Nachiketa 10.

It was the dark fortnight of the month of Chaitra, the beginning of summer when Nachiketa sat alongside the old man in meditation. His mind was not at peace, thinking of the past and the deteriorating health of the old man who had seen him through all along his lonely path of life.  Nachiketa had begun to feel the need to reconcile with, or at least to understand, his past which he had left behind in search of ‘the ultimate ‘, the ‘Yama’, who he believed was going to claim him. He sat beside the old man who was in deep meditation in that dark hour of the night, serene and lost to the world. The serenity of the night-sky had absorbed the old man’s spirit so completely that he seemed to melt and flow into it.

Nachiketa closed his eyes again and let his mind and spirit be carried away into the infinity of the night, and the old man’s presence in it ceased to be felt. Nachiketa became one with the breath of the old man and that of the night. Everything breathed as one single entity. Nachiketa extricated himself out of that totality with an effort of the will. In that moment he wondered whether the old man was in fact an astral being, an alien who did not belong to the world that moved, lived and dissolved in small fragments, not at once, but in isolated phases and moments, with each individual being. Indeed, this was the way ‘Yama’, the astral god of Death, controls the universe, thought Nachiketa. He marvelled at the unflawed wisdom which had led him in search of Yama, in the belief that Yama was the ultimate Master who held answers to all that appeared mysterious to the child Nachiketa in the incomplete understanding of life that the human beings displayed in their behaviour, deeds and actions, in their greed and grasping, in their fears and anxieties. For the child that he was then, his father was the epitome of all humanity. In the silence of the night Nachiketa saw with a greater clarity than before, the path that had brought him here to the old man. It was a light that he had shared with his father, as if since a time without beginning. The child Nachiketa had not known the use of reason, but still, his intuitive light refused to be obscured by his father’s world which was ordered by the tyranny of ignorance. Standing behind both, his father and him, was the unseen presence of Death, watching over their journey silently. Nachiketa wondered why it was that his father chose the way of ambition and why he chose the path towards Death. Suddenly he saw the old man in a new light. From the very moment he was obscured as he lay unconscious at the door of this cottage, his inner teacher had taken over completely, resuscitated his spirit, and tirelessly brought him back to the radiance and the spaciousness of his being, without for a moment letting go of his hand.  That inner teacher who had dwelt inside him all along had manifested itself to him as the outer form of the old man. That encounter, which he almost believed to be with Death, was the momentous miracle of his life.