The Secret of the Katha Upanishad : 2.8. Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday, March 1130,  2022. 19:00.

Discourse -2. 

Post -8.

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Nachiketas is the seeking soul, and the three fasts are the threefold discipline of the human individuality. The entire yoga is here given in a nutshell. The three levels of the human individuality, corresponding to the three levels of the cosmos outside, are to be disciplined. They should not be given a vent or a long rope for indulgence externally. The physical, represented by sensory activity, the psychological, constituting emotion, will, etc., and the spiritual, are the fundamental stages of the ascent for which sake Nachiketas, the individual soul seeking Reality or Truth, observed a fast. What is a fast? It is withdrawal from indulgence—the gradual subdual of the sensory powers.




The bodily individuality is represented by sensory activity. Our bodies are weak, incapable of meeting the onslaught of natural forces on account of our yielding to the urges of sense. We cannot bear heat, we cannot bear cold, we cannot bear hunger, we cannot bear thirst, we cannot bear a strong wind, we cannot bear a flood. Natural forces are uncontrollable. Nature in its physical form has been estranged from the human personality on account of the yielding of the individual to the senses. The senses create a gap between the individual and the world outside. They tell you that the world is outside you, unconnected with you and you have to dread it, and sometimes cringe before it. You know that the world is more powerful than you in every way. 




We seem to be a nobody before it. We are afraid of all kinds of natural forces. So the fast of the senses, which represents the first discipline of a level of the human personality, releases such energy that you master the physical forces of nature. That is the first boon granted to Nachiketas: “When you return to the world, you will go as a master and not as a servant.” The world will recognise you as its friend and not as its enemy. The realised soul can come back to the world after a type of realisation, and when the realised soul comes back to the world, the world receives that soul in a different way from what it did earlier. The world treats you in a particular way now, in your state of ignorance, but will treat you differently when you meet it with knowledge. 


That is why Nachiketas asked, “When I go back to the world, may I be greeted with recognition and not with wrath and anger.” “Yes, may it be so,” said Yama, the Lord of Death. This means to say that even by the reception of a single boon, let alone the other two, you will become a master of the physical forces. The world will not threaten you any more. It will become your friend. At present the world is not our friend. That means we are afraid of it. The world is not our friend today, at this present moment of time, because the senses have created an attitude of estrangement between us and the world. “If you come to my residence and I treat you as a stranger, you will also treat me as a stranger; but if I treat you as a friend, as if I know you from eternity, you will be so immensely pleased and will treat me as your friend.” 




The world will treat you in the same way as you treat it. If you regard it as external to you, it will also treat you as external to it. If you say you are a foreigner, the world will tell you, “You are also a foreigner, come with a visa and passport, as you have no place for me. You get out,” it says, and you get out afterwards, one day or the other. You die because of estrangement of personality from the world—otherwise there would be no birth and death. If you unite yourself with the forces of the world, there will be no birth and death. Births and deaths are the consequence of estrangement of personality from natural forces. 


So the first day's fast of Nachiketas, physically through the withdrawal of the senses, created a reaction from the master of yoga, Yama, in the form of bestowal of a boon with such energy that it received the world as an organic part of its own self. The physical world became a friend of Nachiketas. This will happen to us, also. We are also Nachiketas, individually. Everyone is a Nachiketas, because Nachiketas is only a representation of a seeking soul. So when you control your senses, what will happen to you? The world will receive you as its friend and well-wisher. The consequence of sense-control is abundance in every way. You will not lack anything in this world, afterwards. All things will flow to you like rivers entering the ocean.

To be continued ....




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