The Atman in Hinduism - Part 2

Ātman and Self-Identity: The Microcosm

But instead of that, let us take your identity as a person. If your name is X, then you believe that you are the same person X now as you were, when you were a child right? Imagine the staggering amount of changes that have taken place from your childhood. None of the cells in your body are the same as the cells that were there in your childhood (like the parts of the ship hundred years later were completely different). Also your mental world has changed completely - your thoughts, your tastes, your intentions, your views and so on have changed as well. But still we think of ourselves as the same person that we were. Is this also merely conventional like the identity of the ship of Theseus?

Most of us think that we have a constant self identity that runs throughout our life that is not merely conventional but something that is more firmly rooted. When we faint and regain consciousness to wake up in a radically different environment, we doubt everything but we always feel our own selves to be familiar. Even if we suffer from amnesia, after regaining consciousness, we may forget our own names and what we did, but there will still be a sense of “me” and the “outer world” running through although that is now more ethereal. What is it that remains constant throughout my life that makes me feel me at all moments despite drastic continuous changes? We think that our sense of self identity of ourselves a “me” is not just merely conventional but is actual - in fact it is more actual than any other identity - I can doubt about the identity of anything else (ships or rivers and so on), but I cannot doubt that I exist as a persistent self - Descartes said “I am” is the most fundamental and certain of all beliefs. To put in the words of the 18th century philosopher Bishop Butler, the identity of our self is “strict and philosophical” rather than “lose or popular” from convention.

But some Western philosophers did consider the idea of our own persistent self existence as merely conventional and hence fundamentally wrong and indefensible. How can I know that there is a me that persists as a stable element throughout my experienced life? Obviously, when you introspect your own thoughts, you do not find anything constantly running in them that binds them together (although there is a causal continuity). The radical empiricist philosopher David Hume asks this same question and thus concludes through introspection that there is nothing called a self - just a bundle of thoughts. The Buddha did the same thing 2500 years before Hume and we will see that in the section on Buddhism. Does this mean that the idea of the self is misplaced? Not necessarily. Critics of Hume have sometimes asked, "If Hume looked for his own self and failed to find it, who/what was doing the looking?". This is what Descartes also did to justify the existence of the self - if I doubt that I exist, there must be someone doing this doubting and that is the self. So, the persistent self is not to be looked for among the thoughts of our experience but to be inferred as the subject that does the thinking and not among the contents of what is thought. Every moment of thinking is a dual experience - it involves a subject and an object of thought. Perhaps, the idea of a self is not to be found in the objects of thought but in the subject. But even if we subscribe to the idea of the self as an inferred subject who does the thinking, how would you explain the persistence of the self when one is in a dreamless deep sleep - one does not think anything during deep sleep and hence does that mean that the self identity ceases to persist? The Indian philosophers would not take that as an answer - but what other non dual forms of experience beyond thinking are needed to directly trap the self at all times - even when one is not thinking as in a state of dreamless sleep?

The Upanisads offer a radically different answer to this question by indeed appealing to such a form of experience but this form of experience is not available to everyone and requires extensive preparation and hard work. The Upanisads are the earliest body of philosophical works in India, that confront the problem of the self and self identity head on. The authors of the Upanisads firmly believe that the self is unchanging. But all our bodies, thoughts and personality and even the very fact that whether we are thinking (of something) - all these change - this is also a matter of fact that also can’t be denied. But they do not adopt a Western Cartesian solution to infer the self from the thinking mind because even thinking is not a constant in our lives [e.g. in deep sleep]. So, they conclude radically that our bodies and thoughts and personality and even the subject of thinking - are not a part of our self and hence play no role in constituting our self - who we really are. In short, this is the argument:

Each of us has a persistent sense of “me”.

This “me” (as is intuitively felt) must be unchanging.

But personality, thoughts, behavior and bodies and even whether we think or not, change.

Hence, the persistent “me” cannot include these elements.

This is different from the Western conceptions that seek to look for the self among the objects or subjects of thought. So, who we really are and that which gives us our persistent personal identity is divorced from thinking, our bodies and behaviors. It is very bare and simply exists without including any of our activities that we are engaged in. The Indian philosophers call such a self by the name - आत्मन् (ātman). The word आत्मन् is a Sanskrit noun derived from the verb root “अत्” that conveys the idea of being continuously persistent and conveys a connotation of eternality. For example, the word for Hinduism in Sanskrit is सनातनधर्म​ (sanātana-dharma - meaning: eternal dharma) that etymologically splits as सं (intensifying prefix) + आत् (modification of root अत्) +अन (noun suffix) which demonstrates that the word for eternal contains a form of the verb root अत् which indicates persistence through time.

What does such a postulation logically imply? The seers who composed the Upanisads didn’t shy away in taking this to its fullest logical conclusions. It must be shocking to conclude that what we think so dearly of ourselves and our individuality - our personality, thoughts, desires and bodies - are not who we are because they are not “me” that runs constant. Who we really are - our ātman lacks all elements of our individuality. But if it lacks all individuality, then what is there to distinguish your ātman from ātman?! Or even broader, what is there to distinguish your ātman from that of a dog or a bacteria or a plant?! So,at a deepest level of what persists and really constitutes who we are, we are the same as a dog or a tree or a bacteria. This is the radical conclusion reached in the Upanisads. That what persists and hence constitutes really “us”, is the same as that which constitutes every other human being and even every living being. Deep down, we all are constituted by the same underlying persistent single “ātman”. But, this does not stop here. We have converged on a single persistent reality that underlies all existence of all living beings. Why stop at just living beings? What about gods? What about the material cosmos?

Authored by Rama Seshan Chandra Sekaran. Published by Brhat.