Ishvara, who is the Universal Unconscious according to the Vedanta philosophy. But Jung is not talking of Ishvara. He is speaking of the presence of some peculiar communicating medium among humanity due to which man likes man only. Man cannot think of a tiger or an ass or a cow. When we work for the welfare of all beings, we are working for the welfare of human beings only, not of scorpions and mosquitoes. We are not interested in them, as if they do not exist at all.

This love of man for man only is due to the presence of a collective unconscious, a racial unconscious, the unconscious of the species, so that the species likes their species only. The cow likes the cow, the ass likes the ass, the crow likes the crow, the frog likes the frog, and man likes man. Psychoanalysts tell us that there is an unconsciousness within us which is not only individual but also wider, due to which we are very conscious of the presence of people and we all go on worrying about what people are doing. We do not worry as to what a deer or a snake is doing in the forest. Let it be, let it not be. We don’t bother. But men are very important because we are men.

The collective unconscious speaks through the individuality of a man only in terms of man. It cannot think in terms of a frog. It cannot think even in terms of a super-human being such as gods, let alone scorpions and mosquitoes. Can we think as angels, gods in heaven or the other higher realms of being? A question was put to me yesterday about these matters. There are beings who are larger, superior to us – angels, as they are called, gods, celestials, masters, adepts, yogis, siddhas. Are we thinking about them? We do not know whether they exist. We are thinking only of these little human beings. So this collective unconscious of human nature is human only. We are restricted even by our unconscious, not merely by the physical body.

To be continued .....

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