In psychology, the question "Who am I?" is considered to imply that a
person is a fixed entity, which can lead to anxiety. Instead, some
psychologists suggest that people are better off asking themselves "How
would I like to engage life?".
Explanation
The "Who Am I" test
This test measures how a person perceives themselves, but it can also be
influenced by how they want others to perceive them.
The self as a subject
Psychoanalytic theory views the self as the subject of mental and physical
actions. This means that the self is the thinker, experiencer, perceiver,
and feeler of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions.
The self as a set of potentialities
Some psychologists believe that people are a set of potentialities, rather
than a set of traits. This means that the traits a person manifests depend
on the circumstances they find themselves in.
Limited growth
Believing that one has complete self-knowledge or not knowing oneself at
all are both considered states of limited growth.
2 "What is the purpose of life?" "Is there a God?" "What on Earth are we
doing here?" Among life's big questions, the one that has always interested
me the most is: Who am I? But how does one get to the bottom of "who am
I?" Of all academic fields, the one that appears most suitable for
answering the question is psychology. However, those familiar with the
major themes to emerge from psychology over the past few decades may
realize that the mind is prone to some pitfalls that make it ill-suited for
figuring out the self. There are three themes, in particular, that call
into question mind's capacity for self-discovery.
3 The first theme is that our mind isn't calibrated to perceive reality
as it is, but rather, is calibrated to make sense of our reality. And
often, this means that our mind just makes up stuff that doesn't really
exist. A well-known example of this is that, although we literally cannot
see anything in what is known as the "blind spot" (the spot in our visual
field where nerves connect to the retina), our brain "fills in" this gap in
our visual field. But you wouldn't know that in your daily experience. The
fact that we are programmed to see things that don't really exist implies
that our brain is not be capable of perceiving the truth about ourselves:
we may be making up stuff about ourselves that isn't really true. For
example, our brain may make up reasons for why we decided to marry the
person we married, or why we chose a particular product over another.
Indeed, a plethora of findings in decision-making suggest that we are
routinely blind to the true determinants of our judgments and decisions--a
notion that is oft-repeated in the work of behavioural economists. Further,
and this is why the mind is particularly ill-suited for figuring out the
self, even if the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and why we
did what we did, are sometimes true, we are unable to discern whether our
self-told stories are true or fabricated.
4 The second theme is that the very act of trying to figure ourselves
out may interfere with discovering who we are. In what is known as the mere
measurement effect, researchers found that people who are asked questions
about an activity or a product behaved differently from those who were not
asked these questions. Extrapolating from the mere measurement findings, it
seems that self-enquiry may reveal aspects of the self that may not have
even existed before one embarked on the self-enquiry. For example, the mere
act of asking yourself if you are a kind and honest individual may reveal
that you are kind and honest. Had you asked a different question ("Am I
capable of harming others?"), instead--or not asked any question at
all--you may have a different perception of yourself. If so, to what extent
are you truly kind and honest? More generally, to what extent can you truly
know yourself by asking questions about who you are? The "I" Is More
Complicated than the Mind Can Conceive
5 Finally, we—like reality itself—may be too complex and dynamic to be
fully understood through our finite minds. To be sure, we can make some
relatively accurate broad-stroke generalizations about ourselves, e.g., "It
is unlikely that I will ever smoke," or "I like Indian food better than I
like English food." But one should be cautious in coming to much more
specific conclusions about oneself. We like to believe that we—and others
around us—have relatively stable likes and dislikes, and traits. (Mostly,
we like to think of ourselves as well-meaning, smart, and talented—a
phenomenon known as the self-serving bias or the "Lake Wobegon Effect".)
The truth is that we are not one person, but many people in one. In fact,
the most accurate way to think of ourselves is that we exist as a broad set
of potentialities, rather than as a narrow set of traits. The particular
trait we manifest at any point in time depends on the circumstances in
which we find ourselves. This means that it may not be possible to know
ourselves to any meaningful level of specificity: we can only know
ourselves at a relatively abstract and vague level—as a "portfolio of
possibilities."
6 Given these themes, I am personally pessimistic that the mind can
be used to figure out the answer to "Who am I?" This does not mean that the
mind is totally useless when it comes to answering the question. As
mentioned earlier, we can certainly make some broad generalizations about
ourselves through gaining familiarity with findings in psychology and
through introspection. Further, we can also come to understand, though the
use of the mind, that the mind has its limits, especially when it comes to
self-enquiry. So, is there any alternative way of getting to know
oneself? To me, a particularly alluring alternative is that of going
beyond the mind. Almost all spiritual traditions involve a practice of
silence that encourages exploring the space of "no thought." The idea is to
switch off the mind such that you can get to know the reality "as it
is"—that is, perceiving reality without the filter of the mind. Is there
any merit to this idea? Is it possible to experience anything without the
mind? And what would you find out about who you are if you experienced the
state of no mind? There's only one way to know for sure—by experiencing
the state of no mind for yourself. {PSYCHOLOGY TODAY}
7 INDIAN PHILOSOPHY: In Indian philosophy, the question "Who am
I?" is a central topic of debate. The answer to this question is the
essence of a person, or the self, which is known as ātman. The goal of
Indian philosophy is to help people achieve liberation or a better life.
Explanation
Self-realization
In Hinduism, the self is the true "you" and is separate from the body and
mind. The goal is to realize this through meditation, which can lead to
self-realization.
Atman
The Upanishads say that the ātman is the highest controlling force, the
source of both internal and external light.
Inner enquiry
Ramana Maharshi believed that happiness can be found by discovering one's
true self through inner enquiry.
Ignorance
Classical Indian philosophers believed that ignorance about who we are is
the cause of suffering.
Ultimate truth
The Upanishads believe that the ultimate truth is within a person.
8 Every Upanishad has beautiful teachings and is complete in itself.
You should study these scriptures so thoroughly that you never have to
study them again. After that, actually practice their teachings in your
daily life. To practice, only two things are needed: understanding the
nature of a one-pointed mind, and learning the philosophy of
non-attachment. Modern people are often afraid of the word non-attachment.
Non-attachment is a powerful concept to understand. If you have really
learned the meaning of this word, you are free. Non-attachment means great
love—pure love. Presently, you are attached to the things of the world;
whatever you love, whether it is a person or an object, brings you pain.
Strangers do not create pain for you; it is the objects and recipients of
your love that cause you pain. The way you create and develop your
attachment to the things of the world creates pain. You should learn how to
love and enjoy your loved ones. You can do this by working with yourself
systematically.
9 Although the body is an important instrument, it is less important
than the mind. If you really want to know yourself, sit quietly for a few
minutes and allow yourself to become aware of what you are thinking. If you
do this, you’ll learn something about your personality. Sometimes when you
do this, you may feel very sad. People sometimes think, “I thought I was
such a good person. What has happened to me?” A man who was with me, an
agnostic, said to him, “Swami, what is the difference between you and me?
You eat, sleep, and do many other things exactly the way I do. What is it
that makes you a swami and me an ordinary person?” The swami smiled and
said, “Son, the difference is that anything you hear affects you. What I
hear does not affect me. If someone says, ‘You are stupid!’ it does not
affect me because I know that I am not. However, if I call you stupid, then
you’ll feel sad, because you will begin to think that you are stupid.”
10 The first freedom you need to attain is freedom from fear—that is
the message of the Upanishads. Such suggestions affect your life. From
morning until evening every day, you receive suggestions from others, and
your whole life is affected by these messages. This means you are only a
reactionary in life. Modern people are reactionaries; they don’t have time
to really think, understand, or feel. The world expects them to think and
feel what others want them to think and feel; they are expected to behave
the way others want them to behave. We all lead such lives in the modern
world. In this way, we have created a vast whirlpool for ourselves, and we
do not know what to do. The great Upanishads say, “O human beings, you can
enjoy the things that you enjoy today in a better way. Learn to enjoy
everything, but understand that there is a particular way to enjoy these
things.”
11 Thus, the Ishopanishad begins with the invocation:
“Om purnam-adah” (all this is full and complete).
“Purnam-idam” (this entire universe, whatsoever you find, has come from
Brahman, which is perfect and full and complete).
“Purnat purnam udacyate” (what comes from that which is perfect and full
and complete? Only perfection comes from perfection).
“Purnasya purnam-adaya, purnam eva-vashishyate” (all this is full and
complete in the beginning, in the intermediate state, and in the end).
However, in our daily life, we may feel that nothing is perfect in the
world. Let us examine why this is the case. What is the Hiranyagarbha
projected by maya? Maya is only an instrument through which Brahman
projects itself. That Absolute Brahman becomes many. The Vedantic
Upanishads do not use the word creation because no God or power has ever
“created” the world; rather, this world came into existence through
manifestation.
12 According to Sri Ramana Maharshi, the answer to the question "Who
am I?" is that you are awareness, or the Self. He taught that the Self is
constant and unintermittent awareness, and that the true nature of the Self
is to be found through self-enquiry.
Ramana taught that the "I" thought is the primal thought that runs through
all of your thoughts, perceptions, and memories.
He said that the "I" is the subject, and everything that the "I" thinks or
experiences is an object.
He said that the "I" is a fiction that arises from the mistaken idea that
you are a person with a mind and a body.
He said that the Self is the true nature of your existence, and that you
can realize the Self by giving up being aware of other things.
He said that the Path of Knowledge, or the enquiry of "Who am I?", is the
principal means to achieve this.
13 David: I have been asked, ‘What is Bhagavan’s simple, most basic
message on how to do self-enquiry. I will start with his brief explanation
from his essay Who am I?:
Question: What is the path of enquiry for understanding the nature of the
mind?
To which Bhagavan replies:
That which rises as ‘I’ in the body is the mind. If one enquires as to
where in the body the thought ‘I’ rises, first one would discover that it
rises in the heart. That is the place of the mind’s origin. Even if one
thinks constantly ‘I-I’, one will be led to that place. Of all the thoughts
that arise in the mind, the ‘I’-thought is the first. It is only after the
rise of this that the other thoughts arise. It is after the appearance of
the first personal pronoun ‘I’ that the second and third personal pronouns
[you, he, she, it] appear. Without the first personal pronoun there will
not be the second and third.And the next question is: ‘How will the mind
become quiescent?’ This is Bhagavan’s answer: By the enquiry ‘Who am I?’
The thought ‘Who am I?’ will destroy all other thoughts and, like the stick
used for stirring the burning pyre, it will itself in the end get
destroyed. Then there will arise Self-realisation.
14 After this reply there is this crucial question about practice.
The question is: ‘What is the means for constantly holding onto the thought
‘Who am I?’ To which Bhagavan replies:
When other thoughts arise, one should not pursue them but should enquire,
‘To whom do they arise?’ It does not matter how many thoughts arise. As
each thought arises one should enquire with diligence, ‘To whom has this
thought arisen?’ The answer that would emerge would be ‘To me’. Thereupon
if one enquires, ‘Who am I?’ the mind will go back to its source and the
thought that arose will become quiescent. With repeated practice in this
manner the mind will develop the skill to stay in its source.
15 So those are Bhagavan’s instructions on what you have to do. But
that’s not the end of the story. This is a two-way transaction. Bhagavan
has said in other places that if you can make your ‘I’ go back to its
source and abide there, you invoke the power of the Guru, the power of the
Self. Ultimately, it is this power which is going to suck your quiescent
‘I’ thought into its source and definitively destroy it. What Bhagavan is
saying is that through repeated practice you can learn to take your sense
of ‘I’ back to its source and hold it there in such a way that nothing
distracts it. Nothing will make it want to go out and follow a thought. If
you reach this state of effortless thought-free ‘I’ sense, then this ‘I’
will be abiding at its source. But this is not liberation. This is simply
the ‘I’ offering itself up as a sacrifice to the Self. When this ‘I’ no
longer has any impetus to move out – when there is no momentum left in it
to chase a thought – then the power of the Self will reveal itself to that
‘I’ thought. It will draw it into itself. It will then destroy it and
liberation will result. Your job is to take the ‘I’ back to its source and
hold it there. The power of the Self, acting through the Guru, will take
hold of that ‘I’ and destroy it once you’ve done that initial process.
16 You started off [this interview] by talking about the Buddha,
[mentioning his statement] that one should not take anything on trust, not
take anything as a belief. One should instead find out for oneself what is
true and what is not true. One should reject what is not true and hold on
to truth. That is also the essence of what Bhagavan had to say, and it’s
also its the core of what he taught about self-enquiry.
17 Question: How is self-enquiry done? How does it work? Why
doesn’t it work sometimes? And what makes a successful practice?
David: To answer all these particular questions I will first need to
explain how Bhagavan saw the mind and how he thought it should be
eliminated, because that’s what Self-realisation really is: the permanent
eradication of the mind.
Sri Ramana taught that all of your thoughts, all of your perceptions, all
of your memories, all of your ideas – they are all an outgrowth or a
predicate of one primal thought which he called the ‘I’ thought. This ‘I’
is the equivalent of a string in a necklace. It’s the thread that runs
through every single idea, thought and perception that you have. Bhagavan
said this ‘I’ is the subject. It is who and what you are. Everything that
the ‘I’ thinks or perceives or experiences is an object.
When I say, ‘I see a tree,’ ‘I’ is the subject and the tree is an object.
When I say, ‘I feel angry,’ ‘I’ is the subject while the emotion anger is
the experienced object. Sri Ramana said that your attention is continually
on the objects that you, the subject ‘I’, are seeing, feeling and
perceiving. He said that because your attention is always on experienced
objects, rather than the subject, you never become aware of the true nature
of the subject. Very interestingly, he said this subject ‘I’ that you never
seriously look at is, in fact, a fiction. It appears to exist by attaching
itself to things that are not itself. It arises from the mistaken idea that
‘I am a person. I have a mind. I live inside a particular body. I do
things. I remember things.’ Sri Ramana taught that this idea is absolutely
wrong. He said that this is what causes you suffering. It’s what makes you
have wrong ideas about yourself and about the world. He said that every
single wrong idea you have about yourself, about the world, about God,
stems from this idea that you are a person inhabiting a body and having a
mind.
18 Bhagavan said this sense of personal identity, which he called the
‘I’ thought, needs to be challenged, and it needs to be challenged
repeatedly, regularly, on a moment-to-moment basis. He said that because
your attention is always on things that are not the ‘I’ – the objects of
your attention, the objects that you remember, believe and perceive – you
never put attention on yourself to see what it is that is thinking your
thoughts and perceiving your perceptions. Bhagavan said that this subject,
the ‘I’ thought, is where your focus needs to be. When you do this, you’re
not looking at things that you want to study, things that you want to know.
You’re actually looking at the entity within yourself which thinks your
thoughts and which perceives your perceptions. Ramana Maharshi repeatedly
asked visitors to contemplate the following question: ‘What is this thing
inside you that is aware of your thoughts? What is this thing inside you
that claims it’s perceiving objects outside of yourself?’ And when he said
‘contemplate’, he meant putting attention exclusively on it and keeping it
there. He didn’t mean that you should study it as an object and come to
some intellectual conclusion about what it might be.
19 Bhagavan said this ‘I’ which we assume ourselves to be is not
something that ever comes under scrutiny because we are all obsessed with
the continuous flow of objects that present themselves to us: remembered
objects, perceived objects, the thought objects. Sri Ramana said that we
need to find out the nature of this sense of individual identity in order
to see through the fiction of individuality. His solution was to be
continuously aware of this one inner entity, this one inner thing that
associates and identifies with all the things that it thinks about and
perceives. Bhagavan called it the ‘I’ thought but calling it ‘I’ and
looking for it often makes people create an idea called ‘I’, which they
then go looking for. They think, ‘Oh, my “I” is up here, or its down
there’. Or, ‘It’s this feeling of peace or beingness that I experience when
I close my eyes.’ They then start focusing on an idea or an experience,
something they imagine the ‘I’ to be, rather than the ‘I’ itself. How to
avoid this trap of objectifying the ‘I’ as something that needs to be
looked at? Whenever you go looking for the ‘I’, whatever the mind alights
on is an object, because that is the way the mind functions: it creates
things to look at and then puts attention on them. Notice how your
attention, like a searchlight, seeks something to focus on. If you are
looking for the ‘I’, it might end up on a bodily sensation, a bodily
location, or an intense feeling of peace or well-being. Examine the process
of how this happens. Before you find that object you think might be the
‘I’, there is a preliminary stage of looking, or seeking. That which is
doing the looking is the ‘I’, not the thing that it eventually looks at.
Catch yourself in the process of searching for the ‘I’ and try to catch the
‘I’ that is doing the looking. That looking ‘I’ is the ‘I’ thought, not
some experienced object that you subsequently latch onto and label ‘I’.
20 What I would suggest is that you look at yourself and be
continuously aware, ‘What is it inside me that thinks my thoughts when I am
thinking? What is it inside myself that perceives a perception when I think
I am seeing something?’ That is your ‘I’. That is your sense of individual
identity. This isn’t simply a question of looking at something and
understanding it. It is not an object to be analysed and understood like a
dissected specimen pinned to a board. Bhagavan tells us that this thing
which correlates and organises all thoughts, all perceptions, isn’t
actually a real entity. It fools us into believing that it is a real and
permanent thing because we never look at it closely, never study it to see
how it persuades us of its reality. Sri Ramana said if you can hold on to
this sense of ‘I’, this thing that thinks your thoughts, and not be
distracted by any passing thought-object it wants to be entertained by,
this ‘I’ will very very slowly start to subside. Keep full attention on
this inner feeling, this thing that thinks your thoughts, without allowing
it to escape and grab any more ideas or perceptions. Sri Ramana says that
if you do this successfully, this ‘I’ will go back to its source and,
ultimately, it will disappear. That disappearance will reveal to you who
you really are. Bhagavan sometimes says that you need to find the source of
the ‘I’. You don’t find that source by looking in a particular place or
direction. You discover it by holding onto an awareness of ‘I’ until it
subsides and vanishes. Holding onto it leads you slowly back to the source
in a way that looking for a specific localised source never does. {DAVID
CODMEN DISCIPLE OF RAMANA}
THAT IS THE MYSTERY TILL OUR END WE DO NOT REALISE
K RAJARAM 2225
On Sun, 2 Feb 2025 at 04:11, Jambunathan Iyer <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> “Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your
> strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it
> will never be used to hurt you.”
> N Jambunathan Rengarajapuram-Kodambakkam-Chennai-Mob:9176159004
>
> *" What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you
> become by achieving your goals. If you want to live a happy life, tie it to
> a goal, not to people or things "*
>
>
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