“Beguiled by their greed for wealth, the unaware cannot see any other world. They believe that this visible world is all there is, that there is nothing more. In their arrogance, they fall again and again into my clutches.”

A person who is totally lost in the world of desires and who is obsessed with samsara, the material world, will die again and again. He will die and be reborn again and again because he is clinging only to the visible.

The body is visible but the soul is not visible. The soul will never be visible because the soul is the very seer. It can never become an object that can be seen; it is always the seer, it is always the one who sees. The soul itself cannot become an object to be seen. The body is not an observer, it is the observed. The body is an object, it is matter. The soul is awareness, it is the knowing watcher, consciousness – and there is no way to see the watcher.

The body is visible to you. For the person who believes that what is visible to the eyes is the only truth, then the seer which is beyond the eyes will be the untruth. But remember, the eyes are in-between: outside of the eyes is the world and behind the eyes is the divine. The one who says that he can trust only what is in front of his eyes will not be able to see what is hidden behind the eyes, it will not be visible. Such a man will trust everything else but he will not trust his own being.

Science also makes the same mistake in thinking that what is visible is real and what is not visible, the consciousness hidden within us and which can see everything, is unreal. This is absurd! The whole conclusion of science is that science is the truth and the scientist is not; the scientist is an untruth. It is a very strange conclusion. We can agree and believe in what Einstein says as well as with his experiments. And Einstein also believes in what he has experimented with in the laboratory. But with the one who is conducting the experiments, with the one who is sitting within and doing all the research, by and by, the relationship with that one is broken. The eyes become fixed on the outside reality, and any fixation is a disease. Your vision becomes habituated to only seeing outwards. Then you forget to close your eyes, you forget that there is also something within you.

Yama is saying to Nachiketa that the man who takes matter, the visible, as the only reality will miss that which is invisible, hidden, mysterious, subtle; that which is but which is not apparent – because it is the very seer itself. For this reason, there is no way for it to be an object.

“In their arrogance, they fall again and again into my clutches.”