THE UPANISHADS

One of the most enthralling passages I have ever encountered comes from the “Katha Upanishad”, a section of the Upanishads, one of the most ancient and seminal texts in the history of Indian, and by extension, of Asian thought and its global influence. This text is forever entwined for me with memories of the National Library at Iyaro, in Benin-City, Nigeria, where I first read it, and with the images and emotions associated, for me, with the location of the library close to the motor park. The frenetic activity of the motor park and the stillness of the library one had to pass through the motor park to reach remain for me intimately related, evocative of different but complementary forms of life as gestation and action, the raison’detre of the park as a location from where vehicles could take you to faraway places in different parts of Nigeria suggestive of unexperienced possibilities of being tantalisingly close by.
The motor park was a universe of its own, with a distinctive social structure. It was also recognisable by a characteristic acoustic cartography, a map of patterns of sound, sound patterns particularly as associated with a geographical location, the activity within that location creating a recurrent auditory pattern emerging from the distribution of particular sounds within that geographical region. The sounds that defined the motor park were the shouts from the agberos, who solicit for customers for the vehicles, the calls of hawkers, the noises of vehicles arriving and leaving; this universe of extremely active sound being the expression of the beehive of activity that was Iyaro Motor Park, alive with men, women and children, with vehicles of various kinds, being the zone one had to pass through to get to the scholarly silence of the library.
There, inside another most memorable text, The Common Experience by Chohen and Phipps, I read the passage that has become central to my inner landscape along with other entrancing passages from the Upanishads. My literal understanding of the passage has been central to my conception of the meaning of my life, that conception being a self instituted construct emerging from my interpretation of the influences that expose me to life's possibilities. That literal interpretation, however, even though it continues to inspire me, is beginning to mature into a collaboration with another, figurative interpretation. This latter interpretation enables me to appreciate a broader range of interpretive possibilities in the lines from the Upanishads, expanding my appreciation of those lines even though the cognitive goals they promise have not been fully realised by me after decades of some degree of consistency in their pursuit. This more pragmatic orientation also enables me to apply the synergistic possibilities suggested by those lines to more immediately accessible goals directed at achieving the cohesion between mind and cosmos, the interpretation of the broadest possibility of knowledge of self and the world, that the lines depict/urge as an ultimate goal, as well as the contradictions involved in such a quest and the challenges demonstrated by different efforts in different cultures across time to achieve such a goal.
These lines, in sum, enable me to engage with the world's efforts to make meaning of existence in terms of a passage that encapsulates for me, all possibilities of knowledge. They are, for me, a vantage point from which I can engage with the human effort to achieve what Bertrand Russell describes as the two main goals of human knowledge: to understand phenomena in themselves and to understand them in relation to each other, and, if I might add, a third one, in relation to oneself, a conception related to Aurelious Augustinus juxtaposition of attitudes towards knowledge of self and the world in his observation that people go to look at mountains, and leave themselves behind, leading the North African to make the study of his own self and his mental operations central to his exploration of meaning.
In the passage from the Upanishads, a sage expounds on ultimate human possibility :
Count the links of the chain : worship the triple Fire: knowledge, meditation, practice; the triple process: evidence, inference, experience; the triple duty : study, concentration, renunciation; understand that everything comes from Spirit, that Spirit alone is sought and found; attain everlasting peace ; mount beyond birth and death.
When man understands himself ,understands universal Self, the union of the two kindles the triple Fire, offers the sacrifice; then shall he, though still on earth, break the bonds of death, beyond sorrow, mount into heaven.

It was only after buying a copy of the text through the impersonal, anonymous efficiency of the virtual information and economic space that is Amazon while /studying in England/having the time of my life in studying in England years later, did I learn that the sage speaking is Death, addressing Nachiketas, a boy, who, ostensibly the victim of his father’s exasperation, found himself in the home of Death, who, as compensation for the inadequate hospitality demonstrated by Nachiketas not meeting him at home, offered the boy three gifts of the boy's own choice. Being alive with, the boy asked for gifts of knowledge, even though Death tried to divert him to asking for material pleasures/satisfactions. The passage quoted above passage is Death’s answer to Nachiketas’ question about