Everything you have looked at today was outside you. The Katha Upanishad opens its fourth chapter by saying the openings were built to face that way, and then it mentions one man who looked the other way. Let’s read the two verses.
The Self-existent pierced the openings (of the senses) so that they turn forward; therefore man looks forward, not backward into himself. Some wise man, however, with his eyes closed and wishing for immortality, saw the Self behind.
Children follow after outward pleasures, and fall into the snare of wide-spread death. Wise men only, knowing the nature of what is immortal, do not look for anything stable here among things unstable.
There is a “therefore” in the middle of the first verse and the whole thing rests on it. The openings were made facing forward, and therefore a man looks forward. The outward look is not something he took up at some point. It follows from the way he is built, and it is doing its job correctly when it happens.
Then one man. The only thing said about him is that he wanted something he could not find out there, and that he looked the other way. One act, mentioned once, about one person.
The second verse says what the forward look is going after. Outward pleasures, and a snare — things that will not hold still, being looked to for something that stays. The man in the first verse is not praised for trying hard. He is described as someone who stopped expecting the unstable things to be stable.
Treat the forward look as your own failing and the day becomes a correction job. You stand over your own looking to check which way it is pointed, and the standing guard is more of you than the looking was. A failing can also be committed more times or fewer times, so you end up with a count.
Take it as the construction and the cost is that nothing accumulates. You turn once this morning, and the next thing that happens arrives facing forward exactly as this one did. You do not become a man who has already turned. The turn is available every time and saved none of the times.
So what are we aiming at. We want to be the one who turned, this once, and to be able to do it again later from the same starting place, with nothing banked from before.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- Someone at home is slow getting ready, you are already standing at the door, and everything you can see is them.
- A neighbour says something short to you in passing, and your whole account of it is about what they meant by it.
- You are waiting on a reply to a message, and the entire question is what the other person is doing with it.
In all three, watch the direction of the look in the first second. One question, two answers. Is all of this out in front of me, or is some of it behind the eyes.
You are not deciding anything in that second, and you are not trying to make the turn happen. Watch which way the look is facing, and leave it as it is.