The Secret of the Katha Upanishad: 9 - Swami Krishnananda

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Wednesday 24, Apr 2024 06:50.
Discourse No. 2 - 4.
Post - 9.

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Every event is a universal event. There is no such thing as a local event taking place in a corner or a corridor of the world. You cannot say that a particular event has taken place only in a mohalla or a lane of a particular town. No such thing is the truth. Every experience, every event, every action, is a universal event. It takes place, in a conditioned form, everywhere in the world. Every illness is a total illness of the body. It is not an illness only of the nose or the eyes or the feet. The whole personality is sick even when there is only a sneeze that has come out from your nose. Likewise, every experience is a universal conditioning event, of which we have no knowledge because of our mind being tethered to a bodily locality and the mind's mistaking this bodily locality for the entire reality. 

As the Bhagavadgita tells us, this is tamasic knowledge:

"Yat tu krtsnavad ekasmin karye saktam ahaitukam;

atattv arthavad alpam ca tat tamasam udahrtam."

Mistaking a part for the whole, the body for reality, a localised experience as all-in-all is the worst kind of knowledge that one can have. It is not knowledge at all. It is a form of ignorance. On this ignorance is based our sensory enjoyment, and when it is mistaken for reality, you deny God and deny the existence of the hereafter. Na samparayah pratibhati balam: 'Childish is the mind of that individual who denies the hereafter and takes this world itself as the all.' What is the result of this ignorance? Punah punar vasam apadyate: 'The individual falls into the net of births and deaths in a series of metempsychosis.'

Births and deaths are the punishment meted out to the individual for its ignorance of the law of the cosmos. Every type of ignorance of law is punishable under the code of the government. The government of the universe inflicts a penalty on the human individual; and all individuals in the world, in the shape of transmigratory existence, as people, are sent to jail or reformatories for training themselves and becoming better. Births and deaths are nothing but processes of experience and training in this institution of the universe so that, by repeated births and deaths, you gain experience and move towards what is real, turning away, gradually, from what is an appearance.

The teachings of the Upanishad are an exposition of the various stages of the ascent of man to Truth. It is a wonderful scripture, like the Bhagavadgita. The different degrees of approach to Reality and the method of approach to Reality through these various degrees form the exposition of the Katha Upanishad. The sacrifice of Gautama Vajasravasa, the feelings of the lad Nachiketas in respect of the charities and the philanthropic acts of his father, the rising of the soul of Nachiketas to the abode of Yama and his fasting for three days in that abode, the appearance of Yama after three days and nights and bestowing of boons of a threefold character upon Nachiketas, and the wonderful instructions Yama gave to Nachiketas, are all descriptions of the stages of the rise of the soul to the Absolute.

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Continued

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