Commentary on the Katha Upanishad yacched vāṅ manasī prājñas tad yacchej jñāna-ātmani jñānam ātmani mahati niyacchet, tad yacchec chāntav-ātmani. (13)KATOPANISHAD Mind and the senses are incapable of perceiving objects because they are inert, should be the attitude of the intellect. Thus: “The mind should be offered into the intellect like the senses into the mind.” The mind does not cognise objects, as we can see in sleep. It is the judgment of the intellect acting as an intermediary between the Atman and the mind, which is responsible for individual perception. The senses and the mind are wholly dependent on the intellect, it being the nearest to Reality. The intellect affirms itself, and everything depends upon it, finally. In this meditation in which the senses and the mind and intellect come together, one stage of the meditative process is achieved. It should not be mistaken for the whole of yoga, as is often done in the West. Peace of mind brought about by this stage is not yoga. It is only coming back to yourself, from the empirical point of view. This success is not final and is not *yoga-sakshatkara*. Sense-control is not over here, according to the Kathopanishad, though you may no longer have gross passions, and may be a highly cultured person. Now, we come to a bottleneck; we cannot go beyond this stage. “He should restrain the intellect in the Great Self and That in Tranquillity.” All are held up here, because the passage becomes narrow and only one person can go through. Not even your Guru can be taken. You have to go alone. The Strait is the way of the Spirit. Even your body is too big and you will have to shed it. Every student of yoga fails when he comes to this point, because he has a tendency to look upon what he has left, and his heart goes back to all of it, and this thought is enough to bring him back. This is the state of a *yoga bhrashta*. It seems that no one is fit for yoga. This leaving the body is not killing it, but transcendence. It is a spiritual activity that we are concerned with here. To leave the world and body is to be dissociated in consciousness with them, but we cannot do this. Things persist in the form of memories. This is especially true for householders, for whom it is hard to become real *yogins*. You should have transcended even the intellect. *Pratyahara *is over; the individual intellect has to be reabsorbed into the Cosmic Intellect or *Mahat-tattva*. A further description is not needed here. We will know what to do when we get to this point. However, the Upanishad gives a hint: from *Mahat-tattva*, which is *Hiranyagarbha*, you go to *Īshvara*, the *shant * Atman. While the intellect is the connection of consciousness with a particular point of view, that which is higher is the association of consciousness with all points of view. You have no point of view when you get to that stage. Instead, the points of view of all objects are yours. Instead of visualising one object, you will visualise all objects. You will say: ‘All are mine’, instead of saying ‘this is mine’. It is the shifting of the mind from one thing, one body, one object, one point of view, to all things, all bodies, all objects, all points of view. The *buddhi *has to be transmuted in the realm of *Mahat-tattva*. Hence, yoga here is sometimes called other-worldliness. It is other-worldly in the sense that it is a science which takes the mind from the particular to the universal, and if the universal can be regarded as other-worldly, so can yoga. But the Universal is not other-worldly, because it is here and everywhere.
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