Origin of the self

“I want to dwell for some time on a very important area in self-Knowing, an area which is not adequately covered in the lifetime work of the Master Sri. J. Krishnamurti. And this is about the genesis of the self. How did this so-called self, which is the giver of joy and fulfillment on the one hand, and also, the giver of enormous pain and suffering on the other how did it actually originate? So, that’s the question I’m trying to answer.

“And I find that when you look at very small infants, I have noticed that in small infants who are a year old, maybe 18 months old, the eyelids actually don’t blink. And some where I read in some pediatric literature and I discussed it also with Prema that this is evidence that the self has not yet formed. Because it’s well known that the gods don’t blink. It’s there in the literature of the Hindus. It could be there in the literature of the Egyptians also, that the gods are shown with large eyes. If you look at the pictograms, the the eyes of the gods, they are very big. And what does it show? It shows that the eyes don’t blink. Now that’s the state when the self is not there.

“And as soon as the self is formed, I’ve seen in infants, whom I observed closely, that you can see the visibility of the glint of mischief in the eye of the infant. And prior to that, there was only pure innocence and the pure looking at the world without any sense of division between me as this body and the world as something else apart from me. So this is a state in which all infants are and gradually as they come into the second year, so on, the self becomes stronger. So, the question arises how did the self, actually take birth.

“Now, because I happen to have studied Jyotish in some depth, I discovered that the moment the primordial Light, has got this inevitable connection with the human body, which has taken birth, and along with that, there is a primordial Light which is somewhere in the background. And then when I pondered over it, I found that this primordial Light, OK, let me give it more life by giving you a sutra from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj: “Awareness, is primordial. It is the original state, beginning less, endless, uncaused, unsupported, without parts, without change”. And you are That, I am that.

“Now this is Maharaj’s perception of this Awareness or the primordial Light, and this light came with the body. But then in the beginning, there was no self. The self means something, with a separate individuality masquerading as though it is the body and laying a claim to ownership of the body and then getting hurt and being divisive in the thinking and so on. Now, depending on the Divine architecture, when the primordial Light has this association with the body, the big Self or the Awareness, primordial Awareness, it may acquire a watery cladding, a watery vestment, by which I mean that the individual is primarily a feeling person is more like a mystic or a poet or a musician or an artist who feels very deeply, whose emotional intelligence is very high and the self resides in that. But that’s one kind of vestment or cladding that you get.

“Now, another kind of vestment and cladding that this primordial Awareness takes on, it can be a very fiery vestment or a fiery cladding where the self is defining itself through its will power, through its ambition and through its insights and through its passion to manifest something. So that’s another vestment that the whole direction of it, the whole tenor of it, the ambition, the willpower, the insights and so on.

“Or the primordial Light can take on another very distinct vestment, which is an airy investment. So, which means the self is now in the matrix of thoughts and ideas and aspirations, ideas, essentially ideas, means like Ahimsa, Satyagraha, Perestroika, then Glasnost, and anything new in the world I mean, which is the prerogative of the great thinkers and the great leaders who initiate some new movement.

“Or, the primordial Light can also clothe itself in yet another kind of vestment, namely an earthy vestment and when it does that because these are the four primordial elements and when it does that, then the individual you will see defines himself through his body. He will say, I am this body and he’ll point to his body or he may have an interest in very concrete manifestation on the earth plane, like gardeners and horticulturalists, landscapists are given to that kind of drive and inclination or somebody an engineer or even a doctor who is dealing with the physical thing like the body. So, this primordial Awareness it takes on different kinds of claddings and a sense of self, kicks in.

“If the association of the body would not have happened at all then there is no question of the primordial Light being camouflaged by the vestment and then the whole thing serving to create quite inadvertently the whole phenomenon of a separate individuality which likes to stand apart from what it perceives as the cosmos and then define itself either as the body or as its ideas, or as its lifetime work as a sculptor, as a gardener, as a doctor or through its will, through its ambition, through its insights or through its deep feelings like artists and musicians and poets do. So, this is how the self, actually arises, but when the primordial Light has that inevitable association with the four elements which are in consciousness, then the rest of the life is for the playing out of the drama of that self.

– Sankara Bhagavadpada