Upanishad means ‘sitting’. When a disciple sits in the presence of the master the same experience that happened in the master is reproduced in the disciple. The disciple who experiences the master and within whom the master has been reproduced, writes down his recollections on how this process happened. The disciple or the master or someone else writes an account of how the experience was reproduced in the disciple – what happened when the process began, how it ended and what happened when it ended. This report is referred to as an Upanishad.

The master-disciple relationship is the deepest relation possible in Existence, it is the ultimate love affair

We have heard of the law of cause and effect. If you drop a ball, it falls down. If you heat water, it becomes steam at 100 degrees C. If you put salt in water, it will dissolve. This is the law of causality. Any action will result in a particular effect. Science has its foundation on this law of causality. But this is not the only law in Existence. An important law in operation every moment is the law of intuition or as the philosopher Carl Jung calls it, the law of synchronicity. Here, it is not that something happens and another happens as a result of it. Something happens and a corresponding thing happens.

We are so used to seeing things as cause and effect. You can see the relation between the cause and the immediately following effect. But life is filled with instances where the effect happens so much later that you are not able to relate to the original cause. It is just like when you throw a stone in the water, you can see the immediate ripples are because of the stone. But if you came a few minutes later, you see the secondary ripples, but you cannot be sure what caused them.

You may have experienced instances like this in your life. You think of asking your friend to make your favorite dessert and you land up at her place and she has made exactly that! She just felt she should make it on that day. This is the power of synchronicity.

This happens between the master and disciple even more than in close relationships of friends lovers or spouses. Because the master-disciple relationship is the deepest relation possible in Existence, it is the ultimate love affair.
It is the most mysterious because it is beyond the narrow range of logic. In fact, life begins only when you have touched something that is beyond logic, which cannot be framed by the mind but which pulls the strings of your heart. It brushes aside the arguments of the mind, always looking to criticize.

The true disciple is not a disciple because of something the master said, rather it is because of what the master is. That is why just sitting with the master, the disciple starts falling in tune with the beautiful rhythm of the master. This is Upanishad. This is true disciple hood, being open to the master so that he can shower his love on you and you can receive it in all its glory and divinity and grow.

source: Living Enlightenment