Nachiketas was made of a different stuff. He was not an ordinary boy. “Why should I not put this question? What is the trouble about it? You give me all these wonders that you have described to me but will not answer this simple question.” “Not even the gods have been able to answer this question. Not all the celestials put together in all the seven heavens can answer this question that you have put. Therefore, child, please do not pester me with this question. You keep quiet. I have made the mistake of telling you that you can ask for three boons, and now you are putting me in this embarrassing situation with a question which I cannot answer and I am not prepared to answer. You should not put this question. Take anything else. I am ready to give you. Please excuse me. Don’t bother me with this question.” “You say, O Lord, that even the gods cannot answer this question, which means to say, perhaps, that you know the answer to the question, and you want to turn me off with all the glamour of the perishable world, longest life, and all that. But what is longest life in this eternity? In this eternity of existence, what is the life of the whole universe? You say ‘the delight of all the gods’, but what is delight except itching of the senses? What are these pleasures but methods of wearing away the energy of the senses? You want to tempt me with these pleasures and will not answer me the question which you say even the gods cannot understand. You want to make me the ruler of this universe as long as it lasts, but what will happen to me when it does not last? When the universe dies and perishes, and it dissolves, what will happen to this ruler? He also goes! Take back all your pleasures, your offerings, your dance and the music and the chariot and the cattle and the enjoyment and the long life and the rulership of the worlds. O Lord, take back all these gifts that you have offered to me! I am thankful; but Nachiketas will not budge from this place unless this question that he has asked the third time is answered.”

This is the introduction to the Upanishad. Now, the Upanishad really begins. This great sacrifice of Vajasravasa Gautama for the purpose of enjoying the pleasures of heaven is the exoteric multitude of the deeds of humanity. The Upanishad is, as I mentioned to you, an exposition of the secret of the entire life of man, the secret of your life, the secret of my life and the secret of the life of every blessed thing. Vajasravasa represents humanity, as in the Bhagavadgita we say Arjuna represents mankind. The performance of this Vishvajit sacrifice by Vajasravasa Gautama is the performance of deeds by mankind as a whole. Man performs actions for the purpose of the enjoyment of the consequence of his actions. Why do you work from the morning till the evening in the various fields of your duties? To relieve yourself of the tensions of life and to enjoy the pleasures that are consequent upon the release of tension, and these pleasures to be enjoyed for as long a time as possible. You understand the purpose of your works in life. You work in this world because you want to come to a state of affairs when you need not work any more but will only enjoy the pleasures consequent upon your actions.

But what is your conception of happiness and delight? What is your notion of the happiness that may come as a consequence of your actions in life? It is the very same concept that Vajasravasa had. “I shall go to heaven and be with the gods and enjoy life.” But what do you mean by “enjoying life”? Can you describe to me what actually is meant by enjoyment of life? Have you any idea, the faintest notion, of what enjoyment means? If you are pressed to answer this question, you may say, “Logically and scientifically I cannot say anything about this; but it appears to me that my idea of happiness is to be in the possession of all desirable things in the world. Well! That possession is perhaps happiness for me. The greatest amount of physical wealth, the largest amount of pleasurable relations and perhaps the longest life with this body to come in contact with these objects and be in their possession—what else can be my notion of enjoyment?” This was Vajasravasa Gautama’s concept, and is our concept also. Man is man, always. He never changes. What man was when the world was created, he is today, also. He is made of the same stuff. He will never change. You rub any man, you will find the same substance inside. He may be a primitive or the modern cultured, so-called educated man—they are all made of the same substance, same stuff. They have the same weaknesses and their desires are of the same character. So, what Vajasravasa Gautama thought, we also think today, and what was his fate shall be our fate, also.

But, we have something inside us, an urge that propels us in some other direction, apart from this exoteric urge which directs us to the enjoyment of the objects of sense. This something peculiar within us is the Nachiketas. The son of Vajasravasa Gautama, the progeny of the sage, is the conscience of the sage, which spoke out his heart. In the mythical terminology of the Upanishad, the conscience of Gautama speaks in the language of his son, Nachiketas. While we are after the enjoyment of life, rulership, authority, prestige and power and whatnot, we have also a subtle voice speaking from within us, every now and then, pestering us, as it were, sometimes annoying us with its demands, telling us something quite different from what we are thinking in our mind. “Are you going to enjoy the pleasures of the world? Are you going to perform deeds and actions for this sake alone?” What are the kinds of action that we perform? They are selfish to the core. They are utterly related to our bodily personality. Though we have heard much of what is known as unselfish action, it is something quite strange to our bodily individuality.

All the deeds of our day-to-day life are remotely connected with our personal pleasures known as egoistic enjoyments. As the enjoyments are brittle, short-lived, with a beginning and an end, so are the actions which engender these pleasures. Our deeds have a beginning and an end. They started sometime and they shall end also sometime. Similarly, that fruit which accrues out of these actions also has a perishable constitution. Our longing shall never be quenched by the brittle, dry, momentary objects of the world.

Sometimes, in certain persons, almost every day, there is a shake-up of the personality from within, which tells us that we are not entirely what we appear to be. We are not the Mr. and Mrs. that we are now. We are not the boss or the servant that we appear to be. We are not the man or the woman or the child that people call us. We seem to be in possession of something, a little different from all these things which are the ultimate values of earthly existence. That something seems to speak to us from within, oftentimes, and makes us restless. If at all we are restless in our day-to-day existence, it is because we are made up of something which is a little different from what we are constituted of in our physical existence. If our physical personality and our social relationships in the world are to be the all, then there would be no uneasiness in life. Our unhappiness, our sorrow— whatever be the kind of that sorrow—our insecurity, whatever be its character, is born of a stuff of which we are made in the deepest recesses of our being, which boils up to the surface and struggles to gain access into the surface of consciousness. But we stifle its words, we hush it down and curse it to death, as Vajasravasa Gautama did to his son. “You go on speaking again and again. You go to hell!” This is what we tell our conscience. If our subtle conscience begins to give us a wise advice occasionally—“Friend, you are going wrong!”—you stifle it, cut its throat, and curse it to hell. “Speak not again,” do we tell it; and we make it blunt, and it cries within us. Our real nature within is weeping, “Oh, what is my fate!” We have layers of personality, a description of which is given beautifully in this Upanishad, about which we shall speak on the succeeding days.

The layers of our personality corresponding also to the layers of the outer cosmos speak in their own languages at different moments of time. We do not entirely belong to this earth, because we have other layers of personality which cannot belong to the surface of the physical world. We are not merely social individuals or entities. Our relationship is not one of father and mother, father and son, mother and son, daughter, brother, sister, boss, subordinate, this and that, as we usually imagine. We have within ourselves mysteries which we ourselves do not understand, and cannot understand. This amounts to saying, we do not know our own selves. We cannot know our own selves under the present circumstance. What is beneath our own skin, we cannot say. Our endowment, the faculty of the highest character with which we are blessed in this human life, the intelligence that we are possessed of, is skin-deep. We cannot go beneath the skin. Therefore we cannot know the other layers of our personality which are more real than what appear outside. Unfortunately for us though, what is invisible in our own personality is more real than what is visible in the outer personality of ours. The real ‘I’, the real ‘you’, the real ‘we’ is screened away from the intelligence that works in unison with the senses, so that when you see the world, you are not seeing the real world. When you think about yourself, you are not thinking about the real ‘you’ in you. When you conceive the relationships that you have with others, you are not really conceiving or understanding the real relationship that you have with others. Your loves and affections—your relationships with others in the form of like and dislike—all are misconceptions, root and branch. All our activities, it follows from this analysis, are also a thorough outcome of a complete misconception of life. We are done for if this state of affairs is to continue. We cannot say what will happen to us and what will befall us if this misery of misconception in our own selves is to continue for endless years.

One who cannot understand oneself cannot also understand others, because understanding is a faculty of oneself, and if this faculty is to be the judge and the instrument for other personalities in this world, if that itself has gone wrong, well, your relationship with other people would also be a misconception that has gone wrong entirely. Well, it follows, again, that your understanding of the world also is a misconception. When you do not know yourself, you do not know other things, you do not also know the world as a reality. So the whole series of our experiences in life is a piled up layer of clouds of misconception, sorrow piled over sorrow, grief coming upon grief, misery incarnate in this life. “Anityam asukham lokam,” says Bhagavan Sri Krishna. What is this world? We do not know when it started and when it will end. Every moment it changes, without any notice being given to us. Therefore misery indeed is this world— asukham. Why is this misery? Because experience, which is inseparable from the pleasures and pains of life, is based on an understanding which is thoroughly mistaken. Outwardly and inwardly, to the right and to the left, in the top and the bottom, everywhere we live in a misconceived world.

The Katha Upanishad breaks through this fortress of ignorance, pierces through the veil of this darkness of the series of misconceptions we seem to be involved in, and takes us to the heart of things, and enthrones us on the empyrean of immortal existence, eternal life, infinite satisfaction. Wonderful is this Upanishad. God shall bless you with this knowledge.