Part XXXV– Conscious
and Unconscious entities
In the realization of oneself, the creator-creation
and the self all merge into one that is Brahman
that I am. We will now address the question of
how the notion that ‘I am an individual’ arises,
or what is the nature of the individual (jIva)
and what is its relation to Brahman.
When I say ‘I am’ (aham asmi), the ‘I’ refers
to the consciousness aspect and the ‘am’ refers
to the existence aspect. However, when I introduce
myself, who I am, I will start with ‘I
am’ plus additional information that distinguishes
myself from all others beings in the world. We
have already noted earlier that being a subject, ‘I’ cannot
be defined, since any definition objectifies
the subject. Hence, all the distinguishing features
that are used for ‘I’ to define myself,
do not belong to ‘I’, the subject,
but belong to ‘this’ - this object
that I can point out.
When I say I am this body, this mind or this
intellect, I am equating the subject I with the
object ‘this’. There is obviously
an inherent confusion in the very definition
for ‘I’ that I use, since I am equating
a conscious-existent entity, ‘I’,
with an unconscious entity ‘this’. ‘This’ normally
refers to either to my body, my mind or my intellect.
For example, when I say I am five and half feet
tall, weigh 150lbs, was born in India, studied
and worked as a scientist in US, am married to
so and so, and father of so and so, orbited 62
times around the sun, etc. - these all refer
to this body, mind and/or intellect complex that
I am fully conscious of.
I can go on with my bio data, providing pages
and pages of information ‘all about myself’,
but in reality nothing about myself. All these
pages only contain attributes at my body level,
my relationships at emotional or mind level and
my accomplishments at an intellect level. I can
say nothing more about myself beyond that. I
also cannot stop my introduction just with a
statement ‘I am’ period, although
that is all that can be said about the subject
I. Hence, in my understanding of myself as an
individual ‘I am’, I combine two
things: ‘I am’ – an existent-conscious
entity that I am; and ‘this’ – an
inert entity that corresponds to body/mind/intellect
(BMI) with which I identity at that instant.
By definition, that which has attributes is
an inert entity. Hence, all my bio-data correspond
to my BMI, which are inert entities, while ‘I’ am
a conscious entity. Here, we have a peculiar
combination of ‘I’ the conscious
entity identifying with local equipments BMI,
which are inert. This unholy combination results
in an individual ‘I’ that is different
from all other individuals in the universe. We
are able to live in this confused world only
because everybody is equally confused and is
making the same mistake of false identification
of ‘self’, ‘I’, with
the non-self, ‘this’.
Proceed to the next
essay.
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