God - an investigation - part 6 - Immediacy of the "Self"

One of the compelling reasons for the presence of a “self” that is beyond the notion of change, happens to be the very fact of our physical existence and continuance. Pick a picture from one’s childhood, adolescence, youth or middle age and scrutinize the physical similarities. Except for a vague, fuzzy sense of resemblance – there is nothing that is common in the bodily mutation of oneself. Yet, we preserve, by a miracle, so to speak; the distinct identity of “My body “-amidst all this prolific, sometimes catastrophic changes it has undergone. Wherefrom does this organic unity come from? What is the overwhelming thread of wholesomeness that we carry within ourselves, as a deep self-evident truth of an individual body maintaining its state of homeostasis?

Again, the “I” ness that hums in the background of our existential singularity is not to be confused with the thought structure that we carefully nurture. A moment’s reflection will convince us of shallow premises and the sheer temporality of our “personalities”. Each one of us change, evolve into myriad different people over years. Our likes and dislikes, ethics and morals, right and wrong, aspirations and dreams – have incessantly transformed, and continues to transform with each new day. Yet, the organic “I'ness" persists throughout this kaleidoscopic change. It is there behind - a subtle presence, that is brusquely pushed aside by the cogitations of our ever occupied brain. If not for this saving grace, there would be chaos in the biological identity of Homo sapiens.

What is fascinating as student of philosophy and mystical literature is the fact that thousands of years ago, in the intense crucible of intellectual nourishment -  the authors of the Upanishads took an inward journey to understand this elusive, yet immanent factual reality of an identity that jettisons the psyche-biological unity of an organism with a nervous system and a brain. There was no metaphysics involved in their deliberations. They asked the most fundamental and simple questions, with no end in view - with a clear scientific temper of discovery. I will try and paraphrase the drift of their inquiry in the following paragraph:

The known data in daily life is three distinct states of consciousness - Waking, dream and deep sleep (In this case, consciousness refers to a “self-referential” awareness). The mental content in each of these phases is the quality of our identification with it. In the waking mode – we are irretrievably lost in the miasma of mentation; the dream mode offers a consolation in as much as the attachment is true and valid for the period of fantasy that we bask in; the deep sleep then is blissful, but there is an emptiness and no knowing awareness to vouch for its state... But the undeniable fact that pervades all the three modes of personal existence is a sense of “I”. Now this “I” cannot be the working identity that we normally take for ourselves, because the persona we put on is true only in one of its phases (the waking, and sometimes the dream state) and not the others. So it must necessarily follow that there should/must be a subsuming presence that stitches the disparate modes of knowing into an unitary stream; yet distinct from all of them. The Upanishads called this state “Turiya - which freely translated denotes “choice less awareness”. It is mode that preserves the well-being of the physical organism and its sanity.

I have condensed the essence of eight Upanishads in a matter of twelve sentences above. Those pregnant dialogues are the most subliminal, illuminating and reasoned thought structures in the annals of recorded religious history. The speakers in these conversations are often unknown; later commentators have attributed names to them; but they were irrelevant to the subject under investigation. Sitting in cloistered forests, or enjoying the marital comforts of a bed room, or within the electric atmosphere of a classroom - these protagonists, the pioneers of psychological truism blazed a path that is at once so very profound; and simple...

Will continue this inward journey later…

God bless….