Who Am I?

The genesis of this article stems from the Linkedin Training advertisement from Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg, the authors of Option B. The training is titled “The Importance of Resilience” - (https://www.dhirubhai.net/learning/sheryl-sandberg-and-adam-grant-on-option-b-building-resilience). The video of the advertisement carries a heart touching story of a woman who lost her husband. She narrates how her world crumbled around her. It moves on to the realization that despite the avalanche of misery, things could have been worse. It shows how this realization spontaneously brings about a sense of gratefulness towards God. The advertisement brings 4 points to the fore:

a)      Death;

b)     Misery;

c)      Happiness; and

d)     God

But isn’t that story common for all of us. Rearrange the order of the 4 words above, and still fits into our schemes. The advertisement accepts that there is something called God. At the beginning, God doesn’t appear to be the hero in context of the painful experience of death. The advertisement attempts to explore how should one balance and rationalize between happiness and misery. The element of “chance” that plays a crucial role in the destiny of mankind subtly plays out in the script. Chances were there that the deaths could have been greater, losses even more profound, enormously more shattering. But it did not happen. The draw of cards had not been the worst draw after all. Somehow, we have been able to avoid more unhappiness. In a way, that means we are actually “lucky”. Therefore, -“Love You God!” – there you go! The forgotten God makes a dramatic entry in the story line. Ultimately, it tries to indicate a solution.

One of the reasons for sorrow is that our knowledge about things are finite. Limited by our senses, we try to build an image of our status in the world, as we perceive it to be, and try and reconcile our happiness. Often our limitation lead to the wrong definition of the problem. Hence, we often end up with a wrong solution. The elements used in the above advertisement are so profound at a certain level, just to reflect on them, we will need to start at the beginning. How do we define God?

The most secular definition of God could be found in the Taittiriya Upanishad which may be briefly explained as under:

a)      God is first defined as “Vast”. Just vast. It is an impersonal definition. Vast is not qualified as a He or a She. There is no infinity other than God.

b)     Secondly, God has no limits. The limitlessness of God is further analysed as limitation of space, limitation of time and limitation of object.

a.      Limitation of space: There is no location in space where it is not. It is “Omnipresent”.

b.      Limitation of time: There is no time before which it did not exist and there is no time after which it will not exist. It is “Eternal”

c.      Limitation of object: There is nothing in the world that is different from it. It is “Non-Dual” where the second does not exist.

c)      God is everything Real. In the gross world, that we called reality, no object can pass the test of limitation described above. We therefore need to rely on the implied interpretation which points towards the “existence” of all objects in the real world. The car exists, the table exists, I exist, he exists, we all exist. Objects borrow the “existence” from Pure Consciousness. We experience the objects and the Consciousness manifests through them. There cannot be anything else other than “existence“ because, Not Existence = Nonexistence.

d)     God is everything that is Knowledge. God is the same Knowledge that is grounded in Consciousness.

e)     God is therefore, defined as Existence, Consciousness, Infinity.

f)       According to the Upanishads, Infinity is also called Happiness or Joy or Bliss. Unhappiness stems from the finite state of matter. For example, we are unhappy that we will die. But if death is conquered, doors of eternal Bliss shall open for us. God is therefore, also Existence, Consciousness, Bliss.

The above definition therefore establishes the following:

a)      God has no beginning or end.

b)     God is there today, was there yesterday and will be there tomorrow.

c)      God is here in the very room manifested in all objects that we experience.

d)     Therefore, God is manifested in me.

Therefore, God is not some other being whom I approach when I am in trouble. God is not some one who lives in heaven and therefore he not here at this moment. Neither is God someone whom I will only meet after my death – a post mortem rendezvous. He is omnipresent, He is everyone, including I.

Let us be on this concept for a while. Human beings can be said to have 3 facets – the Body, the Mind and the Intellect. The Body helps in experiencing objects. The Mind helps in experiencing our emotions. The Intellect helps in experiencing our thoughts. The Perceiver in me experiences Object through the Body. The Feeler in me experiences the Emotions through the Mind and the Thinker in me experiences the Thoughts through the Intellect. Therefore, I, the hero of my autobiography, do experience on a physical, emotional and intellectual level. The question is, who am I? Am I the Body? The Body is an object, and I am experiencing my Body. Therefore, I cannot be the Body. Similarly, since I am experiencing my Mind and Intellect, I cannot be the Mind or Intellect also. So, who am I?

On an empirical level, the Body, Mind and Intellect is matter – instruments of experiences. I am therefore a mysterious grace of something ‘other than matter’. Something that manifests through the instruments of experience on the fields of my experience, viz., Objects, Emotions and Thought. The Perceiver, Feeler and Thinker acts as the Conscious Ego. In other words, am I not part of the same unchanging Consciousness that pervades all creations? I repeat. I am not the Body. I was small. Now I am old. By Body has grown from a kid to a teenager to a man and now to an old man (not so old actually). The Body has changed, but I am still the same I. Therefore, I am not the Body, I am not the Mind, I am not the Intellect. At that level, I am the same Existence - Consciousness - Bliss that pervades the whole universe. I am unchanging, insentient.

Mr. Allan Watts, made an interesting story for the kids capturing the definition of God and the esoteric concepts of creation of the world and the cycle of life. He beautifully captured the concepts of “Maya”, Consciousness and Vedanta in general, in his book, “On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”. I did not want the readers to lose the finesse of his words and refrained from paraphrasing the same. I quote Mr. Allan Watts :

“God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside of God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.

     “Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that’s the whole fun of it -- just what he wanted to do. He doesn’t want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self -- the God who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever.

     “Of course you must remember that God isn’t shaped like a person. People have skins and there is always something outside our skins. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t know the difference between what is inside and outside our bodies. But God has no skin and no shape because there isn’t any outside to him. The inside and outside of God are the same. And though I have been talking about God as ‘he’ and not ‘she,’ God isn’t a man or a woman. I didn’t say ‘it’ because we usually say ‘it’ for things that aren’t alive.

     “God is the Self of the world, but you can’t see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can’t see your own eyes, and you certainly can’t bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding.

     “You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn’t really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It’s the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world.”  

I am fascinated by the simplicity by which he has articulated the core of Vedanta. Let us analyse what he says:

a)      God is playing a game of Hide and Seek. Therefore, seeking God is the name of the game of our life;

b)     God created the universe as part of himself. Everything that we see, feel, hear, including us is God.

c)      God hides himself. This is what the Vedantists calls “Maya”. A veil of illusion hides God from us in this world of existence.

d)     God has these strange adventures in game – in the play out of the Laws of Karma.

e)     The Consciousness in all of us (God) will wake up one day only to realise the Real.

f)       God has forgotten who He amidst us is, and it takes a long time for Him to remember who is the real He. This is the cycle “death to death” that we must pass through till we attain God.

The absolute certainty of life is death. Whoever is born, the only thing certain is that he will die. This concept is repeated several times in all world religions. In the book of Psalms we find “What man can live and not see death?” [Psalm 89:48]. The Holy Qur’an also states: “Everyone is going to taste death,…” [Al-Qur’an 21:35]. We all die. Even the Prophets die. Christ had died. Krishna died. Therefore, why do we forget this inevitable fact of life in the life we lead? We tend to carry about our business as if we are going to last forever. A mysterious forgetfulness engulfs us that leads us to deny death in our everyday life. Dr. Ernest Becker in his book “The Denial of Death” made detailed observation about how on a practical scale, we tend to deny the existence of death. He demonstrated through practical examples how mankind goes about seeking immortality in the things they do. Just as the hero who sacrifices his life so that mankind will remember him even after his death, the poor family-man also struggles day and night to raise his family so that he may live through his descendants. He called them immortality projects. He says that man wants to deny the existence of death but, and he quotes Mr. William James :…and the skull will grin in at the banquet.”

It appears despite the denial of death there is a constant instinct of self-preservation that pervades the human behavior. From the moment after we are born the laws of nature are working against us to disintegrate us. By instinct, therefore, man developed an urge for self-preservation. We eat. We apply medicines if we get sick. We get anxious if the person sitting next to us sneezes – lest we might catch a cold. “We are not helpers of Nature but competitors of Nature. The history of humanity is a fight with nature.” But why does man think he will never die? Ramana Maharshi (a sage from the south of India) hinted upon the answer in a discourse. He said, “He sees so many dying but still believes he is eternal. Because it is the Truth. Unwillingly the natural Truth asserts itself. Man is deluded by the intermingling of the Conscious Self with the insentient body.”

Everybody wants to be happy. We do everything possible to be happy. We weigh our options in terms of potential accrual of happiness. The old mother cannot let go her son despite being beaten by him every day. Our love for our dear ones over shadow our judgement of what is righteousness. We want to protect our family will all our might even though we know that all shall die. As Swami Vivekananda explained, “The whole world is going towards death; everything dies. All our progress, our vanities, our reforms, our luxuries, our wealth, our knowledge, have that one end — death. That is all that is certain. Cities come and go, empires rise and fall, planets break into pieces and crumble into dust, to be blown about by the atmospheres of other planets. Thus, it has been going on from time without beginning. Death is the end of everything. Death is the end of life, of beauty, of wealth, of power, of virtue too. Saints die, and sinners die, kings die and beggars die. They are all going to death, and yet this tremendous clinging on to life exists. This is Maya.”

Instead of playing hide and seek with God, we pursue interests that take us away from the game. That what takes us away is called Maya.

Some try and decode this web of Maya through their intellect. But intellect has limitation of being insentient, hence impossible to perceive.

In the world of Maya, happiness and unhappiness is present is equal proportions. We try to create happiness through our actions and inactions. However, the more we create happiness for ourselves, we create an equal quantum of unhappiness somewhere else. It is difficult to predict or even point out where the unhappiness will be or has been created. In the commercial world, we create happiness for ourselves when we increase prices of our products. Do we not create unhappiness for our customers by the same token? Hypothetically, what would happen if all the companies of the world just merged into one mega company? Would not the richest companies instantly become poorer? We who are progressing know that the more we progress, the more avenues are opened to pain as well as to pleasure. Maya presents to us a state of hopeless contradictions. We are in a state of neither existence nor non-existence. Neither misery nor happiness. We are trying to find the Sentient as an Object through our insentient perceptions of body, mind and intellect. Maya tends to confuse us and lead us to believe that the Absolute and the Infinite is trying to manifest itself in the finite. This shall never happen. We yearn for infinite happiness through finite things. Swami Chinmayananda called this ‘becoming Supreme Idiots’.

Maya is webbed with its self-balancing Laws of Karma. The Laws of Karma acts impartially in a flawless manner on all living organisms. The Law of Karma is as is written in the Bible, “As you sow, so you reap”. Therefore, the Law of Karma talks about an action or inaction and its consequences. If you are doing an action that is not righteous, or that is causing unhappiness to people, you earn a demerit point. But then, we just discussed, if we want to be unhappy, we will create unhappiness somewhere. That is true, hence the problem. Therefore, the solution is not to create more happiness to surpass the unhappiness. Remember, happiness and unhappiness are present in equal proportions. You can not surpass unhappiness. Therefore, we should try and reduce happiness, that in turn shall also reduce unhappiness. "Desire is never satisfied by the enjoyment of desires, it only increases the more, as more, when butter is poured upon it." Take for example a case of a person who has alcohol daily. At first, he used to get tipsy at the first drink. Soon, could manage 2. Now he needs 4 drinks to enjoy. The more we enjoy the more we need to enjoy. In this case, an obvious effect of Karma could be a damaged liver. One should understand here that the merit points of good Karma do not get offset by the demerit points of bad Karma. We will enjoy happiness for our good Karma and also suffer due to our bad Karma. The relentless cause and consequence of Karma plays out till one day we evolve as greater beings.

In the ever-changing world of the body, mind and intellect, our experiences keep on changing. Our ideologies change, our knowledge change, the world we experience changes. Maya leads the sleeping Conscious ego to try and create a condition of perpetual happiness between the two ever-changing insentient parts – the instruments of experience and the field of experience. On baser level, is it not our duty to play with the change? Like the dance floor – tapping to the changes in music? To hang on. To never give up. Like emotionally enjoying a physically strenuous sport. Shall I quit just because I am losing? Get crushed but never leave the ring. We must play the game till the end. Is this the Resilience Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg were talking about?

The Conscious Ego is caught between the push and pulls of the fields of experiences on one hand and the instruments of experience on the other. The unholy combination of the instruments of experience makes us a slave. It does not let the Conscious Ego of me escape to freedom. The instruments acts in the veil of Maya to command over the sleeping Consciousness. They feed on the old habits of the mind accumulated and brought forward from previous lives. The game of “Hide and Seek” is made difficult by the presence of the old accumulated habits of the mind called “Vasanas”. We might win the game when we break the shackles of the body, mind and intellect into Freedom. This brings us to the question, what is the purpose of life? Is it only to be happy? Life is a struggle towards the one ideal, towards Perfection. As Swami Vivekananda put it : “ But only one thing is certain; the mighty river is rushing towards the ocean, and all the drops that constitute the stream will in time be drawn into that boundless ocean. So, in this life, with all its miseries and sorrows, its joys and smiles and tears, one thing is certain, that all things are rushing towards their goal, and it is only a question of time when you and I, and plants and animals, and every particles of life that exists must reach the Infinite Ocean of Perfection, must attain to Freedom, to God.” Objects of experience creating waves in the Ocean of Consciousness shall one day subside in Maya.

In the story of Nachiketa, a young boy who asked a question to Yama, the God of death. He asked what is the secret of death? Yama tried his best to avoid answering. However, he gave in at the persistence of Nachiketa. Yama said, “That which is here (the embodied consciousness) is there (the Super Consciousness or God) too. That what is there, is here too.” Therefore, not only are we essentially God, but God is also essentially us. We are the unchanging Consciousness, beyond the body, mind and intellect, beyond the gross, subtle and causal states of matter, beyond the states of wakening, dream and deep sleep. Yama also warns Nachiketa – “One who sees the slightest difference between him and that Consciousness, goes from death to death”.

Yama says,” Meditate upon your heart in the space no bigger than your thumb, a fire without smoke as the pure Consciousness. That Consciousness is the Lord of the Past, the Lord of the Present and Lord of the Future.”

“The one who will do so shall not seek to protect himself anymore. Nothing in the world can destroy him. Even God will not destroy him.”

As Mr. Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked, the purpose of religion is absolute security. At the core of religion is absolute safety. That is what Yama promises.

The purpose of life is to know the True nature of us. As soon as we realise who we are, we will enjoy the state of ecstasy akin to achieving everything we had hoped to achieve, getting everything that we hoped to get in life. While our body and mind shall continue to be ravaged by the Laws of Karma, we will grow old, we will get diseases and we will die, yet we will get through the journey untouched. As the Bhagawad Gita says, that person shall be settled such that even the greatest sorrow cannot shake that person. There will be storms and mountainous waves will rise on the Pacific Ocean, we will always remain in the 20,000 feet of calm waters below.

“There is sorrow, there is death, gushing pain of separation.

Yet there is peace, yet there is bliss, yet the Boundless so arise.

Flows the incessant stream of life, beams the sun, the moon, the stars;

Spring dances into the woods in strange notes of symphony.

Waves ebb; they rise again,

Flowers fall and bloom again.

There is no destruction, there is no end, there is no misery or slightest loss;

At the feet of that Consciousness Bliss, O lord I seek my place”

-         Rabindranath Tagore

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References:

1.      Book of Psalms

2. Holy Qur’an

3. Taittiriya Upanishad

4.      Katha Upanishad

5.      The Upanishads – Translated by Swami Paramananda

6.      The Thirteen Principal Upanishads – Robert Ernest Hume

7.      Interpreting the Upanishad – Ananda Woods

8.      Complete works of Swami Vivekananda

9.      https://ramana-maharshi.weebly.com/vasanas.html

10.    The Early Upanishads – Annotated Text and Translations – Patrick Olivelle

11.    https://www.youtube.com/vedantany

12.  On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are - Alan Watts

13.  The Denial of Death - Dr. Ernest Becker

14.  Gitabitan – Rabindranath Tagore