For as long as I’ve considered the matter, I’ve never struggled with imagining my prenatal existence. It always seemed intuitively right to simply project the various causal constituents that comprise me back into the past, mentally disentangling them from the aggregate whole of my body like an undone knot. The apparent ‘unity’ of the ego never posed any particular challenge to this conception— I had never possessed any intuitive belief within it anyway. It was never apparent to me that some internal state of affairs inhering such that I am given to refer to myself as ‘I’ should demand some extravagant ontological commitments in order to make sense of the phenomenon. That’s not to say that I was unable to see how one’s internal state could be interpreted or construed as such, but it never struck me as being in any sense an appropriate ‘default’ assumption to make. Now, as a freshly minted adult of twenty, I find myself wondering whether my current commitments now obligate me to invert these intuitions I have maintained throughout my not-so-many years of being alive.
If you know anything about me, you know that I am a convert to Hinduism; if you know anything about Hinduism, you know that it is the religion of the ātmā. That term literally just means ‘self’ in Sanskrit, and thus, unsurprisingly, possesses an astonishingly large semantic field, reflected in the innumerable different senses and capacities in which the term is used within the domain of Hindu religious discourse. Nevertheless, and particularly in Western academic contexts maintaining an enduring (and yes, slightly orientalist) fascination with Buddhist philosophy, the ātmā is often stereotyped as being the ‘Eastern’ equivalent of the fanciful, wooey notion of an eternal soul bandied about within Christian and Islamic pop-metaphysics, nobly banished by the tireless efforts of Nāgārjuna and co. Indeed, many descriptions of the ātmā within the Hindu textual tradition come quite close to vindicating this interpretation, exemplified well by the description of the ātmā propounded by the Śrī Vaiṣṇava ācārya Jāmātṛ Muni:
“The self (ātmā) is neither a god, nor a human, nor an animal, nor an immovable being, nor the body, nor the senses, nor the mind, nor the vital air, nor even the intelligence. It is not inert, it is not mutable, and it is not awareness only. It is aware of itself and it is self-luminous, it has unchanging form, it ever abides in its true nature, it is conscious, it pervades the body, it is of the nature of consciousness and bliss, it is the referent of ‘I,’ there is a different self in each body, it is indivisible, and it is eternally pure. Furthermore, it has the intrinsic characteristics of being an apprehender, agent and qualitative experiencer, and by its own nature and at all times it is an inherent part of the Supreme Self.” (trans. Bryant, slightly mod.)
This description, itself based on verses from the Padma Mahāpurāṇam, typifies many general tendencies held towards the concept of the ātmā amongst the schools of Hinduism that reject at least some form of radical monism. This seems, on the surface, to quite radically oppose every facet of my intuitive approach to these matters. While the tradition does indeed acknowledge the causal compositionality of the mundane ego and its cognitive faculties, that there is something else nevertheless undergirding the whole show seems to be a non-negotiable. While I may not be a Śrī Vaiṣṇava specifically, the traditions I do study, to greater or lesser degrees, entertain many of the same tendencies. What’s a materially-minded man like me to do, then?
I, personally, do believe that there is a way of making it work. Whether that reflects my own cognitive interests more than an impartial pursuit of the truth, I’m not sure. Partiality is a fact of life, whether we like it or not. Best to not dwell unnecessarily on things one cannot change. My approach, unsurprisingly, begins with karma; that is, properly speaking, a given causal relation qua its perpetuation of the series in which it occurs. The manifest individual, insofar as it is a unique and irrepeatable aggregation of these causal relations, is in and of itself a locus for further causal individuation. This is the gross body or sthula-śarīra. This locus, insofar as the causal individuation it engenders is itself conditioned by the consolidation of prior causal relations it itself comprises, produces modes of propagation and engagement convertible with but not reducible to prior modes— this is the beginning of social and linguistic reality (c.f. R. Scott Bakker’s Blind Brain hypothesis). This is the subtle body, or sūkṣma-śarīra. Insofar as the causal individuation this locus, the body, engenders is directly contiguous to the causal relations that engendered it, the body itself functions as a causal relatum within its broader global context. This is the causal body, or karaṇaśarīra. Insofar as the principle of causal individuation qua itself remains invariant, individuality as such is indexed by the body as a site for further individuation. This, to me, is the ever-elusive ātmā. Not ‘self’ or ‘soul’, but individual. The individual.
Now does, this then, relate to my own intuitions about reversing the clock, so to speak, on what makes me up, and being so easily able to see my self dissolve through it? Ironically, this is precisely what makes it possible. As an individual, I am therefore the individual, as such, and all of the causal relations that constituted myself, and were engendered and individuated through me, are then indexed to me, as I myself am them. This, of course, doesn’t really fully reconcile me to, say, Jāmātṛ Muni’s understanding, but I don’t think it needs to. It’s a start, and, I think, enough for that.