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The Western, Buddhist, and Upanishadic Answers to the Problem of the Self

Man looking in the mirro

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Your body and mind have changed enormously in the course of your life, and will continue to change. Yet, convention has you, from the baby to the retiree, as the same person.

But let’s not be so conventional. Let’s take the time to ask: what is a ‘person’, and what would it take for a person no longer to be that same person? Are you the same, identical person at all times? Are you the same person that you were a minute, a day, a year, ten years ago? If so, what is the abiding factor?

The English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) famously defined a person as ‘a thinking, intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places.’ According to this definition, you are a person because you can think about yourself in the past, future, and conditional, and in a variety of different places: ‘Last month I could have won the lottery, if only I had bought a ticket.’ 

This may tell us what it takes to be a person, but it does not tell us what constitutes the person—or what it is that makes you this self-conscious mental being. Is it your body, your brain, your ‘soul’?

Three Thought Experiments

Imagine, God forbid, that you have a serious accident that leaves you lying brain-dead on a hospital bed. Your body is being kept functioning, but you are no longer self-conscious nor can you ever be again. Are you, in that permanent brain-dead state, still a person? If not, then your physical body cannot be that which makes you a person. And if it is not your physical body, the obvious candidate is your brain or mind.

Some philosophers have argued that you remain the same person because your body or brain remains the same body or brain, in the sense that it is spatiotemporally continuous (continuous in space and time). Others have argued that you remain the same person because you are psychologically continuous, that is, because your later mental states derive or descend from your earlier mental states.

To help decide this problem, the American philosopher Sydney Shoemaker (1931-2022) asked us to imagine that science has advanced to such an extent that brain transplants are now possible. On the same morning, two men, Mr. Brown and Mr. Robinson, each have their brain removed and operated upon. However, a poorly trained assistant inadvertently puts Brown’s brain into Robinson’s head, and Robinson’s brain into Brown’s head. One of these men dies, but the other—say the one with Brown’s brain and Robinson’s body (let’s call him ‘Brownson’)—eventually regains consciousness. When asked his name he replies, ‘Brown.’ Subsequently, he is able to recognise Brown’s wife and family and to relate Brown’s childhood memories, but he cannot recognise Robinson’s wife and family nor relate Robinson’s childhood memories.

Who then is this man Brownson with Brown’s brain and Robinson’s body? If he is Brown, as most people would argue, this would confirm our earlier intuition that a person cannot be reduced to a body. This leaves us with two possibilities: Either Brownson is Brown because he has Brown’s brain, or he is Brown because he is psychologically continuous with Brown.

To decide between these two possibilities, let us push our thought experiment further still. As people can survive with extensive damage to one cerebral hemisphere, let us imagine that Brownson’s brain (or indeed anyone’s brain, say Smith’s) is divided into two hemispheres and that each hemisphere is transplanted into a brainless body. After the operation, two people awake who are both psychologically continuous with Smith, and who have the same character and memories as Smith.

Although both people are psychologically continuous with Smith, they cannot both be Smith—or, by the transitivity of identity, they would also be each other! Moreover, from the moment they awake, their lives and experiences will begin to diverge.

Our attempt to decide between brain and psychological continuity as the seat of personal identity has landed us in an even deeper difficulty: whereas both brain and psychological continuity seem capable of division, personal identity is not.

Parfit and the Pearl of Self

In considering this kind of ‘fission’ thought experiment, the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit (1942-2017) argued that personal identity may not be what matters.

Because neither of the two people who acquired one of Smith’s brain hemispheres is Smith, Smith cannot be said to have survived the fission of his brain. Yet, everything that matters about Smith—his memories, character, intentions, relations—has survived in both of the transplantees. And it would be absurd to destroy one of the transplantees simply so that we could preserve numerical identity and claim that Smith had survived.

For Parfit, there is no further fact about personal identity, no ‘pearl of self’ that passes intact from one moment, or body, to the next. What matters is not identity but continuity.

This sounds radical. But to me, who has written on Indian philosophy, it rings a bell—or even two.

The Buddhist Take

More than two thousand years before Locke, Shoemaker, and Parfit, the Buddha had argued that what we take to be the self is composed of five elements (skandhas), namely, body, sensation, perception, will, and consciousness. The five skandhas are in a constant state of flux but together create the illusion of integrity and continuity, that is, the illusion of the self.

This explains why, when I try to become aware of myself, I can only ever become aware of such and such perception, such and such sensation, or such and such thought, but never of any actual, core self.

The death of the bodily self leads to the disaggregation of the skandhas and to their re-aggregation into another not-self, which is neither identical to nor entirely different from the previous one, but forms part of a causal continuum with it. An analogy that is often offered to describe this process of rebirth is that of a flame, fuelled by desire, passing from one candle to the next.

The cycle of rebirth can only be broken by transcending our subjective and distorted image of the world, which is built around the ‘I am’ conceit. This, then, is nibbana, or, in Sanskrit rather than Pali, nirvana.

Nirvana, as I see it, rests on the understanding that consciousness is a sequence of conscious moments rather than the continuous, unbroken consciousness of the ‘I am’ conceit. This understanding, so long as it can be maintained, amounts to freedom from the self.

The Upanishadic Take

While Parfit and the Buddha have much in common, the Upanishadic tradition adopts a different approach.

When I look for my self, I find my body, sensation, perception, and so on. The Buddhist concludes that, since none of these is permanent, there can be no permanent self. But the Upanishadic sage might ask: who, or what, is aware of all these things?

The answer of the Upanishads is the Atman, or true Self: not the skandhas, which wax and wane, but the consciousness that is aware of them. Just like the eye cannot see itself, though it sees all else, so this ‘witness consciousness’ cannot observe itself. But through every change, it is the one constant.

Whereas the Buddhist concludes that there is no enduring self, the Upanishadic sage concludes that we have been looking for it in the wrong place. The self is not something that we experience, but that by which we experience. It is not an actor on the stage, but the prince watching from behind the curtain.

Two birds sitting in a tree
The jiva and Atman, sitting in a tree

East and West

We began by asking what, from baby to retiree, makes you the same person. The body could not provide the answer, while brain and psychological continuity proved capable of division. Parfit’s solution was to question the question: beyond continuity, there is no further fact of personal identity.

The Buddhist arrives, by a very different route, at essentially the same conclusion. What we call the self is a succession of changing states and processes, held together by causal continuity and the ‘I am’ conceit. Liberation lies not in finding the self, but in freeing ourselves from it. To ‘know yourself’ is, paradoxically, to know that there is no self to know.

The Upanishadic sage, though acutely aware of the problem, succeeds in salvaging the abiding self. No abiding self can be found among the changeable contents of consciousness, because the true Self is not one of those contents, and not changeable.

All three traditions have noticed that the self cannot be found among the contents of experience. From this, the Western tradition and Buddhism conclude that there is no self. The Hindu tradition preserves the self by distinguishing between the personal self, or jiva, and the universal Self, or Atman. Where the jiva is attached, ever-changing, and mortal, the Atman is detached, steadfast, and immortal, and of a kind with God, or Brahman. The precise relationship between Atman and Brahman is a major theme, and dividing line, in Hindu philosophy.

In the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, the jiva and Atman are compared to two inseparable birds sitting in a tree (the body). One bird, the jiva, gorges on the sweet and bitter fruits of the tree, while the other bird, tasting of neither, calmly looks on.

We can never catch the second bird, because it is the one that is looking. And so it remains forever elusive. But if the Upanishadic vision is correct, to know that bird is to know both ourselves and God, and, as in Buddhism, to transcend the distinction between self and other.

In the West, we tend to look upon the personal self as a problem to be solved; in India, as the key to salvation.

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What Homer Can Teach Us About Ghosting

Odysseus meets Argos upon his return to Ithaca
Argos is the first to recognise Odysseus upon his return to Ithaca—and then dies.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Why does being ghosted hurt so much? Homer and the Mahabharata point to a timeless answer, hidden in the faithfulness of two dogs.

The reunion of Odysseus and Argos occupies barely forty lines, yet it is one of the most moving episodes in Homer’s Odyssey.

After twenty years away, Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar. Outside the palace lies his old hunting dog, Argos, blind, flea-ridden, and abandoned on a dung heap. Recognising his master, the dog lifts his head, gives a final wag of his tail—and dies.

Christopher Nolan greatly expanded Argos’ role in his film adaptation, showing the dog ageing under the neglect and abuse of the suitors. Many cinema-goers, myself included, found the brief reunion between dog and master to be the film’s most moving scene. Nolan has said that Argos was one of the elements that drew him to the project, even describing the epic as the ‘ultimate dog movie’.

Why does this scene move us so deeply? There are many reasons. But one of the deepest is that Argos fulfils one of our most fundamental human longings: the longing to be recognised. Long before we seek fame or deeds, we seek to be known. Friends delight in being understood without explanation. Lovers hope to be recognised beneath the depredations of time. One of the quietest forms of suffering is not to be hated, but to be overlooked—to become as if invisible.

That is why being ghosted can be so painful. It is not merely rejection, but the withdrawal of recognition: the feeling that someone who once knew you now behaves as though you no longer existed. Argos does the opposite.

After twenty years of disguises and transformations, he alone recognises the man who once gave his name as ‘Nobody’. The old dog sees beyond age and suffering—and Athena’s best work—to the man he has always known. Odysseus weeps for the dog, but he weeps also for himself. For twenty years, he has been all things to all men. Then, for one fleeting moment, someone recognises the one man beneath all the disguises. 

Homer was not alone in seeing something profound in a dog’s fidelity. The Mahabharata, along with the Ramayana, is one of India’s two great epics. At the end of the Mahabharata, after the great war has been fought and every earthly hope has been shattered, the five Pandava brothers journey to Mount Meru, followed only by a stray dog. One by one, they fall on the ascent, leaving only the eldest, King Yudhisthira, to arrive at the gates of heaven. The god Indra invites Yudhisthira into heaven, but refuses to admit the dog. Yudhisthira turns away, explaining that he cannot bring himself to abandon his faithful companion. At this, the dog reveals himself as none other than Dharma (cosmic order, duty, right way of living), and Yudhisthira is reunited with his brothers in Heaven. Like Argos, the dog embodies something much greater than himself. By remaining faithful to faithfulness, Yudhisthira proves himself worthy of Heaven and saves his clan.

The two stories mirror one another. In Homer, it is the dog who remains faithful to a man. In the Mahabharata, it is just as much the man. Yet both honour the same virtue. Homer and the authors of the Mahabharata independently arrived at the same intuition, namely, that the fidelity of a dog is not merely an animal instinct. It is a revelation.

The irony, certainly in Homer, is that Argos remembers better than we do—better even than Penelope. Anyone who has ever ghosted, or been ghosted, may find themselves asking: are we better than dogs?

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If Not Physical Fitness, What Was Yoga Originally For?

Indian yogi in meditation
The original purpose of yoga was not to strengthen the body, but to free the mind.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Millions of people practise yoga for stronger backs, greater flexibility, or relief from stress. These are genuine benefits. But they were never yoga’s original purpose.

The first yogis were not searching for physical fitness. They were searching for freedom.

More than two thousand years ago, Indian philosophers concluded that the root of human suffering lies not in the body but in the mind—or, more precisely, in our mistaken understanding of who we are. Yoga emerged as a practical method for overcoming that mistake.

The First Meaning of Yoga

One of the earliest surviving discussions of yoga appears in the Katha Upanishad, composed around the fourth century BCE. There, the brahmin boy Nachiketa rejects wealth, power, and a long life to ask Yama, the god of death, a single question: What becomes of us after death?

Yama replies that this knowledge cannot be gained through study alone, but only through yoga, which he defines as ‘the firm holding back of the senses’:

When the five organs of perception become still, together with the mind, and the intellect ceases to be active: that is called the highest state.

From the beginning, then, yoga was not a form of exercise but a discipline of inner stillness.

Why We Suffer

Classical yoga rests on Samkhya, one of the oldest schools of Indian philosophy. It seeks to explain both the nature of reality and the origins of human suffering.

According to Samkhya, reality consists of two fundamental principles. The first is Purusha, pure consciousness or the witnessing self. The second is Prakriti, which includes not only the physical world but also the body, the senses, the ego, and even the mind itself.

An ancient Indian image captures the idea beautifully. Two birds perch in the same tree. One pecks eagerly at the fruit, tasting now sweetness, now bitterness. The other simply watches. The first bird represents the self absorbed in the changing experiences of life; the second, the silent witness that remains untouched by them.

Yoga teaches that we mistake ourselves for the first bird when our true nature is the second. We identify with our thoughts, emotions, and fears, forgetting that these are passing experiences rather than our deepest identity.

Yoga Beyond Meditation

Composed in the centuries around the beginning of the Common Era, the Bhagavad Gita broadened the meaning of yoga. Alongside meditation, it described the yoga of knowledge (Jnana Yoga), selfless action (Karma Yoga), and loving devotion (Bhakti Yoga).

Its central message is that freedom comes not from withdrawing from life but from living without attachment to success or failure. Like Stoicism, the Bhagavad Gita teaches that peace of mind depends less on what happens to us than on how we meet it.

As the god Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna:

Work done for a reward is much lower than work done in the Yoga of wisdom.

Yoga was no longer confined to the forest or meditation hall. Everyday life itself could become a spiritual practice.

Patanjali’s Yoga

The philosopher Patanjali transformed these ideas into a practical discipline in the Yoga Sutra, the foundational text of classical yoga. He famously defined yoga as:

Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.

To achieve this, Patanjali described an eightfold path combining ethics, posture, breath control, concentration, and meditation, culminating in samadhi, complete absorption. Significantly, the physical postures (asanas) formed only one stage of this much larger discipline.

How Yoga Became Exercise

If yoga began as a path to liberation, how did it become associated with stretching and physical fitness?

The answer lies in its long evolution. Later traditions, especially Hatha Yoga, placed increasing emphasis on physical postures, though still in pursuit of spiritual liberation.

The decisive shift came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Indian teachers such as Tirumalai Krishnamacharya presented yoga in dialogue with Western physical culture and modern medicine. Their students—including B. K. S. Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois—introduced these new forms of postural yoga to Europe and America, where they proved enormously popular.

Modern yoga is therefore not a misunderstanding of the tradition so much as one particular branch of it. While its philosophical roots remain ancient, its familiar image as a form of exercise is surprisingly modern.

The yoga practised by millions today is therefore only one chapter in a much older story.

The Original Purpose of Yoga

Millions of people come to yoga hoping for stronger backs, greater flexibility, or relief from stress. The first yogis hoped for something altogether more ambitious: freedom from suffering through a deeper understanding of the self.

Whether or not we accept their answers, the first yogis were asking one of humanity’s oldest and most profound questions:

Who am I?

For them, the search for that answer was the true purpose of yoga.

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To learn more about yoga and the world that it unfolded from, see my book Indian Mythology and Philosophy.

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His Life, Character, and Philosophy

An attempt on the life of Baruch Spinoza
A religious fanatic slashes Spinoza’s cloak outside Amsterdam’s Portuguese Synagogue. Spinoza kept the torn cloak for the remainder of his life.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Baruch Spinoza transformed Western philosophy with his radical ideas on God, freedom, and the nature of reality, inspiring thinkers from Goethe and Hegel to Einstein. Yet the man who identified God with nature was denounced as a heretic, excommunicated by his own community, and earned his living grinding lenses in rented rooms. Few philosophers have lived so quietly while thinking so dangerously.

Steeped in Descartes

When Descartes died, Baruch Spinoza (also known, after his excommunication, as Benedict, or Benedictus, de Spinoza) was seventeen years old.

Growing up in Amsterdam, he became familiar with the philosophy of Descartes—to the extent that, until 1660, he supported himself by giving private lessons in Cartesianism.

In fact, he became, as far as method is concerned, more thoroughly Cartesian even than Descartes. His Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, published in 1663, is a reconstruction of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy in the formal deductive format of Euclid’s geometry, complete with definitions, axioms, and theorems. It succeeded not only in recasting Descartes’s system, but also in clarifying, refining, and, finally, undermining it.

Given its merits, Spinoza held on to the geometric method for his magnum opus, the Ethics [Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata]. Its geometric method provided Spinozism with added curiosity and credibility, and, to an extent, still does.

Freedom in the Dutch Republic

Like Descartes before him, Spinoza enjoyed relative freedom in what has retrospectively been called the Dutch Republic (formally, the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands; informally, the United Provinces), then in its golden age and the most liberal, and richest, place in Europe.

In the preface to his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP, 1670), Spinoza eulogises his country and its constitution:

Now since we have the rare good fortune to live in a commonwealth where freedom of judgement is fully granted to the individual citizen and he may worship God as he pleases, and where nothing is esteemed dearer and more precious than freedom, I am undertaking no ungrateful or unprofitable task in demonstrating that not only can this freedom be granted without endangering piety and the peace of the commonwealth, but also the peace of the commonwealth and piety depend on this freedom.

In the TTP, Spinoza critically analyses the Bible and argues for the establishment of a secular state founded on toleration. His purpose in critiquing the Bible is to undermine the repressive theological and political order of the era. ‘The purpose of the state’ he concludes, ‘is freedom’—a maxim far ahead of its time, and inscribed on the pedestal of his monument in Amsterdam.

Merchant or Philosopher?

For all its freedoms, life in Amsterdam had not been a bed of tulips. Spinoza’s paternal grandfather Isaac, a Portuguese Jew, had fled the Iberian Inquisition. In the early 1630s, his father Miguel and uncle Abraham moved the family business from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, where Baruch was born. Had the firm not been bankrupted, essentially, by the First Anglo-Dutch War, Spinoza might have continued as an importer of fruits, nuts, and wine.

Attempted Assassination and Excommunication

In April 1655, on the steps of Amsterdam’s Portuguese synagogue, a knife-wielding fanatic attempted to assassinate Baruch, shouting, ‘Heretic!’ Fortunately, the assassin succeeded only in slashing his cloak, which he kept as a memento of the dangers of fanaticism. 

A year later, on 27 July 1656, in his twenty-fourth year, his Jewish community expelled him for his freedom of mind. His excommunication order decried his ‘abominable heresies’ and ‘monstrous deeds’: ‘By the decree of the angels, and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza…’

Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him; the anger and wrath of the Lord will rage against this man, and bring upon him all the curses which are written in this book, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven, and the Lord will separate him to his injury from all the tribes of Israel with all the curses of the covenant, which are written in the Book of the Law.

The sting, however, came in the tail, banning all members of his community, including close family, from engaging with him: ‘We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favour, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells [around four metres] of him, or read anything composed or written by him.’

In a tradition going back to Socrates and Plato, he wrote (but did not publish) an ‘apology’, or defence. Although the work has been lost, he incorporated its contents into later works, especially the TTP—which a viral pamphlet described as, ‘forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil…’ 

Some time after his excommunication, he adopted the motto Caute [Take care] and had it engraved on his signet ring along with a thorny rose (‘Spinoza’ derives from the Latin spinosus, ‘thorny’).

Life as a Castaway

After his excommunication, Spinoza boarded in rented rooms in other people’s houses, in Amsterdam, in Rijnsburg near Leiden, in Voorburg, and finally in The Hague.

Those who knew him were struck by his simplicity, courtesy, and quiet contentment. He lived so frugally that his daily meals often consisted of little more than bread, milk, raisins, and a little butter. In his spare moments, he watched spiders weave their webs and observed flies under his microscope.

In Rijnsburg, under the influence of Descartes, he wrote the unfinished Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, on knowledge and method and the purification (or ‘emendation’) of the intellect.

This work on ‘thinking skills’ opens with a sentence that could have been written by Seneca or some other Stoic:

After experience had taught me the hollowness and futility of everything that is ordinarily encountered in daily life, and I realised that all the things which were the source and object of my anxiety held nothing of good or evil in themselves save insofar as the mind was influenced by them, I resolved at length to enquire whether there existed a true good, one which was capable of communicating itself and could alone affect the mind to the exclusion of all else—whether, in fact, there was something whose discovery and acquisition would afford me a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity.

For fear of compromising his freedom, Spinoza rejected a stipend from a patron and a professorship at Heidelberg, to eke out a living by grinding lenses—including for Huygens, who, in 1667, wrote to his brother, ‘The [lenses] that the Jew of Voorburg has in his microscopes have an admirable polish.’

He should have taken the stipend: the inhalation of glass dust led to his death in 1677, at the age of forty-four, from silicosis.

In the months preceding his death, the thirty-year-old Leibniz, as if acting on a premonition, travelled to The Hague and spent several days in conversation with him—in arguably the greatest meeting of minds since Plato and Aristotle.

The God of the Ethics

Spinoza’s masterpiece, The Ethics, completed in 1675 and published posthumously in 1677, consists of five parts.

The first part, Concerning God, contains an ontological proof, founded on his necessary perfection, for the existence of God, not dissimilar to the one deployed by Descartes. 

Departing from Descartes, Spinoza argues that God is not beyond the world but at one with it. Propositions 14 and 15 state, ‘No substance apart from God can exist or be conceived,’ and, ‘Whatever exists, exists in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God.’ This lack of a distinction between the Creator and his creation is encapsulated in the slogan, Deus sive natura, ‘God, or nature.’

Many contemporaries understood Spinoza to be an atheist, although later Romantics interpreted him rather as a pantheist. The Romantic poet Novalis (1772-1801) famously referred to him as ein Gottbetrunkener Mensch, ‘a God-intoxicated man.’

The Mind-Body Problem

Whereas, starting from an ontological argument, Descartes had argued that at least one thing exists, and that that one thing would not deceive us, Spinoza had argued that at most one thing exists, and that that one thing is everything, including us.

For Spinoza, you and I have no independent existence outside of God; we are not substances, but modes of God, who is the one and only substance.

God has infinitely many attributes, but we can only know two of them, namely, thought and extension. Spinoza’s answer to the mind-body problem is thus to deny that there is a problem: thought and extension, that is, mind and body, are two ways of apprehending the same reality.

Mind and body do not interact, or even correlate, but simply correspond, like the two sides of a same coin.

Freedom

God being eternally and necessarily as he is, things could not be otherwise. Everything follows from God’s essence and prior causes. This being so, nothing is intrinsically good or evil; ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are simply subjective judgements as to what may be helpful or harmful to our survival.

Freedom, too, is a construct of the human mind. People think that they have free will because they cannot grasp the complex concatenation of infinite causes that determines their every thought and action. Freedom is not the ability to do otherwise, but the capacity to comprehend reality as if outside of time and subjectivity, sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity, in the manner of a geometrical proof.

Freedom, in other words, is knowledge, which leads to tranquillity and virtue, is blessedness, and can only be achieved in the secular state.

Immortality

There is no afterlife or personal immortality, because there is no person. But the human mind is capable of grasping eternal truths and, in so doing, participates in something that transcends the individual. If we can bring ourselves to see the world sub specie aeternitatis and share in the eternal mind of God, we achieve a kind of immortality.

Appraisal

As I said, Spinoza has been read by some as an atheist and by others as a pantheist. I see in his Ethics many parallels with Stoicism, Paganism, and, above all, Hindu Vedanta. As per the Chandogya Upanishad, ‘When a man knows the best and the greatest, he becomes the best and the greatest.’

Both ancient and remarkably modern, Spinoza stood completely outside, or beyond, his time. While we may debate the nature of his God, we cannot doubt what he, or it, is not, namely, the God of the Bible—and wonder whether Spinoza’s metaphysics derives, in fact, from his politics.

When asked whether he believed in God, Einstein replied, ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.’

Whereas Descartes, with his vain attempts at resolving the mind-body problem, had struggled to salvage received religion from the trainwreck of the Scientific Revolution, Spinoza did his utmost to overturn it.

The metaphysics of Leibniz, who almost literally picked up the torch from the dying Spinoza, may be read as an attempt to solve the mind-body problem while preserving, rather than overturning, the status quo ante.

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The Upanishads and the Search for the True Self

Two birds in a tree

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Who am I? This is perhaps the oldest and deepest question in philosophy. More than two and a half thousand years ago, the sages of the Upanishads rose up to it. Their meditation, often conveyed obliquely in the form of stories, remains one of the most striking and illuminating in the history of human thought.

The Story of Indra

In the Chandogya Upanishad (c. 7th century BCE), Indra, king of the Vedic gods, and his nemesis, Virochana, king of the asuras (anti-gods), go to the ashram of the creator god, Prajapati, to learn the secret of Atman (the Self).

Prajapati takes them both in, and, after 32 years, summons them and tells them that Atman is the reflection of the self in the pupil of the eye. Satisfied with this answer, Virochana returns to the asuras, who take to venerating the bodily self.

But Indra is not so sure, and goes back to the ashram. After 32 more years as a brahmacharya (celibate student), Prajapati tells Indra that Atman is the dream self.

Still full of doubt, Indra is made to wait another 32 years, before being told that Atman is the unconscious self.

When Indra protests that no good can come of this knowledge, Prajapati keeps him for five more years and, after a total of 101 years, finally tells him the secret of Atman.

If Atman is neither the waking self, nor the dreaming self, nor the sleeping self, then what is Atman?

By having Indra wait for what is the natural lifespan of a wise person, Prajapati is making the point that the deepest truths cannot simply be taught, but must painstakingly be learnt. Wisdom is not something that can simply be handed over. It demands patience, perseverance, and, above all, the willingness to question even the answers one has already received. Virochana was content with appearances; Indra sought the truth behind them.

The Upanishads return to this mystery again and again. In one Upanishad, Indra spends a lifetime seeking the Self. In another, the same mystery is pursued by a very different seeker.

The Story of Nachiketa

The brahmin (priest) Vajashravasa purports to be sacrificing everything he owns, but his son Nachiketa notices that he is only offering up those cows that are old, lame, or otherwise unproductive.

Nachiketa repeatedly taunts his father, saying, “I too am yours! To which god will you offer me?” In a fit of rage, Vajashravasa cries out, “To Yama himself!”

Taking his father at his word, Nachiketa descends to Yama’s abode. But the god of death is out, and the boy is made to wait for three days without food or water. When Yama returns, he offers the brahmin boy three boons to atone for his lack of hospitality.

For the first boon, Nachiketa asks for peace between himself and his father when he is returned to the old man. Yama happily grants this.

For the second boon, he asks to learn the fire sacrifice, which he performs to Yama’s satisfaction.

Finally, for the third boon, he asks to be told what comes after death.

Yama replies:

Here, even the gods of yore had doubt. Indeed it is not easy to know—subtle is this matter—O Nachiketa, ask for some other boon. Press not this on me; give this up for me… Ask for centenarian sons and grandsons, many cattle, elephants, gold and horses. Ask for wide extent of earth and live yourself, as many autumns as you like.

But Nachiketa resists the riches of the world, saying that man is not to be satisfied with wealth: “If wealth were wanted, we shall get it, if we only see thee.”

Impressed by the boy, Yama agrees to tell him the Secret of the Self, which persists beyond the death of the body.

After a time, Nachiketa bids farewell to Yama and returns to his father as a jivanmukta, that is, one who has achieved moksha (liberation) in this life.

Whereas Indra’s trial was patience, Nachiketa’s was temptation. Both the god and the boy proved themselves worthy of the knowledge they sought.

The Secret of the Self

One seeker waited 101 years. Another contended with Death himself. Both sought the same truth.

What did Yama tell Nachiketa? And what, in the Chandogya Upanishad, did Prajapati finally tell Indra?

“Atman” is often translated into English as “soul” but does not include the individual or cognitive aspects of the Judeo-Christian soul and, for this reason, is better translated as “Self.”

In Hindu thought, the individual aspects of the Judeo-Christian soul, such as ego, mind, reason, emotion, and desire, are subsumed under the jivanatman (“life-breath”), or jiva for short.

Whereas the jiva, the personal self, is enmeshed in the world, the Atman is detached from this contingent life and incarnation. And whereas the jiva is ever-changing and evolving, the Atman, the universal Self, is steadfast and immoveable.

In the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, the jiva and Atman are compared to two inseparable birds sitting in a tree (the body). One bird, the jiva, gorges on the sweet and bitter fruits of the tree, while the other, tasting of neither, calmly looks on.

The Atman is neither the waking self, nor the dreaming self, nor the sleeping self, as Indra had been led to believe, but pure consciousness, or witness-consciousness, and of a kind with the supreme soul, Paramatman, which is either Brahman or an aspect of Brahman.

There is something within us that witnesses every thought without itself becoming a thought, every emotion without itself becoming an emotion. Our bodies change, our memories fade, our personalities evolve, yet the simple fact of awareness remains. The sages of the Upanishads identified this silent witness with the Atman.

In all living things, Atman is the spark of life, or light of consciousness, that ignites and illumines all else for the time that it remains embodied. It is the eternal core of a living being, which, in death, leaves it for another form, or, at long last, returns to the infinity of Brahman.

If the Self, the Atman, is made of the same stuff as the world, then self-understanding and self-control become means of understanding and controlling the world and existing on a higher plane.

In the Katha Upanishad, Yama tells Nachiketa:

Subtler than the subtle, greater than the great, in the heart of each living being, the Atman reposes. One free from desire, with his mind and the senses composed, sees the glory of the Atman and becomes absolved from grief.

Knowledge of the Self can be attained through the practice of yoga, which Yama defines for Nachiketa as ‘the firm holding back of the senses’.

This is the first recorded mention of ‘yoga’ in something close to its modern sense—and it is put into the mouth of Death himself.

Yama warns Nachiketa to be watchful, ‘for yoga comes and goes.’

More than twenty-five centuries later, the question that drew both Indra and Nachiketa remains our own. We spend much of our lives identifying ourselves with our bodies, our ambitions, our possessions, our memories, even our thoughts. The Upanishads invite us to look deeper. Beneath everything that changes, they suggest, lies something that does not: the silent witness, the Self, which is not merely ours but one with the universe.

Whether one accepts this vision or not, it remains one of humanity’s most beautiful and profound meditations on the oldest of all philosophical questions:

Who am I?

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