The Immortal Self

A Vedic Rishi writing the Upanishads

Section 24 of the Upanishads for Awakening

Yama has just told Nachiketa that “though the body be destroyed, he [the Self] is not killed.” Then he continues: “If the slayer think that he slays, if the slain think that he is slain, neither of them knows the truth. The Self slays not, nor is he slain” (Katha Upanishad 1:2:19).

Before considering this upanishadic passage, here is what the Bhagavad Gita, the great digest of the upanishads, has to say about this: “Bodies are said to die, but That which possesses the body is eternal. It cannot be limited, or destroyed.…Some say this Atman is slain, and others call It the slayer: they know nothing. How can It slay or who shall slay It? Know this Atman unborn, undying, never ceasing, never beginning, deathless, birthless, unchanging for ever. How can It die the death of the body? Knowing It birthless, knowing It deathless, knowing It endless, for ever unchanging, dream not you do the deed of the killer…” (Bhagavad Gita 2:18-21).

Dreaming–that is the key. God is dreaming the entire drama of the cosmos, but He knows it and controls the dream. We, too, are dreaming the drama of our life, so Krishna tells us: “You dream you are the doer, you dream that action is done, you dream that action bears fruit. It is your ignorance, it is the world’s delusion that gives you these dreams” (Bhagavad Gita 5:14). The richest people in the world, if they dream they are penniless, suffer the frustration and fear of poverty just as keenly as do those who really are paupers. When they awake, the mental pain disperses, but it was no less real.

This is something we often miss when we subscribe to the theory of Maya. The experiences, such as birth, death, and disease, may be illusion, but the suffering they produce is not. It is real. The grief we feel at the death of a loved one is real, even if the death is not. That is why the Sankhya Karika, the basic text of the Sankhya philosophy upon which the Yoga philosophy is based, opens with a discussion of suffering as our problem. Certainly, illusion should be dispelled, but that will not take care of the deeper problem: our capacity for suffering. It is foolish and callous to bully those who suffer by expounding on the unreality of that to which they are reacting. For there is no thing or situation which can make us suffer. Suffering is our reaction to those things. When we reach the state where we no longer react–for pleasure is as destructive as pain–then we will be free.

Patanjali’s dictum that yoga is the cessation of modifications of the chitta does not refer at all to restless thoughts in the superficial mind. He is speaking of the capacity for any kind of reactivity to outer stimuli. It is when we are unreacting and resting in our true Self that we are in the state of Yoga. To merely fiddle around with the shallow thinking mind, believing that calming it makes us yogis, is deluding ourselves. Our problem is far, far greater and deeper than jittery thoughts. It is the capacity for suffering and for being deluded. To be awake in the fullest sense is to be incapable of sleep and dream. (I am speaking metaphysically.) All the philosophy and analysis in the world will not help us. We need to awaken forever. That is what real yoga is all about.

Slayer and slain are roles in the dream-drama of the evolving consciousness. If we know–not just suppose or believe–this, then nothing can move us from the state of peace that is a quality of our true Self. Fortunately for us all, the cliche about “There is naught but thinking makes it so,” is bunkum, another Western “truth” that mercifully is false.

The body can be slain and can be a slayer. Being part of the dream, it really acts and is acted upon in the dream context. The dreamer, however, is not part of the dream, even when it projects an image of itself into the dream and slays or is slain. Nothing external can affect or change the internal reality. Again, awakening is the only solution, and we should accept nothing less. Any view other than this which Yama presents to Nachiketa is but the blind leading the blind.

A great flaw in the thinking of most of us is only accepting half of this great truth. We easily affirm our immortality, saying: “I can never die,” and thus reject the idea that we can be slain. Yet we accept the concept that we can be slayers, and make a great to-do about “sin” and “karma.” Because we want to control the behavior of others by promising rewards and threatening punishments, we have literally bought into this delusion and traded on it for life after life, fooling even ourselves. Though we find the truth in the upanishads or the Gita, we still keep on worrying about purifying ourselves and clearing out our karma. Half-deluded, we stumble on, distracting ourselves from the real goal, sinking deeper into the morass. Consider the lives of saints. So many of them have been great sinners, even murderers, or incredibly ignorant, and yet we see them either instantly entering into the state of holiness or rocketing to it in a short time. The reason is simple: they had never committed a sin in their eternal lives. Like David, they awoke and found themselves with God. (“When I awake, I am still with thee.” Psalms 139:18).

We need only do the same.

Read the next article in the Upanishads for Awakening: The Indwelling Self

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