by Kelly Pickerill
This isn’t a new book, of course, but Nilgiri Press has just reissued Eknath Easwaran’s Dialogue With Death: The Spiritual Psychology of the Katha Upanishad in a revised edition called Essence of the Upanishads. This attractive edition includes a previously unpublished introduction and some minor revisions that were suggested by the author before his death in 1999.
Easwaran’s translations of the classics of Indian spirituality (the Dhammapada, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Upanishads) are critically acclaimed, and in this new edition, he expounds upon the Katha Upanishad, the story of the boy who asked Death himself what happens after man leaves this world.
Easwaran’s meditations on the Katha Upanishad are incredibly readable and insightful. He uses humor and anecdote to show the importance of translating the scriptures to daily living through meditation. The journey he relates is personal, but the lessons to be learned are universal.
Easwaran developed a method for meditation called “Passage Meditation,” the repetition of a memorized prayer or scripture from the world’s great religions. In one of my favorite books, J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, Franny becomes dismantled during a weekend with her ivy league boyfriend when, unhappy with the insincerity she perceives in everyone around her, she begins chanting a prayer and suffers a spiritual and existential breakdown. The book has been recognized as a depiction of the journey one takes to enlightenment, but the path Franny takes is, admittedly, somewhat brutal. Ever since I read it, though, I’ve been curious about the practice of passage meditation, and the phenomenon that happens, Franny says, when a person prays without ceasing. She says:
“But the thing is, the marvellous thing is, when you first start doing it, you don’t even have to have faith in what you’re doing. I mean even if you’re terribly embarrassed about the whole thing, it’s perfectly all right. I mean you’re not insulting anybody or anything. In other words, nobody asks you to believe a single thing when you first start out. You don’t even have to think about what you’re saying, the starets said. All you have to have in the beginning is quantity. Then, later on, it becomes quality by itself. On its own power or something. He says that any name of God–any name at all–has this peculiar, self-active power of its own, and it starts working after you’ve sort of started it up . . . You get to see God. Something happens in some absolutely nonphysical part of the heart–where the Hindus say that Atman resides, if you ever took any Religion–and you see God, that’s all.”
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