SELF ? FROM KATHA UPANISHA

The Self is Not to be Sought Through the Senses :: The Intricacies of the Inner way of the Self :: From Katha Upanishad


parᾱñci khᾱni vyatṛṇat svayambhῡstasmᾱt parᾱṅpaśyati nᾱntarᾱtman,
kaściddhīraḥ pratyagᾱtmᾱnamaikṣadᾱvṛttacakṣuramṛtatvamicchan.



---Katha Upanishad 2:1

Translation:

Yama speaks:

“O Naciketas! What we call as ‘Sreyas’ and as ‘Preyas’ are two different things of contradicting nature. Both of them are aimed at attracting the Purusha or the Jivan into doing certain specific things and to arrest him within that range. Out of this, the one who follows ‘Sreyas’ attains good results here and in the hereafter. The one who chooses to adopt ‘Preyas’ loses control of himself and of his spiritual progress.

Comments:

A philosophical and psychological truth is stated in this verse, summing up human potential as well as the nature of divine Truth. “The original Creator inflicted the senses to go outwardly, so everyone looks externally. Desiring immortality, not satisfied in this world, some wise man turns within, self-controlled and heroic.” We do not behold the Atman because of the original difficulty that seems to be sympathetically working everywhere; a tendency being set at work at the beginning of creation: to gaze outward. All creation is doing so. God looks at Himself in space. The will of ishvara is this original gazing or sankalpa: the creative affirmation, a fundamental urge, though consciously initiated in the beginning; a deliberate and wilful tendency to look at Himself, to be conscious of Himself, to enjoy Himself and to do this in the form of the vast panorama of creation. This brahma-sankalpa to create is so powerful that it is felt in every part of the universe which is His body, just as the effect of our thinking is felt in every pore of us.

That supreme idea takes a concrete form through every part, every being. Everything is made to think in accordance with that original Ideation, though distorted. The child may imitate its father in a wrong manner.

He gazed at nothing but Himself, a sankalpa raving Itself for an object. While this is His original act, and while we try to imitate it, our error seems to be the ‘other-ideation’ in us, as against self-ideation in God. The senses of the human being, of all beings, seem to be inflicted with the punishment of looking and projecting outward. The original sankalpa of ishvara is a conscious movement of thought, while we think without having any control over it. We drift with creation, while in ishvara, creation drifts with His will. The jivas are isolated centres of thought, thinking of not only themselves, but of others in the form of objects.

In God-thought, others are not objects but subjects. We cannot understand what His thought is because we have never seen Him. In us, thoughts work in a mysterious way, independently catching hold of the impulse to create and thus making us totally unaware that there is a consciousness at all; so much so that there is only world-consciousness and no Self-consciousness, to the extent that even the Atman is denied. The Atman denies Himself: ‘I do not exist.’ You as a centre of consciousness have identified yourself with the object, including your own body, so much that you see only them and are not aware of Self-consciousness. This is the deterioration of the Original Will, the mystery of God’s descent into jiva-consciousness. This is maya. So we are world-conscious, body-conscious, worried because we have lost our ‘be-ness’ in objects; we exist as them. There is only a heap of them; the world.

But there are rare souls who have got a glimpse of what is behind it. How they have come upon this Atman in the midst of the darkness of objects, and seen light which is not otherwise seen, is a miracle. How God became this world is a mystery, and how knowledge arises in the jiva is a mystery too. Dhiras, strong desireless minds who have self-control, are the ones who have turned their gaze inward and seen their Atman, and the Upanishads are their revelations.

Consciousness drifts away in space and time; this is creation. The scriptures tell us that there have been stages of descent of consciousness. Just as a stone thrown into the middle of the still waters of a lake creates waves deep in the centre, and becomes weak in the periphery, the Original Will of ishvara becomes weaker and weaker as it goes through the human beings, the animal and vegetable kingdoms and becomes finally arrested of all its outgoing tendencies when it reaches inanimate matter. We, as waves produced by the momentum of ishvara-sankalpa, are in one of the conditions of descent. Because of this, we are compelled to go outward, not inward. If this drifting is allowed to go uncontrolled, we go to realms lower than human. But if it is checked and allowed to know its consciousness, it may try to recede rather than proceed, and become the ripple beholding its bottom, which is the substance of all waves.