The Secret of the Katha Upanishad : 5.2 Swami Krishnananda.

Chinmaya Mission :

Chinmaya Mission Durban began the month of April with a celestial celebration and a heartfelt offering to the Divine in the form of Samarpanam 2023! The dazzling night was filled with a bonanza of bhajans that ushered the minds of the attendees into pure bliss. Samarpanam 2023 pulled over 250 devotees to our Ashram on the 1st of April 2023! Melodious bhajans by celebrated artists from India, Anuja Sahai, and Dhananjay Bhatt, accompanied by our very own local instrumentalists of the Swarang Group, truly set everyone grooving to the glories of God!

This year's Samarpanam was even more special as Pujya Swami Abhedananda launched the Crowdfunding Initiative for Chinmaya Mission South Africa's noble endeavor - Nourish to Flourish!

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Wednesday, April 12, 2023. 07:40

Discourse No. 5-2.

Post -27.

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The first step, according to the Upanishad, in the mantra cited, is a withdrawal of the senses, such as speech, etc.—all the senses of knowledge and action—into the mind. But this is not all. The instruction goes further. The mind has to be settled in the intellect (jnana-atman). The intellect is then to be set in tune with the Cosmic Intelligence (Mahat-atman). This Cosmic Function should get settled in Cosmic Being (Shanta-atman). Here, Being, Consciousness, Freedom, Bliss are all one, indivisible essence (Akhanda-Ekarasa- Satchidananda)

The intelligent one, the discriminative seeker, should introvert the senses in such a way that they stand in unison with the substance of the mind. The mind and the senses, though they work in collaboration with each other, are not identical in their function. The difference in their activities lies in the fact that while the mind can contemplate spatial and temporal objects independently of the functions of the senses, the senses require space and time and externality for their activity. Also, they cannot work unless the mind is actively associated with them. There is a speciality in the working of the senses, the speciality being that they cannot move inward to the subjective centre, but are always accustomed to move outward to the object. So you will never be able to make them contemplate themselves or meditate upon the source on which they have their very being. The senses are the forms of the mind itself. We may say, to give a working example, the senses are to the mind what the rays are to the sun or the light of the sun. The analogy is not complete, but there is some similarity in this illustration. As there is a jetting forth of rays from the orb of the sun, there is a projection of force from the psychological organ, the antahkarana, in the form of sensory activity. The mind itself becomes the senses when it contacts objects. The senses are the mind thinking external forms. So, the first step, according to this mantra of the Upanishad, in the practice of yoga, is the attempt on the part of the seeker to block the avenues of the senses, so that the mind is not channelised towards objects but stands self-controlled, self-subdued and centred in itself. The five senses mingle with the mind in a blend of unified function; the intellect does not flicker with desire or distraction; there is a feeling of wholeness, then, in oneself. This is the yoga of meditation. 

Our energies get depleted through sensory activity. This is something well known to us. Our strength does not depend upon what we eat, merely. It depends upon something else.

Our life does not depend merely on the breathing process of prana and apana. It depends on something else, from which even the prana and apana rise. The intake of diet is, indeed, very important for the maintenance of health, but health does not rest on food alone, because everything can be thrown out of order if the mind is upset, in spite of the taking in of the best form of diet. A shock that is injected into the mind is enough to disturb the entire balance of the personality, notwithstanding the fact that one has every amenity possible. The energy of the individual is in the individual himself. Your strength is in you. It is not outside you. The weakness of the personality, or the weakness of the body, is not due so much to physical contact with objects as to an erroneous adjustment that we make with the conditions of the world outside. All our suffering can ultimately be boiled down to an error of understanding, wrong knowledge. Just as we do not understand our own self, we also do not understand others. As a matter of fact, that we do not understand others properly follows from our not understanding our own self. A misjudgement of our own self implies a misjudgement of everything else also, because perceptions are emanations of our own consciousness. The sadhaka, or the seeker of Truth, should be confident that all that he needs will be provided to him by the very laws of existence. It is law that supplies you with strength, not the discrete objects of sense. Obedience to law is at once an acquisition of power, because law protects. The Upanishad, therefore, tells us that the senses which are powers of the mind, moving towards objects outside, should be sublimated into the mind itself. They should melt into the substance of the mind, so that they become the mind itself. This is pratyahara, sense-abstraction, described also in one of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. When Patanjali defines pratyahara, he says that it is nothing but the standing together of the senses with the mind, which is what the Katha Upanishad also says.

Yoga is the rise of consciousness from the lower to the higher degree of reality, by stages. The universe evolves by stages, and yoga is a process of the reversal of the diversifying creative activity of the universe. If creation is the coming out of an effect from the cause, yoga is a movement of the effect towards the cause, a recession of the particular into the universal, in greater and greater degrees. The effects have to be understood in order that we may know what their causes are. Also, in this attempt of the effect towards its cause, it should not try to jump to the third or the fourth level, or the ultimate level, at once. In yoga, there is no double promotion. You have to pass through every stage, though due to the intensity of the practice it may appear that you have achieved the goal at once, in a short time. How this happens is sometimes illustrated by a homely example. Suppose you have one thousand petals of lotus, kept one over the other. You pass a needle through them. How much time would the needle take to pierce through the thousand petals kept one over the other? The needle will come out immediately. Though the act of the passing of the needle looks immediate, it has passed through every petal, one after the other. It has not suddenly pierced through the petals, at one stroke, without any passage of time involved. Similarly, advanced sadhakas, seekers of a high order, may seem to have achieved success quickly, sometimes even in a few days. But they have to pass through all the stages, without omission. The stages, primarily, are those of the objects of sense, the senses, the mind, the intellect, the Mahat-tattva, and the Supreme Atman, or the Paramatman.

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To be continued

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