The Esoteric Significance of the Kathopanishad - 6.11. Swami Krishnananda.

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Sunday, June 06, 2021. 9:48. AM.
Chapter 6: The Meaning of Not Coming Back - 11.
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When we practice yoga, we are not entering merely inside our physical body, closing our eyes and holding our nostrils and meditating on a little flame of an imagined lamp in the heart, as if we are individuals. Even psychologically, psychoanalytically, we are not individuals. We belong to the whole of humanity. So we touch the whole of humanity when we probe into the depths of our being. And intellect is not necessarily the means of meditation because, as I told you, it is a little iceberg on the top of the ocean of this large unconscious which is at the base. We have to go deep into ourselves. “Know thyself” is an old dictum. This is a very difficult statement. It cannot easily be understood because to know thyself is to know what we are. I have tried to place before you the difficulty of knowing what we are. Very difficult beings we are, indeed. We are mysteries almost touching the borderland of infinitude.

This is why we cannot be satisfied with anything in this world. Even if we are the ruler of the whole Earth, we will be dissatisfied. We will look up and say, “Why are other things there which I have not conquered? I would like to have all the space also.” No man can be satisfied by all the wealth of this world. The Yoga Vasishtha says all the grains and the wheat and the rice and the gold and diamonds, all the power and the status and everything that is blessed that is in the whole world is not adequate to satisfy even one individual in the world. Such is the width, depth, magnitude of our being. We cannot be satisfied by the whole world because we are larger than the world. We are the noumenal perceiver of this phenomenal world. This is the reason why nobody can satisfy us. Though we appear to be limited to this body, we are not really so limited.

So in every level of perception, cognition and contact, we have to be in union. Yoga is union – not contact, not perception. In  beautiful Mantras the Kathopanishad touches upon this yoga. Indriyebhyah

KATHOPANISHAD : Chapter-1. Section-3.

Mantram-10.

Indriye-bhyah para hy-artha, arthebhyas-ca param manah, 

manasas-tu para buddhih buddher-atma mahan parah. 

Mantram-11.

Mahatah param-avyaktam, avyaktat-puruṣah paraḥ,

purusan-na param kincit, sa kastha, sa para gatih. 

There are larger realms of existence. We cannot understand what these larger realms are. I gave you one little example yesterday how we can conceive these higher realms or internal layers of the cosmos. The commonplace example that I mentioned is the structure of a physical object. The hard physical substance, so-called, a stone or a granite piece, is constituted of fine molecules. The molecules are internal to the stone and more pervasive because they are subtler and more ethereal. The atoms are the constituents of the molecules. Molecules are chemical in their nature; atoms are subtler, they are not chemical. Atoms are internal to the structure of the body of the object, internal even to the molecules.

To be continued ....


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