Gita, lesson 18: what I can call "I" and what is merely an object

Someone says "I am 50 years old." But is time the self? The eighteenth chapter in Swami Dayananda Saraswati's series uses this kind of defamiliarization to investigate the most basic question in Indian philosophy: what, exactly, does the word "I" designate?

The criterion of the object

The rule that organizes the chapter is simple: anything I can take as the object of my attention cannot be the subject. The body fits this rule. One speaks of "my hand" and "my liver," never of "I am the liver." The same holds for emotions, memories, thoughts, doubts, and even one's own ignorance, all of them perceived by someone. The tradition calls this entire set anātma, the not-self.

The subject needs no proof

What is left is the one who perceives. Dayananda states that there is only one "I" of this kind, with no second one to perceive it. It is self-evident: no one needs to ask whether it exists, because the very question already presupposes who is asking. This Self (ātman) is said to be satyam, what exists by itself. Everything else is mithyā, what exists in dependence on it, in the sense that it is only known through it. To illustrate, he uses two images: the pot and the clay, where there is just one clay and many pots; and light, which reveals objects without depending on them.

Not even God as an object

The chapter also warns against a common slip. Seeking an experience of God, through meditation or seclusion, turns God into yet another content of the mind, and therefore an object, not the Self. The Self is the one who witnesses even the idea of God.

The conclusion is that the world is not something separate from the one who knows it. It depends on the Self, but the Self does not depend on it.

The complete study is in the book A Essência do Bhagavad Gītā (The Essence of the Bhagavad Gita), by Swami Dayananda Saraswati.