I Know You Are, But What Am I
Do Nothing for the Planet: Part Eight
“Heavenly Father has chosen you and me, just mostly me.” — The Book of Mormon
The last few parts kept circling one idea: that reality is shaped by the observer. Which leaves the obvious, and much older, question. Who is the observer? What, exactly, is this “I” doing all the looking?
There is a story in the Katha Upanishad about a boy called Nachiketa, a seeker desperate to know the truth of life. His father, in a fit of temper, snaps “I give you to death,” and the words haunt the boy so much that he goes looking for Death himself. When he arrives, Death is out. Nachiketa waits three days and three nights, and Death, impressed, offers him three wishes. The boy asks first for his father’s peace, then for the secret of the sacred fire, and finally for the biggest thing of all: the secret of what happens when we die. Death tries to talk him out of it, dangling wealth, grandchildren and long life instead. Nachiketa refuses. He does not want more years of an unfulfilled existence. And so Death, pleased, begins to teach him.
The layered self
What Death teaches is that the Self is covered by five layers. First the body, which is physical. Then three layers of mind, dealing with the senses, the emotions and the intellect. The fourth is the Ego, our sense of “I,” which is almost impossible for most people to see past. And the fifth, underneath it all, is the Self, which is understood as the collective consciousness itself.
To move through those layers, Death says, we have to learn that every day we are forced to choose between two roads: Preya and Shreya. Preya is what pleases us, the instant gratification, the tasty treat. Shreya is what actually benefits us, like meditation. Death offers Nachiketa an image for this. He likens the body to a chariot, pulled by five strong horses that are the senses, directed by a driver who is the mind. The Self, in this picture, is the anxious passenger, powerlessly bound by the actions of these forces. When Nachiketa asks how on earth he is supposed to choose the right road, Death gives one of my favourite answers in all of scripture: “Just don’t take the other road.” With training, he explains, we can become a strong driver with well-trained horses. But we have to execute that choice every single day.
Death has one more image, the City of Eleven Gates: a walled city whose walls are our skin and tissue and whose gates are the openings of the body. Inside the innermost chamber lives the ruler, the Self, our inner sanctum where we could go for rest. In reality, Death says, we almost never go there. We lurch from watchtower to watchtower, flinging the gates open and closed without ever checking who we let in, and every time we do, a little of our prana escapes. He concludes that perfection is “not in the attainment of a future or yonder world, but it is in the now and here, for one who is self-realised, who knows his self as Brahman.”
I am That
That last line is the thread that runs through all of this. As far back as the Upanishads, the Isha Upanishad states our connection with the divine in a single mantra: Soham, roughly, “I am that.” It echoes everywhere once you notice it. It’s Moses at the burning bush. It’s Jesus saying “I am the way.” The Indian sage Nisargadatta Maharaj claimed he attained enlightenment on that statement alone, and insisted “I am that” is the only mantra you would ever need. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna puts the same idea in relational terms: “the man who sees me in everything and everything within me will not be lost to me, nor will I ever be lost to him.”
So our own divinity is recorded, in black and white, throughout our oldest history. Which makes it a genuine wonder how thoroughly we’ve become detached from it. It’s as though, somewhere along the developmental road, humans came to a fork where we could have identified with the Universal I, and we chose the Ego instead.
The self psychology keeps trying to catch
Meanwhile, Western psychology has spent over a century trying to pin the Self down, and mostly discovering that it won’t be pinned. Deepak Chopra jokes that if you stopped people on the street and asked who they were, very few would answer that they are a holographic expression of the entire universe manifesting as a continuum of probability. They’d start naming the objects of their experience instead. That habit even has a name, Object Referral: we build our identity out of our stuff, our roles, our labels.
Freud thought the Self was formed in early childhood through a series of repressions and projections that haunt us into adult life. His student Heinz Kohut added that our healthy development depends on parents and peers recognising our specialness (no pressure, Mom and Dad). But every serious theory of the Self that followed lands in the same place: it is plural. Maray Schechtman says the Self is born of the stories we tell about ourselves. Kenneth Gergen, in The Saturated Self, says it’s social, built out of our relationships. Thomas Metzinger calls it a model the brain runs. Different maps, but the same territory: there is no single, solid, findable thing in there. The Self seems to be all of these at once, and more.
William James, who we met a couple of parts ago, split it neatly. We have an I, the part that gives us continuity through past, present and future, and a Me, the self that meets the world, which he divided again into the material self (what we own), the social self (who we are in company) and the spiritual self (which is fairly self-explanatory). Integral Psychology, drawing on Sri Aurobindo and Indra Sen, splits it into a Frontal Self that lives in the physical world, made of body, heart and mind, and a Spiritual Self behind it.
Jung, characteristically, found three of everything: an instinctual self of impulses and inheritances, a relational self that deals with the world (the Ego, which has a bad reputation these days but is also the thing that stops you tracking down the parking attendant who ticketed you and doing something you’d regret, so, Hallelujah), and above them a higher, imaginal self, opening onto the collective unconscious, that innate part of unfathomable us-ness we all share and keep forgetting we do.
Here’s what I find striking. We have manuals for every appliance in the house, and none at all for the most important machine we own, ourselves. And when we finally go looking, the thing we find is exactly what the Upanishads said we’d find: a Self that only shows itself in relation to things, that dissolves under inspection into pure relationship, and that, when you strip away every label, leaves nothing but Atman, the true Self beneath the costumes.
Ken Wilber, using the colours of the chakra system, argued the point that ties the whole chapter together: our capacity for transcendent states has less to do with which part of the Self is involved and more to do with our level of consciousness. He says true understanding starts, and ends, with I AM. When most of us say it, we immediately assume we are one thing and not another. To actually understand yourself, he suggests, you begin and end with I Am, and simply leave it there.
Which is a lovely place to pause, except it opens a much stranger door. If the real Self is this timeless, universal I, then it doesn’t begin at birth or end at death. So what happens to it? And if we are, at bottom, that Self, what on earth do we do with things like evil? That’s where the next part goes.
Notes
A note on all these models. I’ve laid the yogic map of the Self (the five sheaths, Atman) right alongside Freud, James, Jung, Wilber and the neuroscientists, and I want to be honest that I’m treating them as maps, not as interchangeable proven facts. The Upanishadic model is a spiritual and experiential framework, thousands of years of careful first-person observation, but it is not a laboratory result, and I don’t want to smuggle it in as one. The Western psychological theories are models too, contested among themselves and rarely settled. What genuinely moves me is how often they rhyme, how the felt experience the yogis described keeps surfacing in modern accounts of a plural, relational, constructed self. I’m pointing at the rhyme. I’m not claiming the map is the territory.