The most difficult question for science

As children, we were asked the following question: Who are you?

We introduced ourselves and then talked about the class and school we were studying in. Nothing has changed for adults. We spell our names and mention the job and company we are working in.

As innocuous as it seems, these introductions are an example of the dystopia we find ourselves in. Looking back, how could your class or school have been an answer to the question about the self? They were never the correct answer as one moved on from being a school student, which was a temporary state. Isn't it also equally silly to talk about company and job as part of an introduction about ourselves? Jobs and companies change all the time. Working in a job does not make the job us. Working for a company does not make the company us. We are neither the name, job or company. We are the self that exists. All this is intuitively obvious, but there is something deeper. We know who we are, but we cannot explain it.

A materialist would say that we are the body. That also fails at the point of death. The body exists, but the "person" is nowhere to be found. Individual cells live on, with some cells dying days after the person is officially dead. Similarly, inside a dream, the brain can recreate the body and the environment and make everything seem as normal as it always is. The unreality of a dream is only obvious when you wake up. All talk of consistency and repetition is meaningless inside the dream world, where nothing seems out of place to the dreamer. Again, you exist in the dream world without the real body. The mind is capable of simulating the body without the actual body.?

All our problems in life begin with mistaken identities. In our lives, we extend the idea of self to everything around us. Recently, we bought a farmhouse. I never would have cared for this place before the purchase. Once the purchase was done, the place somehow crept into my sense of self and ownership. It has found a way to wiggle into what I would define as myself. These instances happen all the time. I drink a glass of water. The water, alien to me, becomes a part of me after I drink it. The outsider became an insider in an instant. Likewise, when people relieve themselves in a toilet, they are disgusted by the output they see. Is not all this strange because all these particles were a part of the body seconds earlier? Suddenly, they become a weird, alien, disgusting thing. We have more bacteria than human cells in our body. They are also part of what we call a human. There are mites and insects on our bodies. All these means that the human body is better represented as a natural habitat with multiple biomes. The human body is an illusion; it is nothing like what we think it is.

A long time back, an Archaea (bacterial relative) and a bacteria cell decided to come together and fuse with each other. This symbiosis was the beginning of multicellular life. All mammals, including humans, originate from this extraordinary gesture of cooperation. Were the two cells blindly and mindlessly cooperating, or did they come together to strike a beneficial alliance of their own volition? Another example is when bacteria decided to transform into mitochondria to help multicellular beings survive. Without mitochondria that create energy for cells, no reptiles, worms or mammals can be alive.?Every animal form has bacteria inside it. We are as much bacteria as we are human. It is easy to forget all this when a foolish human mind thinks that all bacteria are our enemies. This ignorance is the grand Maya of the world. What we think of as the truth is untrue, and what we think of as the untruth is true.?

Bacteria can live without humans, but humans cannot live independently of bacteria. From a bacterial perspective, we are another form of bacteria. All of life is descended from bacteria. The children of bacteria over billions of generations became all the plants and animals of this planet. There are no species in this world, just different families of bacteria. From this perspective, we logically go back to the idea of Atman - the unity of all life. Next time we are asked the "Introduce yourself" question, one answer guaranteed to shock the other person is to say, "I am bacteria."?

We delude ourselves into thinking that we?are defined by position, power, job, company, country, religion, etc. Our sense of ownership extends to land, wealth, money, stock markets?and a million other things. These things are not us. They come and go as our fortunes wax or wane. From a genetic perspective, we say we are 50% of our parents' genes. Our children are half of us. But a banana also shares at least 20% of its genes with us. This relation also makes bananas uncomfortable close to our grandparents, who share 25% of their genes with us.?Welcome to the world of genetics.

Think deeply. From a Western materialistic perspective, one can never answer the question - Who are you? However, this is no issue for the Indian schools of thought, such as Hindutva or Buddhism, which say clearly - we are Consciousness. Consciousness can never be explained in the third person. Science can be explained in the third person because it is a tool for the mind to describe the world, not Consciousness. Consciousness cannot be taught; it can only be experienced in the first person.

The only space where science has made zero progress till today is in the study of Consciousness. The most recent theory of Consciousness and wildly popular theory is called QBism, a rehash of Buddhist and Hindu beliefs. Western Science seems to be so inane to accept theories written 5000 years ago as new theories.

A popular science reviewer said that scientists are no better off after 150 years of studying Consciousness than when they began. This issue concerns not just understanding consciousness but also the term "life." The scientific definitions of life and even NASA's definition of life are amateurish. There are thousands of definitions, and there is still no agreement.

The correct answer to "Who am I?" is "I am consciousness, unbounded by space and time." This is the answer from the Vedas, the Gita and the Upanishads. Sam Altman spent a year in India to learn exactly this. He keeps repeating that everything is Brahman. So these ideas need deep introspection not peripheral reflection. I called consciousness "unbounded by space and time" not only to be provocative but also to stress that spatial and temporal constructs make no sense to mental concepts. Space and time apply only to material objects. One cannot deny subjectivity with objective truth. These two worlds are separate.

All this is borrowed from the Upanishads. They are not scriptures which force you to accept anything you do not believe or understand. Accept any of the truths only if they make sense to you personally. If not, you can discard it.

As the great Western philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote,

"In the whole world, there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. The Upanishads have been the solace of my life and will be the solace of my death."