As Gautama Buddha taught, one soon realizes upon entering the Path that it is impossible to fall back with impunity into thoughtlessness and heedlessness. Eternal vigilance is the price of spiritual freedom, and is constantly stressed in the training of srotapattis and would-be Bodhisattvas. On the razor-edged Path, as it is called in the Katha Upanishad, everything is finely balanced and highly energized. The greater the knowledge, the greater must be the responsibility and courage to accept the consequences of all thoughts, images, emotions and acts. More and more, one must feel a profound and cool heart-awareness of one’s kinship with all those whose self-created fetters have become, through ignorance and cupidity, like the entwining coils of a venomous snake. Unconditional compassion (karuna) and wise action (upaya) cannot come without the moral stamina to stay on the Path, despite seductive distractions, insidious rationalizations and specious excuses for sluggishness and backsliding. The sacred lineages of true Teachers (the Guruparampara) vivify the immemorial teachings by the light of measureless love and wisdom-compassion, effortlessly exemplified in their celebration of universal unity and human solidarity, and the supreme transcendence of the sovereign Self in the temporal realm of maya.

 It is only through the Guru that the chela has the golden opportunity of lighting up ‘the Nachiketas flame’ of discernment and daring. Once lit, it must be sedulously guarded and tended by the chela, and eventually fanned into the fire of wisdom-sacrifice (jnana yajna) which gives light to all and takes from none. Established on this hoary Path, a stage will definitely come when all indifference to earthly reward will be natural and easy. In the Katha Upanishad Nachiketas simply could not see the point of the glittering gifts Yama, the god of death, offered him: riches, kingship, kingdoms and earthly happiness. All these had no meaning for Nachiketas because he knew too well the deceptive trappings of a life he had long since outgrown. He sought only the secret of immortality, and was unreservedly willing to honour the privilege of receiving the secret and retaining it with constant gratitude. Every skill and faculty is needed while climbing the steep mountain precipices of the secret Path. It must never be forgotten that all the needed resources are within oneself, and they will all have to be summoned and utilized, on this razor-edged Path. Having heard about the Path and having grasped that one cannot evade this recognition, however partial or fleeting, one must see the profound sense in which the Path is difficult to tread.

 The powerful metaphors — indeed the entire parable — of the Katha Upanishad have manifold layers and levels of meaning, all pointing to the secret spiritual heart. In The Voice of the Silence the Paramita Path is connected with antaskarana, the inward bridge between the impersonal and personal selves. The time will come when the seeker must choose between the two, for either must prevail. One cannot both be upon the Path and also maintain the absurd but prevalent misconception that there is a personal entity inside oneself, a ‘ghost in the machine’, to whom things are happening and who is holding the reins in life’s journey. This is the root illusion in the eyes of enlightened seers; no such entity really exists; there is only a bundle of propensities and reflexes, images and fantasies. The concatenation of elemental entities comprising the shadowy self are engaged in their own activity, propelled by the gunas expounded in the closing chapters of the Bhagavad Gita. The evanescent and everchanging personality may cling to the illusory misconception that it is acting freely, but it is no more than a congeries of numerous life-atoms pursuing their own predetermined proclivities. The celebrated metaphor of the chariot, also deployed in Plato’s Phaedrus, is given a vast extension in the Katha Upanishad as it is applicable to cosmic as well as to human activity. The Katha Upanishad may be seen not only as a philosophical dialogue, but also as an alchemical text, replete with deeply evocative, enigmatic and magical mantrams.

 At some point one must mentally let go of the route by which one has come, what Gautama Buddha called the Raft and The Voice of the Silence terms the antaskarana bridge. This letting go is depicted in the image of the complete sacrifice (mahasmashana) of the ‘assemblage of sins’ and the namarupa (name and form) to the impersonal, immortal Self upon the altar of the secret heart. For a Manasa to be engaged in embodied existence means that an impersonal cosmos has made an immense sacrifice. This is symbolized physically by the sacrifice of the father giving of his life-essence, and mentally by the magnanimous sacrifice of a great being giving freely of his spiritual essence so that evolution may go on. It is also evident in the noble sacrifice of the mother who, over a period of painful gestation, gives everything to the astral body (linga sharira) of the soul coming into the world, just as the maternal matrix of Akasha nourishes the embryo of the globe. The impersonal has sacrificed for the sake of manifestation on the personal plane. This must be deliberately reversed through an intense awareness of what one owes to one’s father, mother, and all one’s teachers, especially to one’s spiritual parents and preceptors. The conscious reversal involves taking everything one has, with all one’s powers and limitations, and readily sacrificing it for the sake of the self-conscious re-emergence on the plane of manifestation of the inward god, the inner sovereign, who otherwise would remain the silent Self. One must allow that Self within, who is no different from the Self of all, to assume divine kingship within the human estate.

 No one can tap the highest resources without becoming secure enough to want nothing for the puny, shadowy self. Moved solely by desires that elevate the whole of humanity and the entirety of creation, and established in that proper mental posture, one can abandon the antaskarana bridge, because one can re-create it at will. Seeing one’s personal self as no different from other personal selves, one can do the bidding of the divine through the instrumentality of anything in Nature, including, therefore, the use of one’s persona, in which one has renounced absolutely all proprietary interest. Becoming aware of the life-atoms in one’s vesture, one realizes that there is no such thing as the ‘personal self’ save in a metaphorical sense. Life-atoms are constantly streaming in and out as part of the ceaseless spiritual transmutation of matter on seven planes and the awesome law of sacrifice within the seven kingdoms of Nature. The true hotri or hierophant is an initiated alchemist able to send forth beneficent emanations through a mighty current of concentrated thought, mystic meditation, noetic vision and unconditional compassion, consciously quickening the upward movement of all the available life-atoms. To such a sage or magus, the antaskarana Path does not have its former significance, except as a drawbridge to be extended at will in the service of universal welfare.

Raghavan Iyer
The Gupta Vidya II