Deep in the still house of Death, the boy Nachiketa had been granted a great gift: the secret of the deathless Self. But knowing about it, Yama the lord of death had warned him, was not the same as knowing it. "Sharp as a razor's edge, hard to cross, is this path," Yama had said. "You must walk it with your own gathered mind."

So when Nachiketa returned to the world, he sought out a clean, quiet place and sat. And at once he discovered how scattered he was. His mind was like a marketplace at noon — a hundred stalls, all shouting at once. A bird's call pulled his ears one way. The memory of his father pulled his thoughts another. His feet wanted to shift; his eyes wanted to wander.

He did not fight all hundred at once. He chose a single point — the quiet space where his breath came and went — and he laid his whole attention there, the way you might rest a finger on the centre of a spinning top to let it slow.

When his ears strayed toward the bird, he gently brought them home. When his thoughts ran off after his father, he gathered them back, like a cowherd turning wandering calves toward the gate. Each sense that pulled away, he drew quietly in. He was not stern with himself, only steady. One point. Then again, one point.

Slowly the marketplace emptied. The shouting stalls fell silent one by one until only a single clear lamp remained, burning without a flicker. In that gathered stillness Nachiketa felt something settle and shine — as if muddy water, left undisturbed, had grown clear enough to see straight to the bottom.

This was why Yama had called it a cleansing. Nachiketa had added nothing new to himself. He had only stopped scattering, stopped stirring up the mud, until the pure Self that had been there all along stood plain and bright before him. He sat on, one-pointed, and the dust of a thousand worries simply settled and was gone.