Realms of Consciousness

Know Yourself!

Simple questions about the foundations of things have often complex answers. It happens in science and ontology, in epistemology and psychology. Our center, or starting point, our foundation and root, is simple and evident: the "I". This pronoun designates in the first place in a unique way my personal center, but it also has an extension in the human species, and beyond the species, in the whole of life. When the "I" speaks, it speaks then in a threefold manner. But before we get to talk about the "I," let us clear up a few details about the psyche.

What is psychology? I am not asking what academic psychology is, what is taught in universities, but the question is more anthropological, broader: what is the human psyche? What is psychology in my life? What is my soul's dimension?. We feel the need to better understand the nature of the mind. 

The need for knowledge of oneself, the motto that could be read at the entrance to the sanctuary of Delphi: Gnosi Seauton, "know yourself". This short and cryptic sentence contains the core of psychology. Through that epistemological action begins the path of psychology, a path of transformation, metamorphosis, and evolution of the person. Crossing that threshold, we step into the greatest adventure that we can undertake, no doubt about it. Psychology is the inner journey that integrates our entire life, our vision of the world, and our relationship with others. I can do little for others if I don't first understand who I am, who is the person in front of me, what it means to be a person, and what is a human being.

“Know yourself”: the action of knowing applied reflexively, turned in on itself, a form of self-absorption that aspires to reveal our nature and then go towards the rest, towards the world. Knowing oneself is not like knowing a simple object, be it concrete or abstract. For example, within ordinary knowledge or Lebenswelt, to know what a tree is is to be able to distinguish one when we see it, that is, to assign the concept tree, obtained from perceptive representations, to a plant structure that we have in front of us. From the point of view of botany, that is to say, from a formal science, or Überlebenswelt knowledge, knowing what a tree is implies a basic knowledge of biology and the application of a definition to the perception of a tree that we intuitively develop in the Lebenswelt. Knowing objects is the ability to assign a concept to a set of representations, it is to incorporate the object within the symbolic framework of a specific historical culture, that is, to incorporate it into the identity narratives of a given time and space. If I take myself as an object, if I consider myself as a member of a social group culturally determined by particular identity narratives, I am delimiting the scope of what I am. If I further limit my self-objectification and decide to give myself a scientific explanation, I will obtain a rational image in my reflection mirror, however, I will be able to say nothing about those components of my being that make orderly, rational reflection possible. Those components do not follow the simple quantifying patterns used by rationality, the models that seek to reduce me superstitiously to the simplifications of the universe that our cognitive physiology demands. Put into other words: reason is not founded on reason, the roots of reason are grounded somewhere else, or as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: deep is the Night, and deeper than what the day thought it to be.

We will examine all these objectifying options, but it is essential that we are clear that to find out the nature of the root of our investigations, the root of the human psyche, will at some point require a more naked and authentic answer, the psychological demand of being alone with the Universe. The question where this psychological nakedness reveals to us, the one that has been beating for countless generations in the minds of those who suspected that humans are more than what shows on the surface of self-inquiries, is very simple: who am I? At the core is the old problem of Western Psychology concerning Selbsbeobachtung, the self-observation that has been discredited as a valid method for Psychology. However, we have to take into consideration that Modern Science cannot solve, nor even formulate, the basic question “Who am I?”

Let us honor the vichar (self-inquiry) tradition of Advaita Vedanta, beginning our investigation of consciousness from the intimate point of view of the question: “Who am I?”

The first time we hear this question, in our deep childhood, it is someone else who asks it. The expected response is a name: mom, dad… Someone answers it for us and waits for our mimetic action, rewarded by bursts of joy. We have imprinted into the deepest and oldest memory of this brain that to be is to have a name. The question is, from the first moment of our life, the basis of our relationship with others, of the recognition of identities from names. We learn our name as well as the name of another relative, of another person who speaks to us, and thus we learn to objectify our parents and ourselves.

The answer to “Who am I?” with a name only makes sense in the most basic social identifications. What's more, my own name, the one that has been assigned to me, is nothing more than a label, and it loses all meaning if I ask myself the question reflexively. Furthermore, what is the point of asking myself any question? Do I not already have the information that I could give myself as an answer? In principle, it would seem so, although a self-formulated question is nothing more than a starting point for a reflection on its content, for a philosophical inquiry. When I ask myself a question, I somehow imply that inquiry will reveal more than what appears at the surface, that somehow new connections will be revealed to my conscious understanding. Such an attitude is derived from experience. The world is continuously showing us that there is more, much more in it than what we get out of simple perceptions, or even from complex conceptions.

The question is as simple as it is fascinating and fundamental, perhaps the most fundamental question that a human being can ask. Any other question will have to take into account the result of the answer we arrive at, if it has a definitive and usual answer... No one can answer it for me or you. If I were not able to answer "who am I?", the meaning of my existence would dissipate like a summer cloud. I could go on living, but I couldn't help but feel like an automaton completing scheduled tasks. We always have to manage some kind of response, already made by our human group or just constructed in a sloppy collage by us, using the best opinions that came to our attention. So I say: I am a human being, a very common answer that seems to settle the matter, but that says nothing about the part that has to do with my existence, my feeling of being someone with a mind of my own, relatively independent of others right now. The very notion of being human is foreign to my vital feeling here and now, is a cultural superimposition that explains very little of myself.

Our question already entails an answer: I am a “who”, something substantive, and I realize that I am being, although I cannot specify the nature of my being, of my being alive as an individual being. Thus, I say of myself that I have the capacity for movement, action, and reaction, and in this I discover myself as other objects that I perceive and understand as “not-me”. However, I am not an object. I am not my body, because when I see it there is no full and unequivocal identity with it, neither when I feel pleasure nor when I feel pain do I attribute it to the body, there is something that feels that pleasure and that pain, and that from the impressions sensory and memory builds an experience. The body does not exhaust my identity. In a certain sense, the body is alien to me, since it is not an extension of my will, and follows cycles and impulses that do not depend on what I want. It's me and it's not me at the same time. This is interesting because the body is showing me that what I call "me" and what I call "not-me" have an intimate connection. I then realize that the air in my lungs is an intimate "not-me" that transforms into "me", giving life to the cells, and it is, analogously, food, and the sun that activates my body and my soul in subtle and complex ways.

I feel then to be life, a continuum of material forces that interpenetrate in complex processes that go beyond mere matter, it is sentient matter, beautiful matter, psique. But this observation arises from a mental process that was already imbricated in all my feelings, the connection of my self with the "non-self". I cannot separate this mental component: it was there from my first inquiry about my identity, like the complex emotion that I feel when perceiving the intimate connection of my body with what surrounds it, the world. I see that body, emotions, and mind form a reference frame that I share with higher animals. They also live in that complex reference frame, however, their sensation of life and vital action is not capable of reaching to the reflection space where my question arises. My mind is more complex than theirs, and its operation allows it to turn on its own actions as if they were objects to consider and ponder, to examine and judge. Let us say that I have an intellect and they only have an animal mind. I also have an animal mind, emotions, and a body, but there is something in me that is not limited to just that: I have an intellective capacity, and I examine myself and ask myself about my identity.

However, the identity that I do discover is not limited to being a process of intellectual analysis and synthesis. At each step, these insights are linked with subtle forms of emotion, far removed from the most basic animals, and linked to the very process of understanding my identity. They are emotions of sublimity and harmony fused with intellection, and they open up new fields of my identity. Sublime emotion sustains intellection as much as intellection follows the paths of this sublime emotion. Rooted in the intimate matter in which I am founded, the one that breathes and dances in my chest, propelling me into longings, the one that launches arrows of sublimated vital representations following trajectories of reason and imagination towards an existence that is ever more subtle and broad. I think about the galaxies, and the immensity of the dimension of these light sources produces a joint emotion of harmony, bliss, peace, purity, infinity, strength, beauty, and joy. The emotion is not any of them separately, nor a partial combination, it is a compound of them that, like many compounds, acquires a different nature than its parts separately. I call this emotion “ananda”, a Sanskrit term from the Vedic tradition. The galaxies immerse me in ananda. I look at their photos and forms, I read about their formation, I even see with my own eyes in the clear night one of them, our sister galaxy Andromeda, and the cosmic emotion grows and dissolves me. Astronomical numbers don't tell me anything compared to what I feel knowing about my home, my space, my light... myself. The atoms of my body reverberate with its distant light, with its invisible and present energy, and I have no difficulty in recognizing myself in that vibration as much as I recognized myself in basic emotions. That recognition occurs through the emotion-intellection of ananda: the ananda absorbs my other identities.

And not even such an answer satisfies the want, the longing that energizes the question of “Who am I?”, the spontaneity of its flow in my experience. There is something other than even the most sublime emotion of ananda that throbs in my question. No other living being raises this question, nor do the gods. The gods have answers, like Yahweh's to Moses, but they do not ask themselves questions. “I am who I am” -He told him, that is, “I am who I am”, my identity is being, but that answer, although it clarifies things for me and removes something ineffable, is not enough. The verb to be points to a mystery, and yet there is nothing more obvious, more common, more here. And from this sense of mystery, our psychological journey begins.