The Secret of the Katha Upanishad: 7 - Swami Krishnananda

==================================================================================

Saturday 30, Mar 2024 06:30.

Discourse No. 2.2

Post - 7.

==================================================================================

The human mind is a fool, really. It understands nothing, but yet it assumes an arrogance of all-knowingness and omniscience. Nothing can be worse than this attitude of the mind—knowing nothing and imagining that it knows everything. This attitude is called ignorance. This is called vanity. This is egoism. To assume an attitude of what you are not, that is ahamkara. But the whole of life is nothing but a pretension of this kind. In every one of our activities and attitudes, and even our expressions and speeches and conduct and behaviour, we are hypocritical to the core, if we go deeply into the matter. We do not expose ourselves, because that exposure of our true personality would go contrary to the assumed satisfaction which we wish to acquire through contact of senses with objects. There is, thus, a psychological cloud covering our mind, as psychoanalysts would tell us. Our great psychoanalysts, masters of the West like Freud, Adler and Jung, have told much about this subject of how the human mind can be completely clouded over by factors which have been allowed to grow like accretions upon the tablet of the mind, until a time comes when the cloud itself becomes a reality and the mind becomes a subsidiary fungus, as it were, growing as if it is not there at all with any importance of its own. This is what we call samskaras in Sanskrit, impressions of perceptions, cognitions, desires, etc.

The great Master of the Katha Upanishad points to the unfortunate position of the human mind when he says that preyas or the asking for sensory gratification is a folly. It is not a wisdom on our part. To ask for any kind of pleasure in the world is not an aspect or form of knowledge, for knowledge is identical with sreyas or blessedness. Your good or real prosperity lies not in your yielding to urges or to psychological pressure, but in your being a controller, a regulator, a restrainer, or a master over these urges.

According to the science of psychoanalysis, there is no such thing as individual freedom. It is all compulsion, urge, which is mistaken for freedom of will. We are not going to enter into this subject here, but I am only mentioning it as a side-issue to point out to what extent we can become slaves of such forces of psychology from within, of which we have absolutely no knowledge. The hypnotic condition is an instance on hand. When a patient is hypnotised by a physician, the patient acts as if he has freedom of his own. He goes in a particular way, speaks in a particular mood; and if you ask him as to why he is going in that direction, why did he do this particular thing, he will say, “Well, I wanted to do it.” He will never be aware that he has been pressurised by the will of the physician when under hypnosis. So freedom, at least from the point of view of psychological analysis, is a chimera. 

It does not exist. You mistake the forgetfulness of your background of action for freedom of will that you are deliberately exercising. You take your lunch everyday with a freedom of choice. Nobody compels you to eat. So you can say that the daily breakfast or lunch or supper that you are partaking of is an act of free will. But it is not. You are compelled to do it. Why? Because an illness has arisen within you in the form of hunger and thirst. You cannot call it an act of free will. Even the choice of items of food depends upon one's physiological structure and condition.

A student of yoga should be a very thoroughgoing psychologist to understand his own mind or her own mind, because the practice of yoga implies a knowledge of the workings of the mind. If you know nothing about the mind, the practice of yoga is far from you. There should not be any kind of predisposition, prejudice, taking for granted or mere assumption, irrationally. You must be an expert analyst of your own mind.

*****

Continued

===================================================================================