We slowly arose from our lying savasana poses and lined up Yoga poses knees to pay homage to the guru before beginning our days. When we drove out of the Yoga poses knees parking lot and into the sunshine outside, we turned out onto Yoga poses knees the West Side Highway and headed south directly toward the World Trade Center. I arrived home Yoga poses knees at 8:30 A.M., and had an hour to kill before my first appointment of the day. I changed my clothes and sat with my mother over a cup of tea. We were watching the Today Show together when the program was interrupted by a news flash: A low-flying plane had just crashed into one of the Twin Towers. People who had witnessed the crash were calling in from various locations in lower Manhattan to tell the reporter what they could see.
So this verse seems to assure us that when Brahmin doctrines – revealing hidden non-dual connections – are combined with yoga practice then the adept is released from cycles of rebirth, as he becomes brahman. But we are still left to wonder, reading this last verse, if this brahman realisation happens in death or in life. If it happens when the adept is alive, then the Katha is in line with the karma discourse in earlier Upanishads like the Brhadaranyaka: release is caused by Gnostic insight. Otherwise the Katha is introducing yoga in relation to a new model of liberation – release as Mystical Realisation .
The Katha Upanishad is seen by many scholars to be pre-Buddhist. Hence this new meditative technique of yoking the mind-senses system suddenly introduced in some Brahmin clans’ discourse could be an import of early Sramana and Kshatriya practices. But otherwise there are no philosophical elaborations in Katha on the yoga sign; no doctrine is described, just some statements describing the significance of yogic trance.
