The Secret of the Katha Upanishad : 3.8. Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday, December 14, 2022. 07:00.

Discourse - 3.8 

Post -19.

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Avyakta is that inscrutable, indescribable precondition of the manifestation of all things, we call prakriti, maya, avyakrita, and so on, though all these terms do not convey a true meaning of what it is. The presupposition, the pre-condition, the necessity, the cause behind the expression of this Universe in its visible form is avyakta. Every effect must have a cause. If the Universe is to be regarded as an effect, logically speaking, there must be a cause thereof. This is the Seed of all things. And beyond this final Cause, is the Causeless Cause, the unmoved Mover, the Purusha.

Beyond the Avyakta is the Purusha. The Purusha is Supreme. What is this Purusha? Purusha is a term we apply to what truly Is, the Ultimate Existence. We cannot also call it existence; it is neither existence nor non-existence as we know it. It is not sat or being and asat or non-being, but beyond both. The Purusha is Consciousness, if at all we can define it in this manner. It is the Supreme Being, the Being of all beings, the Real of real, Satyasya satyam. It is not the cause of the universe; else, it would become temporal: therefore, it is supposed to be superior to the Avyakta which is the cause of all things. It is neither a cause nor an effect. We do not call it either way. We do not call it sat; we do not call it asat. We can know it only by being it. Therefore Yama said, it is difficult to teach it. How can you teach that which can be known only by being it? There is no teaching of it. There is no hearing about it. There is no knowing about it other than by actually experiencing it or realising it.

The Purusha is not reached by any kind of conceivable effort. We are coming to the nature of the difficulty in knowing it. We generally acquire things by effort of some kind. We exert towards the acquisition of objects, but an ordinary exertion or effort will not be of much avail in the acquisition of the knowledge of the Purusha. The Purusha is not someone or something, somewhere. The great commentator on the Vedanta texts, Acharya Shankara, says that you can reach a village or a city by moving along a road, but the Purusha is not a place, not a thing, not a person. How can you reach it by moving? You cannot sit on a vehicle or a chariot and drive towards it. There is no such thing as going to it. There is no movement towards God, because existence and God are identical. How can you move towards existence, when you are included within it? Inasmuch as knowledge of the Purusha does not mean movement physically or spatially towards it, it has to be regarded as an illumination rather than an acquisition, as of a property. 

Knowledge of God is not a future event but an eternal fact of being. There is no past, present and future for it. It is eternity itself. It is here and now. How is it? I shall give you an example or an illustration to make you understand what it could be like. Suppose you dream that you are a butterfly. You are flying with two wings. You have lost consciousness of your being a man. You are no more a man. You have become a butterfly and you are flying from flower to flower, from place to place. Now, if you want to become a man, what should you do? Have you to jump from place to place or fly from one leaf to another leaf or go from one butterfly to another butterfly? What should you do to assume once again the nature of the humanity you have lost consciousness of? To become a man, the butterfly need not move from place to place. It need not even think of anyone. It need not do anything at all. It has to cease from being everything that it is, and simply reshuffle its consciousness. 

The butterfly-consciousness has to be re-organised, ordered in a given manner, and it is placed in man's consciousness. That is called waking. The moment this reshuffling of consciousness of the butterfly takes place, you are said to awake from the dream, and you say, “I am a man”. Have you gone from one place to another place? You have not moved even an inch from where you were, and yet you have become completely different from what you were. Likewise, man becoming God is not like moving in a jet plane or going to a seventh heaven, even as the butterfly becoming a man is not a movement from place to place. It is only a state of consciousness, changing its condition immediately, then and there, where it is, here itself. When you are shaken up, you become that just here, where you are seated. So, the Purusha who is beyond the Mahat and Avyakta is the eternal and the infinite which is hidden within the cave of your heart— existence itself—not to be reached by spatial or temporal movements or activities but by a methodology which is incapable of description. Nachiketas! Difficult it is to obtain this knowledge.

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Next
Discourse - 4.
To be continued

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