The Kathopanishad: A Wondrous Epic of the Spirit: 2. Swami Krishnananda.

 

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Tueday, 29 Aug 2023. 06:15.

Article

Scriptures

(Spoken on June 19, 1972)

Post-2.

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Death is the greatest fear that we have before us. Among all the dreads in nature, death is the greatest. The highest punishment is hanging. We cannot conceive of anything worse than that. And the fear that is attended with the concept of death is also associated with the notion of self-extinction. The fear of death is the same as the fear of self-extinction, the abolition of oneself, the complete negation of one's personality. The cessation of one's being is what is implied in death.

The father of Nachiketas is supposed to have cursed the boy: “Go to death. The devil be with you!” Some such imprecation was cast upon the lad in a moment of fury by the father, as we are told in the Upanishad. Sometimes we tell people, “Go to hell!” Now, those words were literally taken by Nachiketas. Or, we may interpret the passage of the Upanishad as meaning that Nachiketas actually died. The words of sages have tremendous power. Curses have force, and probably the lad died because of the curse of the father, which was engendered by anger due to an impertinent remark made by the boy on his observation of an erroneous sacrifice performed in the name of a yajna meant to ensure salvation to the soul.

Now, those three days passed by the spirit of Nachiketas before the palace of Yama have a tremendous significance on the path of the spirit. They are not four days or seven days, but only three days, and Yama is absent for three days. The starvation of the spirit is implied here as, for example, we have a famous saying of Christ given to us in the New Testament: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” It is not poverty of economic existence, but poverty of the spirit; starvation and fasting of the spirit in its threefold entanglement is what is meant by Nachiketas' three days of fasting.

We are involved in a threefold manner in this universal concatenation of forces. The threefold involvement is physical, astral and causal. Psychologists know that our bodily personality is not our entire personality. What experiences we pass through bodily or physically in this world of nature is not the entirety of our experience. We are a deeper psychological unit than the bodily experience can reveal to us. We have an astral or a subtle personality which works as the force or the incentive power behind the movement of the limbs of the body. So the bodily or physical austerity that we are likely to perform in the name of ritualistic observances in religion, etc., is one part of the spiritual discipline, no doubt, but it is not the whole of the discipline.

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To be continued

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