The Secret of the Katha Upanishad: 17 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Saturday 17, Aug 2024, 06:50.
Upanishads:
Discourse No. 3
Post - 17.

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Now, Yama comes to the main argument of the whole Upanishad, and the heart and soul of the aspiration of Nachiketas. How can one know it? There must be something extremely difficult about it; else, Yama would not have been so reluctant to speak of it. However much you may scratch your head, rack your brain or think about it, or argue, or read, or speak, you cannot understand it.

nyam a pravacanena labhyo

na medhaya, na bahuna srutena.

Even if you ponder over it in all possible ways, you will not gain an access into this knowledge. So difficult is its deep significance to grasp. That is why Yama thought it better if he kept quiet about it. But Nachiketas would not leave him.

na narenavarena prokta esa

suvijneyo bahudha cintyamanah.

An ordinary person cannot expound this mystery. An inferior type of understanding cannot appreciate it or expound it, however acute it may be from the worldly point of view. This is not the usual scientific knowledge. This is not like the studying of physics, chemistry or mathematics. This is not concerned with anything that you can see or hear or touch or taste or see. This is unconditioned knowledge and therefore conditional speech cannot express it. Thought itself being conditioned, cannot become the means to the expression or conveyance of this knowledge. How can the unconditioned be conveyed through the conditioned? This wisdom imperishable, eternal, cannot be carried through any perishable means or a vehicle of a temporal character.

The rational faculty fails here because the highest form of rationality is merely what is available in that we call scientific knowledge. We are rightly told that religion begins where science ends. The limit of science is the beginning of the higher wisdom. On account of its subtlety of nature, this wisdom becomes superlogical. This Atman, this truth of all things, cannot be known through argument or speech or discourse, not by immense scholarship in the scriptures, not by acuteness of intellect, because the subtlety of the intellect is, after all, based on what we call the logical law or principle. 

Today man hangs upon the logical system of thinking as the ultimate means of knowledge. But logic is the outcome of an assumption which itself is an hypothesis taken for granted and finally indefensible. All logic is an attempt to bring about a union between what we call the subject and the predicate of an argument. Those who have studied logic, induction or deduction will know what it means. Every logical proposition is made up of a subject and a predicate, and for any sense to be conveyed, you must express it in a sentence, and the conjunction in a sentence is that which links the meaning of the predicate with the subject or the meaning of the subject with the predicate. 

The distinction that we make in this way between the subject and the object—you may call it the predicate—is based on a presupposed notion of the mind that things are divided among themselves. Why should you try to connect the subject with the predicate? The necessity of connecting them arises only if they are different. But why should you take it for granted that they are already different? 

That you exist as a bodily individual—that this individuality observes a world outside—is a hypothesis which cannot be scientifically proved, because all scientific argument is based upon this assumption that the world exists, and that you exist as a part of it; but this assumption itself is untenable as it is merely taken for granted and is not proved. How do you know that the world exists? Because you see it! How do you know that your vision is correct? You cannot prove this logically. 

You have only to say it is: “I am seeing it, and therefore it must be there.” This is called dogma. Science is against all dogma, but it is itself based on a dogma that the world is, and the scientist also is in it. Human understanding, ordinary intelligence is of no use here, and a lot of learning founded on this understanding, also, is of not much help. Unless you seek for another means of knowledge, altogether, there is no way of gaining entry into the mystery. Ananya-prokte gatir atra nasti, says the Upanishad.

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Continued

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