Chapter VIII

Identity
AT "THE MOUNTAIN"

   

   “The Mountain” is a retreat center in North Carolina, popular with Atlanta groups. Run by the Unitarians at that time, it is just north of the Georgia border and up above everything. The Vedanta Society was fortunate, in the spring of 1983, to secure a reservation for our weekend retreat. Earlier retreats were held in Mountain City, Georgia, in a very rustic locale. At The Mountain we had better facilities. From that peak one seems to look down upon the whole world, as if from great metaphysical heights, but our experience of it was not what it should have been because of rain, through almost the whole weekend. However, we had study to do, and the sessions were long and intense; below is the substance of the presentations.
   
   
Identity crisis
   
    We can become identified with things in surprising ways. When ice cream parlors of a certain brand disappeared from the city where I live, an acquaintance told me she felt devastated. “When I heard the news I was depressed for weeks,” she said.
    Discarding false identities is a fairly comprehensible and widely used self-help procedure. But let us be more subtle: discarding is also relating; i.e., it involves our sense of identity, our personal limits, our integrity.
    Vedanta makes a two-pronged assault on the problem of identity: a short-range one, involving our present life and who we are in time, space and circumstances; and a long-range one, aiming at our absolute, unconditioned identity, or “who we really are.” We need to go about these two searches concurrently, for they are closely related, and the more our spiritual outlook matures, the closer they are seen to be. Thus we are shooting for the stars but keeping our feet on the ground.
   
    The so-called identity crisis dates at least from the time when doubt was thrown, in the Age of Enlightenment, upon the Christian doctrine of a God-created soul. Although Martin Luther did not directly attack this nor even disbelieve it, in many ways his is the watershed figure in the vast shift which took place in the minds of the populace. The phrase identity crisis, however, is modern—post World War II. From the turn of the century till then, we were looking to our cultural leaders to tell us who we were. For example, Wordsworth and other poets substituted for “the soul” a romantic self. Matthew Arnold moaned that “the self is being lost,” whereas T.S. Eliot deplored a “divided self.” D.H. Lawrence gives us a “new” self, born of the secular religion of love, while Yeats (who, we may interpolate, had a fair understanding of Vedantic ideas) prefers the secular religion of Art. Coming down the years we hear from Beckett of a “zero self.” More recently someone has said, “You are a person through other persons.” Quite a span of opinions.
   
   
Flexibility and identity
   
    Erik Erikson, one of the most prominent spokesmen on psychology of our day, espoused an identity diffusion. There was no integrated self-concept and no integral and stable idea of others in relation to oneself. How very opposite to a system of relations totally defined and fixed, as in the way of,  for example, Confucius! The illness of our society is evidenced by, among other things, the divorce rate (people can speak of “temporary commitment”), and the feeling of having no purpose (both individually and collectively). National and international events have become a form of theater, which can be followed on the news media like soap opera. From the radio comes this bit of weighty fluff:
Kermit the frog, to Peter Sellers: “Just relax and be yourself.”
Sellers: “Impossible. I could never be myself.”
Kermit: “Never yourself?”
Sellers: “No, you see there is no me; I don't exist.”
Kermit: “I beg your pardon?”
Sellers: “There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed.”
    The manipulation of others has come to be not merely approved but admired and emulated. There are excellent examples in the TV shows “J.R.” and “Dallas”, and in the sordid history of Richard Nixon. One has to ask, is flexibility the supreme value in all the phases of our life? Then what is the meaning of vows, as in marriage or monastic life? Many of today's commitments are minimal, and continuity falls ever lower in the scale of values. Many American families used to know the genealogy of their forefathers and mothers; now rootlessness is rife in American life.
    How many options we have in this rich land! One has only to visit in the third world to see that our amplitude of choice on every side, in every field, even leaves us bewildered. There is much talk of “community,” but where is it? What is it? Certainly not neighborhood, in these mushrooming ticky-tacky subdivisions. A rabbi in Pennsylvania declares that while he wouldn't be happy to hear that a prospective convert did not believe in God, “he'd have to accept her if she agreed to live a Jewish life and to throw in her lot with the Jewish people.” Here we surely have a new definition of a Jew! Or is it?
   
   
Solutions
   
    These are the things today's psychologists are pointing to, and while many agree on the problem, not many propose the same solution. The question of finding our “short term identity” as we have termed it, is complicated by this modern trend toward diffusion of the self. Instead of the old psychology of a single self, often dominated or repressed, with will power and conscience forming its character, the moderns give us a plurality of different voices, fractional selves, and tell us that these need to be integrated. They may even assert that to think of each of us as a separate, monolithic, unchanging persona is an obstructing fiction. Today's “personality” is many selves, contending with one another. This inner fragmentation is seen for example, in one part of our mind wanting something and another part knowing we have no right to it. Such frustration results in the development of neurotic symptoms.
    When public figures become exposed for abuse of office, caught with the smoking gun, so to speak, from their embarrassed faces we hear the words “it was beyond my control”, “I deeply regret…” etc., as if their present self-state were the only one worth considering. A busy doctor, for instance, might do better to say, “My professional self wants to do rounds at the hospital, but my spontaneous self wants to go to the golf course.” Then he can make a conscious choice, and realize which self he is electing. It reminds us of Swami Vivekananda's dictum: “Don't repent!”—i.e., acknowledge a mistake and move on.
    Personality splitting, they say, is a basic mental mechanism, but we must integrate these sub-selves to make a coherent self. It's useful, sometimes, to take extreme cases. For example, an “alcoholic self”'s purpose is to get a drink, to celebrate, to cheer up, to forget—and no hiding behind rationalizations. Similarly with the procastinator self, the optimist self (the gambler), the pessimist, the go-getter, the dreamer, adventurer, scaredy-cat, cynic. Then there is that special class who are always “becoming” and never quite reach: the painters and writers who don't get inspired; the graduate students whose theses drag on; actresses and musicians who never seem to be quite in the right place at quite the right time.
   
   
A gender difference
   
    Women, in particular, throughout human history have not been encouraged to ask “Who am I?” Defined by their relationships and the role “assigned to them by nature,” they have been expected to please others. In the old India this was the rule of thumb; nothing else was anticipated. The woman becomes “somebody” not as careerist or even as wife, but as mother (doubly so if the baby is male). Again she has another role if widowed. This is sometimes true even in the “liberated” West. We think of an example in which a very powerful woman, a hospital administrator, abjectly crumbled on hearing her mother's voice on the phone, presumably putting her in her place.
    In one of Erikson’s writings he asserts that identity involves both a sense of continuity within oneself and some measure of agreement between that sense and the perception of the self by others. “If people around you don't know who or what you are, something is wrong!”
    In other words, they say, we can have a number of sub-personalities, but there must be an inner observer and organizer, who can declare, “I needed this self in the past, but I've outgrown it. We must take full responsibility for ourselves.” As Sri Ramakrishna put it, “Let there be no thievery in the granary of the mind.” The sub-selves must not be disconnected islands.
    The media, which present us with dazzling, diverse role models and life styles, give the impression that anyone is free to be anyone, if he/she only learns to act the part. The doctor finds the patient expects him to react to his problem with stereotyped phrases and so he gives them, and the patient's own conviction is only reinforced. Television dramas turn human conflicts into esthetic happenings. When real life seems not to be exciting enough, dramatic techniques are used to “hype” it with “docudramas” etc. As a result people begin to experience themselves as part of a show, vividly exemplified in the TV talk shows. We may be able to delineate three steps in this process: first, producers and directors, themselves borderline personalities, put forth their versions of reality; second, the public readily accepts that this is the way things are: “telling like it is,” we happily say; third, the values of the characters depicted soon get assimilated into the culture.
   
   
Three sorts of “selves”
   
    All this theatricality increases our self-consciousness—the awareness of our lower self. Someone has said that the saddening paradox of modern life is the coexistence of a heightened self-sense coupled to an increasingly fragmented identity.
    The Wonder of Being Human is the title of a work by Sir John Eccles, a Nobel prize-winner, and David N. Robinson, who have made some nice distinctions we should like to summarize here. The book defines “self” as an awareness of being: “I am.” One's “self-identity” is “who one is” (based on memory). An amnesiac, for instance, has the first but lacks the second. Then there is the third, which they call our “personal identity”, i.e., others' knowledge of who one is. When we meet a total stranger we may have the second, but do not have the third. The total amnesiac may not have either the second or third, but still has the first. The authors make a study of “multiple personality” (as in “Three Faces of Eve”) and come up with the conclusion that such cases are not three selves in one person, but three different self-identities possessed by one otherwise unique and irreducible self.
   
   
The Outlook of Vedanta
   
    We have seen that many modern psychologists agree on the two mistakes we usually make regarding the human will: either we totally abdicate our will or we define it with Victorian simplistic rigidity. But these counselors see nothing amiss in trying to persuade ourselves that we are a “group of selves," a team. This is where Vedanta differs markedly. Our spiritual intuition tells us a different story. Sankara says that all compound or combination things exist for the purposes of a single agent. In a group of musicians playing chamber music, for example, it may appear, or may even be prescribed that they have no conductor; the organizing agent, however, is the composer, whose indications the group has agreed to portray. When the psychologists say, “Choose consciously among your sub-selves, be ready to express one, equally ready to discard one”, Vedanta would have to ask, “Who is making this choice?” What we posit is an antaryami, the reflected Self as an inner controller.
    I should like to turn now to some pronouncements on identity which I consider authoritative, surveying the whole field, from recent times—teachers I have known—back through the founders of the Ramakrishna movement and then to the more ancient authorities, the smriti and sruti (the scriptures of Vedanta).
   
   
 Spokesmen of today
   
    “Who Am I? A being who has had much more experience and who has made many more choices than I can now recall—enough experience and choice, in fact, to have built up my present character, mentality and body. I am what I have thought. I am the residuum of many choices. Therefore I blame no one and accept full responsibility. What Am I? One of the innumerable beings passing up through Time to Timelessness. I am here partly to discharge my own mistakes and partly to develop rudimentary constructive beginnings. Why Am I? That I may so act toward myself and so act toward and through these others, that they and I may come to realize we are one, and thus attain the complete Unity. I am in the presence of ascending invisible powers of being as much above me as I seem to be above the animals and insects. This ascent continues until the highest beings, free from Time, are without separation and become united with the Eternal. I therefore draw myself up toward that Light by an ascending contemplation of ever higher Being until I contemplate that Being, which, because It transcends all time, space and separation, must be immanent, and therefore possesses even me.” [1]
   
   
Differences which drop away
   
    “Do you know that when this higher consciousness grows within you it is not possible for you, or certainly it is not instinctive with you, to recognize that here is a woman and here is a man? That sense goes away. No doubt many of you are surprised to hear this. ‘What do you mean by that? Don't you see any more? You must admit that men look different from women. And don't you think that if you have good eyes you will recognize the difference, even if you were an illumined soul?’ No. One of our great Swamis, Swami Turiyananda, who lived for some years in this country, later said, ‘While I was in America I was not conscious of the difference between men and women.’ When I first heard about this, it made a very deep impression on my mind. I was then a novice in one of our monasteries and I thought, what a wonderful thing that is: after all, there is no man, no woman in God, and if everyone is really divine you cannot say, ‘Here is a man and here is woman.’ To perceive the difference is a violation of the truth. You may say, ‘Well, it might have been a very special thing with Swami Turiyananda.’ Of course it is a special thing! It is not an easy thing to perceive.” [2]
    “I have often thought that if from their birth children did not hear such debilitating statements as, ‘You are a born sinner; you are a man; you are a poor man; you are a healthy man; a good man, a bad man,’ but were told instead, day after day, ‘You are eternal, you are immortal, you are ever pure, you are full of knowledge, full of strength, full of blessedness,’ this truth would become a power in their life, even when they grew up and their other instincts began to prevail.” [3]
   
   
Worship of Spirit by Spirit
   
    “Worship God feeling that God is spirit and I am spirit,” writes Swami Ashokananda. “That would be the truth—the truth about me and the truth about God. Thus if I worship him in this way I shall be worshiping him in spirit and in truth; in my worship there will be no element of falsehood or unreality. If, on the other hand, I do not recognize him as spirit, if I do not recognize myself as spirit, and if I do not come to the conviction that in this I have arrived at truth, my worship of him is not the truest worship. Just as worshiping God in an idol or thinking of him as only an object of your formal worship would not be to worship him in truth, in the same way, to worship him without thinking of yourself as spirit would not be to worship him ‘in spirit and in truth.’” [3]
    “When a little quietness comes into this mind, you feel as if you are a soul—not Spirit yet, but as if you are something a little different from the mind and the body. You will actually have that feeling. If you say, “Well, some people may have that feeling,” I tell you, everybody will have it; granted there has been a little change in the condition of the mind, that consciousness will come. And when you look at others, you will begin to feel that they, too, are a little more than mere body and mind. You will see something else there. You do not have to infer it, you actually feel it. When you look at the world, you will feel that behind this material world is a finer entity, and God will not seem so unreal or impossible as he seemed before.” [4]
   
   
No rest here
   
    “I would not call any position philosophy if it fails to recognize that it is my present state of being and knowing that is the source of all the trouble. In my present state I am not able to make peace with myself. I am continually torn and divided within myself; the claims of the body encroach upon the claim of the Spirit, and the claims of the mind want to ignore the claims of the body as well as those of the Spirit, and of course the Spirit will ignore the claims of both body and mind. Until we have really established ourselves on our highest level, which is that of the Spirit, there is a continuous loss of equilibrium; we are continually moving and never able to attain any stability of being. We all know this to be true. That is the real problem of any individual seeker of truth.” [5]
    “In one of the books of our philosophy, it is said, 'Do not think that you are separate from anything. Whatever you think you are separate from will circumscribe you and bind you. Think that you are one with all, and you will feel free.' That is the true sense of oneness, but do not for a moment think that it can be derived by any superficial practice. Real things are not on the surface….Only the great can achieve the great. Only the deep can achieve the deep. If you say, 'It seems to me the cure is more difficult than the illness,' I shall ask you why you think you have not the deep power within you. Why should you have that idea? Why should you be superficial and think that that is your nature? That is where you are committing suicide. You are deep, profound. Try to be deep and profound and see if you cannot find deep and profound truth within yourself. You have to practice these things. If you become superficial, you will become like the dust that is being scattered by the wind.” [6]
   
   
Swami Vivekananda
   
“First kill yourself and then take the whole world as yourself.”

“Nothing in the universe has power over you, until you allow it to exercise such a power.”

“This world is a play. You are His playmates.”

“If you think you are free, free you are at this moment, and if you think you are bound, bound you will be.”

“That is the highest person who can say with truth, 'I know all about myself.'”

“When you look at the unchanging Existence from the outside, you call it God; and when you look at it from the inside, you call it yourself.”

“I may be a little bubble of water and you may be a mountain-high wave, never mind! The infinite ocean is the background.”

“Whether you know it or not, through all hands you work, through all feet you move.”
   
   
Classical Texts of Vedanta
   
    Let us see how the question of identity is handled in some of the celebrated classic texts of Vedanta. In The Discrimination between the Seer and the Seen we read:
   
“The form is perceived and the eye is its perceiver. The eye is perceived and the mind is its perceiver. The mind with its modifications is perceived and the Witness (the Self) is verily the perceiver. But It (the Witness) is not perceived (by any other).” [7] And from Self-Knowledge:

“By negating all the superimpositions through the help of the scriptural statement “It is not this, It is not that,” realize the oneness of the individual soul and the Supreme Soul by means of the great Vedic aphorisms.” [8]

“I am free from changes such as birth, loss of weight, senility and death; for I am other than the body. I am unattached to the objects of the senses, such as sound and taste; for I am without sense-organs.” [9]

“I am free from sorrow, attachment, malice and fear; for I am other than the mind.” [10]

“I am without attributes and action, eternal and pure, free from stain and desire, changeless and formless, and always free.” [11]

“I fill all things, inside and out, like space. Changeless and the same in all, I am pure, unattached, stainless and immutable.” [12]

“I am verily that Supreme Brahman, which is eternal, stainless and free; which is One, indivisible and non-dual; and which is of
the nature of Bliss, Truth, Knowledge and Infinity.” [13]

“Blessed am I: I have attained the consummation of my life, and am free from the clutches of transmigration; I am the Essence of Eternal Bliss. I am infinite….” [14]

“In me, the ocean of Infinite Bliss, the waves of the universe are created and destroyed by the playing of the wind of Maya.” [15]

    We should also mention the Astavakra Samhita, a highly monistic text which concludes with a celebratory section on realization, and the Pancadasi, which does a comprehensive job of pricking all sort of bubbles, the illusions we ignorantly cherish.
   
   
The Bhagavad Gita
   
    Here we are on ground which is not only classical but also popular. Here are some of the most important verses of the Gita relating to our personal identity.
   
“This soul is never born, it never dies. Once coming to be, it never ceases to be. This birthless, deathless, changeless and primordial spirit is not slain when the body is slain.” [16]

“The wise one integrated in yoga, thinks 'I do not do anything at all' while seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, sleeping, walking, breathing, talking, giving and taking, even in opening and closing of the eyes, he knows full well that only the senses play on the sense objects, not the real self.” [17]

“He sees himself in all beings and all being in himself. This is the vision of the Yogi, whose mind is in universal harmony. He sees the same spark of God in everything he sees.” [18]

As regards our “short-term” identity, too, the Gita has its message: “It is better for a man to do a work prompted by his inner nature, even if it is not done well, than to do a work not natural to him—however well performed. He who works according to his own nature, makes the right choice.” [19] Finally, Sri Krishna tells us who all of us are, in relation to him, the Lord, when he says to Arjuna, “You are dear to Me,” for Arjuna is Everyman. [20]
   
   
Upanishads
   
    Passages in the Upanishads, the most ancient record of all self-knowledge, about ones identity, are legion. We shall cite only a few:
“This knowing Self is not born, nor does It die. It does not spring from anything, nor does anything spring from It. Unborn, eternal, everlasting, ancient, it is not destroyed when the body is destroyed.” [21]

“He is the one, the ruler of all, the Inner Self of every being, who makes his oneness manifold. The wise who realize Him as the soul of their soul—to them belongs eternal bliss and to none else. He is the one reality in this world of shadows, the one consciousness of all conscious beings, he who, though one, fulfills the desires of the many.” [22]

“That which all this has as its subtle essence of That is everything made. That is the Real. That is the Self. And thou art That…” [23]

“Next the instruction with regard to the Self. The Self is below, the Self is above, the Self is behind, in front, to the right and to the left. The Self has become all this…” [24]

“He who dwells in all beings, who is within all beings, whom the beings do not know, whose body all beings are, who controls the beings from within—He is the Inner Controller, your Immortal Self.” [25]
   
   
Summary
   
    To conclude this study of the identity crisis, we cannot do better than to provide our readers with the experience of Swami Ashokananda in his own account:
    “These are the conclusions that I arrived at: that there is only one reality, the Spirit; that I am that reality; and if I am that reality, then I am not bound by this body or these senses or even by my mind—so I have to admit that I am infinite, I am limitless. How can there be anything outside me? If you say, ‘Now, Swami, that's no way to think: it sounds so awfully egotistical. How can you think that you are all that there is and that we are nothing? Are you really so majestic, so great, that you can say you are the whole of reality?’ Yes, I can say that, but it is not egotism.
     “Egotism is itself a phase of the mind. You have read in Vedanta that the ego is one of the four aspects of the mind. You can realize a state when you actually see that the ego has nothing to do with you. In that state you can't be egotistic. Egotism thrives on the recognition of other people with whom you can compare yourself and find yourself superior; without that, you cannot have any egotism. If you are the all, how can you make comparisons? In fact, you cannot even say ‘I,’ because when there is only one reality, it becomes a silent entity. It cannot define itself, it cannot name itself, for all naming and defining belong to the mind. And if you are not the mind, if you are beyond it, if you are the ineffable reality in which there is no definition and in which there are no terms, then what you are cannot be expressed in any way.” [26]
   
    It was Sunday afternoon, and we had to come down from The Mountain, as almost everyone has eventually to do. But it is to be hoped that something of these heights of thought and feeling remained with all of us for the days and years that followed.

      

  1. Gerald Heard, The Recollection
  2. Swami Ashokananda, Spirituializing Everyday Life
  3. Ibid.
  4. Ibid., Worship of the Spirit by the Spirit     
  5. Ibid., My Philosophy and My Religion—I
  6. Ibid.     "                "
  7. Drg-drsya-viveka 1
  8. Atma-bodha, 29
  9. Ibid, 31
  10. Ibid. 32
  11. Ibid. 34
  12. Ibid. 35
  13. Ibid. 36
  14. Viveka cudamani, 488
  15. Ibid. 496
  16. II. 20 (trsl. Santosh Ganguli]
  17. V. 8-9         "
  18. VI. 29         "
  19. XVIII. 47     "
  20. Ibid. 64
  21. Katha Upanishad I. 2. 18
  22. Ibid.  II. 2. 12, 13
  23. Chhandogya Upanishad VI. 8. 7 ff
  24. Ibid.  VII. 25. 2
  25. Brhadaranyaka Upanishad  III. 7. 15
  26. Op. cit. p. 51

   

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