The Esoteric Significance of the Kathopanishad - 6.13. Swami Krishnananda.

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Monday, July 05, 2021. 6:16. PM.
Chapter 6: The Meaning of Not Coming Back - 13.
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1.

How would the mind be superior to the world? 

This is the point of difference between the two schools of philosophy called realism and idealism. Is the object prior to thinking, or is thinking prior to the object? 

We need not enter into this discussion here. The point is that in some special way the mind is superior to the world. Therefore, we feel that we are superior persons. We do not think the world is superior to us; we are superior. We can know the world. We can measure the Milky Way. We can count in terms of light years, which are unimaginable distances. The mind, though it appears to be apparently located within our body and operating in the brain, is really not so. It is an ethereal, pervasive electric force, as it were, which cannot be locked up within the little body or even the brain. Otherwise, how would we explain our little mind knowing all these people sitting here if the mind is only inside our brain? If the mind is only working inside the skull of a person, it cannot go outside. Then no contact of the mind with objects is possible. No one can know that another exists. There will be complete subjectivism of experience. Each one will be brooding about one’s own self, and no one will know that even space exists outside.

2.

But we are aware that there are things outside. I know that you are all seated here. This shows that my mind is not working merely inside me. It is outside me also. Again I am coming to the point of what this outsideness means. When I explained to you what interiority means, simultaneously exteriority is explained. In a very, very special sense, the mind is more pervasive than the imagined location of it inside the skull or the brain. This is why telepathic communication is possible. We can contact a person in London or New York by the mind. How is it possible if the mind is inside the brain only? If it is only inside our skull, how is telepathy possible, how is mesmerism possible, how is hypnotism possible, how can any kind of willpower be possible as something exercised on somebody else? So the mind is not individual, though it is locked up apparently within this body due to intense attachment to this body.

3.

This consciousness of ours becomes hardened by attachment and becomes the so-called thinking principle, the mind, which is the instrument this personality is using to come in contact with empirical objects in space and time. We have to withdraw the senses, and the mind should receive the energy of the senses into itself, thus becoming doubly, triply, quadruply strong, because the mind is usually weak due to the energy of the mind getting leaked out through the apertures of the senses. The pot full of water can go out if there are five holes at the base of the pot. Otherwise, it will be strong and filled to the brim. Our energies are not full to the brim. We feel weak, very much innervated, emaciated, cannot walk, cannot stand, cannot think. Because the mind is distracted, it is thinking one thousand things, and the energy is going out in many directions.

4.

Before I told you something about the way in which the senses have to be withdrawn. The senses have to be withdrawn for the purpose of enabling the mind to concentrate on its goal. The mind, remember again, is not necessarily inside our body. It is a pervasive principle, almost inseparable from the cosmic mind. This is why this verse of the Kathopanishad tells us there is something higher than the mind: buddher ?tm? mah?n para? (Katha 1.3.10). There are larger realities, wider in their dimension, deeper in their comprehension than what is available to us.

To be continued ...


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