The Kenopanishad: Commentary on Section -1 : Swami Krishnananda.

 

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Thursday 17, Sep 2026, 15:45.
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The Kenopanishad: Commentary on Section - 1
Swami Krishnananda

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Mantram-2.

śrotrasya śrotram manaso mano yad vāco ha vācaṁ sa u prāṇasya prāṇah,

cakṣuṣaś cakṣur atimukya dhīraḥ, pretty āsmāl lokāt amṛta bhavanti.

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Simple is the answer of the Upanishad, as simple was its question. What is that, was the question. The answer is: It is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of the speech, the breath of the breath, the eye of the eye. Knowing this, heroes, having departed hence, relinquish what is mortal and become immortal. This is the second mantra in the form of an answer to the question of the first mantra.

When the Upanishad says that the real is the eye of the eye, etc., it means that there is something which sees through the eye. Now, for example, we put on glasses and we see through the glasses, but we never say that the glasses see. Who is the seer? The seer is the eye. The glasses are only the medium. The spectacles do not see; the eyes see through the spectacles. But, suppose we mix up the spectacles with our own bodily consciousness and regard the spectacles as a part of our own body, well, we may say the spectacles see, the glasses are seeing. Some such mistake we are committing daily when we say that the eyes are seeing. The eyes see in the same way as the spectacles see. That is all. In one sense, it is true the spectacles see, but we know in what sense it is so. That the glasses are not the real seer becomes clear when we distinguish between the glasses and the eyes. If we mix up the glasses with the eyes, then we can mistake one for the other. There are what are called contact lenses. They are so adjacent and near to the eyes that we cannot even see them, and for all practical purposes, they are the eyes. Yet, they are not. They are foreign matter thrust into the eyes for a certain purpose. Likewise, the retina of the eyes, which seems to be a part of our life, part of what we really are, are only lenses placed for the purpose of visual experience. So is the ear drum, the tactile sense, etc. placed for the purpose of auditory experience, apprehensibility, and so on.

How do we know this? As long as we are in a state of conscious identification with the retina of the eyes, they will look like the self. They do not look like what we are but stand outside us only when we are in a position to distinguish between the internal directive principle and the constitution of the eye itself. The eye is made up of physical substance. We know it very well. The whole body is nothing but flesh, bone, muscle, marrow, tendon, etc. Now, we regard this as our self. The mass of matter which is the body, which is subject to the laws of physics and chemistry, which has spatial dimensions and which is subject to temporal succession, which is changeable every moment, which never remains in one condition for two successive moments, such self-transforming complex of the body we regard as our own self. As I mentioned at the outset, that which is constantly changing cannot be regarded as the self because the Self is an experience of non-changeability. Though we have been growing from childhood to adult age and from adult age to old age, we have grown some feet higher than what we were when a baby, and many other changes have taken place, yet, we have never missed the identity of our personality. The 'I' persists in spite of the changes that the bodily parts were subjected to throughout the advancing of age. How are we to answer this question: How can we account for this phenomenon?

There is so much of change and transformation, the biologists tell us that every seven years the cells of the body are completely changed, there is a new birth altogether after every seven years. We become a new person; yet, the continuity of 'I'-ness is there. It never ceases. We never say there was somebody when we were a child, someone else when we were an adult, someone else now when we are old. No such thing is felt. The feeling is: 'I am existing. Whatever I was, whatever I shall be, I am, indivisibly, continuously and invariably.' What is this phenomenon due to? How do we account for this if it were not for an invariable conscious element inside us? It looks that we ourselves are something very mysterious, which has been mixed up with what we are not, by a process known in philosophical parlance as superimposition or adhyasa, by which the character of one thing is transferred to another thing.

Students of philosophy will know what adhyasa means. A transference of properties is generally called adhyasa. The properties belonging to one are transferred to someone or something else. On account of this transference of psychological qualities, we entertain love and hatred. Characteristics which are desirable, personally speaking, are transferred to certain objects. The desirable characteristics of our psychological constitution, when they are transferred to any particular object, look attractive, and the object becomes lovable, dear and affectionate. Any psychological complex in us which we regard as undesirable, when it is transferred to any particular object is disliked, and that becomes an object of hatred. This is a kind of external adhyasa, spatial adhyasa or superimposition. The mother's love for a child, one's hatred for another—all these are explicable in terms of a psychological superimposition, and this superimposition takes place in a dexterous manner, of which we remain entirely unconscious. We cannot know what is happening. If we know it, then, we will not be slaves of these passions. We go with these movements of the psychological function. It is very strange that when these complexes are transferred to objects our whole being seems to be transferred together with them and then we are 'in' the child which is ours, the object we love, and we get correspondingly related to objects positively or negatively in accordance with the way in which our psychological functions are transferred positively or negatively. The whole being of us moves with the movement of consciousness. Our Self itself is shaken, as it were, when the mind moves towards objects either positively or negatively—positively as love, negatively as hatred. So it is that we cannot brook either too much of love, or too much of hatred. We are disturbed when there is too much of love, disturbed also when there is too much of hatred, because our whole being is 'out there'. We have no private personality of our own at that time. We have become 'something else', temporarily, for the time being. We are possessed by a power which is not ours. Now, this situation is called adhyasa.

Up to this time I have explained only external adhyasa, the superimposition in which we usually involve ourselves in the perception of objects desirable or undesirable; but inwardly there has taken place, already, another kind of superimposition. There is a transference inwardly, which has already worked itself out, on account of which we feel we are bodies, which is called anyonya-adhyasa or mutual superimposition of attributes between consciousness and the matter constituting the body. Now, there is a very interesting mutual transference of properties taking place between our consciousness and the body that we think we are. The body has certain characteristics. The consciousness has certain other characteristics. And what are the characteristics of consciousness? Consciousness does not change. It can never become an object, and it cannot be 'related' to anything. Consciousness never becomes external. It is not in space and time. It is indivisible. It is Self-sufficient, Self-luminous, Self-complete. And what are the characteristics of the body? It is made up of parts, as against consciousness which is indivisible. The body is external, as against the consciousness which is pure subject. The body is subject to transformation, as against consciousness which is unchangeable. The body is always in space and time, as against consciousness which is never in space and time. Look at the contrary characteristics of the body in comparison with consciousness! There is a mutual transference of properties taking place here. That particular borderline where this mysterious transference of properties takes place is called the jiva, or the individual. You do not know what this jiva is. It is a very interesting thing and you cannot define it. It is a peculiar indescribable point of experience where this adhyasa takes place. The body and the consciousness meet together, shake hands with each other, transfer each other's properties and the one becomes the other, as it were, matter saying 'I am consciousness', consciousness saying 'I am matter'! If consciousness begins to feel 'I am matter', what will happen? It would shake as matter shakes. It would feel that it is undergoing transformation as matter really does. All the vicissitudes which are attributable only to changeable complexes of matter get attributed to consciousness. Then it is that we say, 'I am unhappy', 'I am hungry', 'I am thirsty', 'I am dying', 'I am old' and this and that, the properties of matter getting attributed to consciousness. On the other hand, contrary-wise, when the properties of consciousness are transferred to matter, what happens? The body begins to feel, 'I exist', 'I am intelligent', 'I am happy', 'I am powerful', 'I can do this', 'I have this', 'I have that', and so on. So, this is what matter borrows from consciousness, while consciousness has in turn taken loan of the changeable attributes of matter, and we have a peculiar admixture of confusion which is called the jiva's experience.

We do not know where the jiva exists, really speaking, between consciousness and matter, between purusha and prakriti. It is a myth, finally, if we go on analysing it properly. It does not exist. It is like the old story: A gentleman entered the house of a person where a marriage was taking place and he wanted to take advantage of the situation. He started enjoying the comforts of a guest; all the good things about. The marriage ceremony was taking place and the bridegroom's party thought he is perhaps from the bride's party, and the bride's party thought he is from the bridegroom's party. So, no one enquired about him. After the marriage was over, this gentleman would not go out from the father-in-law's house. He went on demanding this, that, three-times-coffee, four-times-food, but the people did not say anything, for he might be from the son-in-law's side! The matter came to a point where he became intolerable. He went on giving a lot of trouble. However, nobody would stop him or refuse anything to him, because the father-in-law thought that he was the son-in-law's guest and the son-in-law thought that he was the father-in-law's guest. And the man went on tormenting everyone daily. One day the father-in-law called out and asked: Who is this gentleman? When that gentleman came to know that a conversation was about to take place between the two parties, and he might be detected, he ran away from there. So is the jiva trying to take advantage of the situation of this admixture of properties between purusha and prakriti, and if purusha and prakriti, like the father-in-law and the son-in-law, were to see each other properly and enquire into each other's relations, and thrash out this question, then there is no jiva. It would take to its heels, immediately. But they have no time to talk; they always remain engrossed, like the father-in-law and the son-in-law, in the business and noise of the marriage. There is then, this mysterious devil or ghost, which is called the jiva, cropping up in a very unintelligible manner, and causing all this tremendous havoc that is called samsara. Can this be thrashed out, is the query of the Upanishad, and this question is taken up in a very beautiful manner.

There is something strange in us, and it is different from that which we mistake ourselves to be. It is not the ear, it is not the eyes. We should not mistake the eyes for the Self, etc. There is something inside the eye. Have an analysis made of your own personal daily experience. There are people who open their eyes and go to sleep. There are people who sleep with their mouth open, and if we put a particle of sugar on their tongue they would not taste anything. There are people who go into such deep sleep that they would not hear even a gunshot nearby. The ears are open. The eyes are open. The tongue is there. But all these have no sensation at all. Sometimes we touch them even, they would not know anything. What has happened to them? What has happened to the so-called person who once thought he was the eye, ear, etc.? He has withdrawn himself from what he thought he was. The true gentleman has gone inside, and it was only in a confused state of mind that he thought he was something else. This is adhyasa internally taking place.

As I mentioned, external adhyasa is in the form of love and hatred towards things, and the internal adhyasa is mutually between consciousness and the body. In sleep, our true personality is withdrawn, so it is that we cannot see, cannot hear, etc., with these outer organs. They are of no use, then. There is an intervening stage called dream where we mentally project the senses of knowledge and action, and begin to have similar experiences as in the waking state. In the state of dream there are no real outer sense organs like the physical limbs, and yet we know, in the state of dream, we can hear, see, taste, etc. What is this thing that we call 'seeing' in the state of dream? Have we eyes? We seem to be having eyes there, but really we do not have any eyes. The real eyes are open or are closed, as the case may be, and yet they are not functioning. What we call the organs of perception in the waking condition are lifeless when we are in dream or sleep. They are not at all worth the while, then. Yet, there is a kind of eye which sees through dream. We can see the dream world through the dream eye. We can taste a dream lunch through the dream tongue and mouth. We can hear dream music through the dream ear, and so on. How does this happen? The mind has put on the shape of the sense organs in dream. It acts the part of many things at one and the same time. The mind becomes the seer, hearer, thinker, experiencer, enjoyer, and even the very objects of experience. All these things the mind becomes at once. It has withdrawn itself from the bodily organs which it thought it was, and now it is ruling over a new kingdom altogether which it has manufactured out of its own feelings and thoughts. The mind, then, goes to sleep. Even the mind is not there. We exist in the state of sleep in a condition in which we cannot attribute to ourselves anything that belongs either to the waking state or the dreaming state. We remain as unique beings in sleep, absolutely featureless, uncommon, incomparable and totally independent. Such is our nature in sleep. We know how happy we feel when we go to sleep, and that happiness has come to us merely because we are absolutely independent, unrelated and free in ourselves. Merely because we are absolutely free we have had such a delightful experience, and because we are wedded to what we are not in the waking and dreaming conditions, because we falsely imagine ourselves to be something different from what we are, in these states there is there restlessness of mind. Only in sleep there is delight. And the Upanishad takes us to this fact of experience. There is something inside: inside the ear, inside the eye, inside the sense organs, inside even the mind. The mind also does not operate in the state of sleep. The intellect does not work. Who exists then? We are likely to mistake our thought for ourselves. We cannot regard our Self as distinguishable from our thought when we feel 'I exist'. Mostly when we define ourselves as an existent being we regard ourselves as a thinking being, but in sleep we do not feel anything at all. Then, what do we feel we are, in the state of sleep? We can then exist even without thinking. This is what we realise in the state of sleep. We can exist without seeing. We can exist without hearing. We can exist without thinking. What is that state in which we exist without even thinking? Ordinarily, such a state is unimaginable, because one can never be without thinking. Whatever be our conception of ourselves in the waking state, it is in terms of a thought. We think that we 'are something'. That is our apparent being, but that is not our being in sleep. We do not think in sleep that we are something or anything. What is that which exists in sleep? To that the Upanishad takes us gradually by an analysis of sensory experience.

Śrotrasya śrotram: The Ear of the ear is that Consciousness, bereft of which the ears will not hear. Manaso mano: It is the Mind of the mind, the life principle behind the thinking faculty, without which the mind will not operate. Yad vāco ha vācaṁ: It is the Speaking force behind the organ of speech, without which the tongue will not work. Sa u prāṇasya prāṇah: It is the Breath behind the breath, Life behind life. It is the Eye behind the eye—cakṣuṣaś cakṣur atimukya dhīraḥ, pretty āsmāl lokāt amṛta bhavanti. What should we do then? We must gradually isolate external factors from what we really are. This is what the Upanishad teaches us in this mantra, the process of self-analysis for the sake of the transcendent Self-experience.

This self-analysis has to be done gradually, from outward disentanglement towards inward realisation. We are involved externally first, and then we realise that we are involved personally, and then, later, it is that we try to go deeper. Our personality is entwined in many things of the world. It is difficult to conduct self-analysis because, usually, our personality is a social one. It is not the pure personality that we are thinking of daily. We are, rather, always conscious of a social personality of ours. This is a further externalised extension of what we really are. When we say that we are such and such, this and that, in terms of social status, we have carried ourselves too far, beyond reality. In an act of self-analysis this externalised superimposition or adhyasa has to be eliminated. We must first of all know that we are independent personalities at least, let alone something that is deeper still. Most people cannot even know that they are independent persons. They are always sons of somebody, daughters of somebody, subordinates or bosses related to somebody else. What they are independently, they cannot think. There is no time to think all that. Look at this, even ordinarily speaking, we cannot think independently about ourselves. 'I hail from such and such a place, and so on, is the way we begin to describe ourselves. We never have any thought of our independent personality as we were when we were born into this world. We are really nothing of the sort we are describing ourselves to be at present. We were one thing when we were born, and afterwards so many accretions grew upon us. Psychological relationships were established which grew into a thick cloud, as it were, and our true personality got obscured.

Self-analysis should, first of all, begin with an elimination of these outward accretions that we have unnecessarily created over our own self, over our own real personality; and after the realisation that we are something independently apart from what others think we are, then it is that real self-analysis can begin. So there is a twofold performance that we are called upon to do in self-analysis, the external withdrawal and then the internal withdrawal. The external withdrawal is to forget that one is an administrator, an officer, a boss, a son, a father, a this, a that, and so on. This is the first withdrawal that we have to practise, and it should be easy to do. We are not bosses. We are not administrators. We are not officials. We are not sons. We are not daughters. We 'are' something by ourselves. We have a status of our own. This fact we realise first. What is a person when he has no children? We do not call him a father. Unrelated persons have to be defined in their individual capacity. If we are to be absolutely left alone in the world, imagine our position. What would we be in the world as absolutely alone, unwanted? What do we call ourselves at that time? We would not say to whom we were born. It might be we had a father and mother, but we do not care about this aspect because we are absolutely alone now. Never would we think that we are boss, never that we are a subordinate, etc., since we stand single. The world does not want us. We are in a wilderness. We are thrown to the winds. We do not know what our own condition then is. In such aloneness, when we experience it, we come to a consciousness of our true personality. That would be the first achievement in self-analysis; but much more is to be realised, and there is a lot to do still further.

It is not enough if we overcome the feeling that we have social relationships. We must also get over the idea that we have bodily relationships. That would be a further advance made in the act of self-analysis. This is really the practice of yoga. While social disentanglement may be called vairagya, in a lower sense, internal disentanglement is yoga. So there is a distinction between vairagya and actual practice of yoga. Vairagya is only a preparation. It is the giving up of all illusions of life. We realise that, really, we have none in this world to call our own. We are alone. This is the truth. When we know this, we really practise vairagya, but yoga is still higher. That is a self-transcendence from bodily awareness where we gradually rise into a universality of being. The Upanishad here is not so much concerned with the vairagya aspect of self-analysis, because it is taken for granted. The Upanishad is always meant for advanced students. It is not for beginners. It is understood that there is an element of vairagya in a large proportion in all students of the Upanishad. Raw minds are not to study it. The Upanishad never discusses these preliminaries of practice such as the lower vairagya, etc., but concerns itself mainly with the internal detachment and the inward process of self-analysis, the going deeper into one's personality, to realise what one, really, Is.

Here, in the second mantra, the Upanishad says that we realise, by such act of self-analysis, that we are a consciousness that hears, a consciousness that sees, a consciousness that touches a consciousness that tastes, and a consciousness that smells, and all is consciousness-experience. Like the light of a candle placed inside a vessel with five holes, jetting itself forth through the five avenues, consciousness seems to be manifesting itself in the form of sensory perception through the five holes we call the senses. Our consciousness is something like light and we may compare this body to a vessel, a pot with five holes, and placed in darkness. The light is shining inside and beaming out through the five holes, and it appears as if there are five rays of light, while really it is one light that is shining in a fivefold manner. Likewise, the Atman within us operates consciously through the five senses, and it appears that we act in a fivefold manner—seeing, hearing, etc. To make the example more clear, we can imagine one of the holes in the pot being equipped with a concave lens, another hole equipped with convex lens, a third with a coloured lens, a fourth with a broken lens, and so on. If the lenses are of a different structure, fitted to the five holes of the pot, and if the light, the very same light, passes through these five holes, we know it will project itself in five different ways. So is the Atman-consciousness manifesting itself through the different sense organs. When it jets forth through the eye it appears to be one thing, through the ear it looks another thing. It appears to be different in five manners on account of difference in the structure of the sense organs, as I mentioned in the example, but the light is the same. When we dissociate the structural difference of the sense organs from the light, and realise the light within, as it is, then we become what we really are, a hint of which is received by us, daily, when we go to sleep. That is the Atman, realising which one becomes immortal.

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Next
Mantras - 3 and 4
Continued

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