The Secret of the Katha Upanishad: 18 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Saturday  31, Aug 2024, 07:15.
Upanishads:
The Secret of the Katha Upanishad: 
Swami Krishnananda.
Discourse No. 3
Post - 18.

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The nature of reality becomes a difficulty for the human understanding because of there being no defining characteristics of reality. You cannot say it has a colour. You cannot say it has a shape. You cannot say it has any kind of quality which can be interpreted in human language. All definition is in terms of visible or sensible characters. The sensible character of an object is not the ultimate definition of it, because we are here trying to understand the essential constituent of an object and not its character as it is presented to the senses. The test of reality, the nature of Truth or Satya, is non-contradiction. Truth is that which can never be contradicted by any other definition, experience or realisation, which means to say that eternity is the character of Truth. Nothing in this world can be said to be ultimately real, because everything passes into something else. The whole world is transitory. It is made up of bits of process— parts, as it were, of a whole—and so it is not a completeness by itself. A juxtaposition of parts cannot be regarded as a reality, for the real is that which endures forever. We have never seen any object in this world, any person here, enduring for all times. We are told by master astronomers that even the solar system will not be ever enduring. There was a beginning for even the sun and there will be an end even for the sun. The cosmos will perish in the process of time. How can you call it real? The satisfactory definition of reality cannot be applied to any visible object. 

How will you define it, then? The mind of man, which is the central faculty of knowledge, depends entirely on the information gathered through the senses. The function of the mind is mostly a confirmation and association of ideas acquired, through the sensory passages. The mind does not give us any independent knowledge apart from what we obtain through the senses. What is not visible and what is not audible, what cannot be seen or heard or tasted or touched or felt, cannot also be known by the mind. So the mind also is a kind of sense—we call it the sixth sense. It has a capacity to synthesise the different reports of the senses, no doubt; but synthesis is not knowledge. In this organisation of the sensory knowledge brought about by the mind, we are not given a new, qualitative knowledge. We are only given a new type of organisation of what is already there, come through the senses. And the intellect is only a form of judgement that is passed on to this organised knowledge of the mind. So, the intellect, the mind and the senses seem to be of a common group. They belong to the same category. What other faculty have we except the intellect, the mind and the senses? With these untrustworthy servants of knowledge, which we have employed for our knowledge, we cannot really know Truth. This is why the Katha Upanishad warns us that by sheer argument, study, intellectuality and rationality, Truth cannot be known.

Truth has to be known by one with the blessing of a special type of instrument. No commentator has been able to properly explain what this term 'ananya-prokte', in the Upanishad, actually means. Many of the words used in the Upanishad are cryptic. They are like difficult nuts which you cannot easily crack. Ananya, grammatically, means'other than what is already there', or 'different from what is there', or 'non-difference'. This word occurs also in the Bhagavadgita, and even there the commentators vary in the interpretation of what it really signifies. The teacher should not be an 'anya', or an 'other', but must be an 'ananya', a 'non-other'. An 'ananya', is one who is 'not different from that which he teaches'. Nowadays we have learned men, professors, who are supposed to be repositories of knowledge, but their lives are different from what they preach. They are 'anya' or 'other' from knowledge. The practical life of a professor is different from what he teaches in his college. When knowledge is different from life, such knowledge becomes a husk without substance. It is a burden that you carry, like an ass carrying bricks. Knowledge becomes valuable when it becomes 'ananya' with one's own life. Knowledge becomes meaningful when it is lived, and not merely taught, or heard, or read about. 

Knowledge is identical with being—sat and chit are regarded as identical. Your sat or existence, or life, is to be in conformity with your chit, or what you know, teach and study. So, this knowledge can be imparted only by one who is established in a practical knowledge of Truth, one who is a brahmanishtha. A Guru is supposed to be a shrotriya and a brahmanishtha. A shrotriya is one who has a thorough insight into the meaning of the scriptures and has the capacity to express it in the best form of language. A brahmanishtha is one who is established in the knowledge of Truth. It is said that the Guru should be both a brahmanishtha and a shrotriya for a practical reason. A brahmanishtha is one who is in union with God, but one who is in such union may not always be in a position to teach, because of his transcendence of all means of communicating knowledge. He is above normal body-consciousness, above the empirical means of expression. And a mere shrotriya is like a pundit or scholar. Unless he is a brahmanishtha, he will not carry conviction when he teaches. Your teaching should carry weight and force. It should go into the hearts of the hearers. That is possible only if you live that knowledge yourself, and also you are in a position to expound it through language and diction.

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Continued

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