The Essence of the Aitareya and Taittiriya Upanishads 7.2. - Swami Krishnananda.

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Friday, August 13, 2021. 7:23. PM.
Chapter-7. The Secret of Sadhana -2.
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Then the gods told the deity of the nose, “You chant the mantra; speech is defeated.” So the deity of the nose started chanting the holy mantra, and the Asuras understood this. They came with a force and attacked this deity of the nose. That is why it is said that we can also smell bad odour, and not only fragrance. So sometimes we close our nose when certain odours enter our nostrils. The nose was defeated.

The angels told the other sense organs, one by one, to chant the mantra, and all had the same fate. They were all overcome. The Upanishad tells us that every sense organ has, therefore, a double activity. It can do good and it can do bad; it can receive what is good and it can receive what is bad. We can hear nice things and we can hear bad things also. The mind also was defeated. The mind was inflicted with the evil by the Asuras when it chanted the mantra. So it can think right and it can think wrong. Thus, there was no way out. The gods were defeated repeatedly. They were utterly helpless.

When they were all thus defeated, they joined together and considered as to what could be done under the circumstances. They thought that they had made a mistake in choosing their agents for chanting the Udgitha. So they asked the vital force, the Prana Sakti, which is prior to the operation of the senses, which impels the senses to act—as the sun impels all activity in the world, himself not doing anything. They said: “O Prana, chant the Udgitha for us.” And the Prana, the unifying force, the vital energy, chanted the Udgitha. And when the Prana started the chant, the Asuras came in a large battalion to attack it. What happened? They were thrown back. As a mud ball thrown against a hard rock breaks into pieces and becomes dispersed in all directions, the Asuras were thrown and cast in various directions, powerless by the force of the Udgitha chant conducted by the vital force, Prana Sakti—a thing which the senses could not undertake, and could not succeed in doing. Then the Devas won victory over the demons. They assumed their original positions of angels, which had been occupied by the Asuras, the demons. Now, inasmuch as the Asuras were quelled and overthrown completely in this battle with the force of a chant conducted by the vital force, the gods regained their original positions. The lost kingdom was regained. “One who knows this secret also regains one’s own position,” says the Upanishad.

Here is a very mystical anecdote given to us in the sacred text, the Upanishad, which is very precise and goes to the point. The meditational process, or spiritual discipline, is described here in the form of a story. The angels fall and lose their positions due to the evil influence of the Asuras. And in order to regain their lost positions, they have to take recourse to the vital force, and not to the sense organs. The sense organs are not our friends in the practice of spirituality. They succeed in making an attempt only, but really they do not succeed in the end.

To be continued ...

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