The primordial one pierced the senses outward and hence
the person looks outwards and not inwards.But a brave spirit with inward looking eyes desiring
immortality looked within and found the immortal self.. Katha Upanishad (Chapter 4 verse 1)
There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.
Charles Baudelaire
All living beings, from plants to unicellular organisms and sea anemones, from butterflies and glow worms to hummingbirds, from alligators to dolphins, from cats, dogs and horses to apes and human beings wish to continue living, and to flourish. Every minute of their lives they do all they can to live and flourish. And in this they succeed according to the sensorimotor and mental abilities they possess, and to the extent that outer circumstances allow.
In this respect, the appearance of human beings on the earth in the course of evolution marks a break in the order of sentient beings. Over the millennia, one primate became a biped with an upright posture and gait, a highly developed front brain, and an opposable thumb with hands that could grasp and manipulate objects into tools. This being, which lived in packs like wolves and apes, developed not only a long-term memory, but also a collective memory. It also developed the ability to articulate a huge range of meanings using an incredible range of sounds (including the intensely beautiful mix of harmonic and melodious sounds called music); all this was made possible by a highly developed and sensitive larynx. This was a radical break from the range of abilities of other sentient beings.
Over the course of the next few millennia, this member of the genus Homo seems to have outlived other similar sub-species. Homo sapiens developed all the abilities unique to them, such as generalising repeated experiences into abstract thoughts, representing the thoughts visually in written languages, and further inferring rules of correct thinking or logic. In the course of time, these unique abilities of rational thinking resulted in the building of large bodies of knowledge, leading ultimately to the huge complex artefact called modern globalised civilisation.
All this is not to suggest that human beings are completely unique among sentient beings. Even the smallest of living beings display an astonishing intelligence which enables them to flourish. A wild mother duck will feign lameness to draw the attention of a stalking hyena, and at the same time guide her chicks towards a lake so that they can swim away to safety and she can follow. Elephants, giraffes and chimpanzees in the wild ‘mourn’ their dead and some domesticated elephants even ‘mourn’ the death of their trainers. Dogs are proverbial for their loyalty to their masters and are known to have risked their lives in order to save young children from grave danger.
Many sentient beings can be clever, skilful, intelligent, empathetic and altruistic, but they know nothing about questioning themselves or the world. They are comfortable in being what they are, living comfortably in their skins. They are a part of nature and are completely embedded in it. Even their altruism and capacity for empathy is of an unselfconscious kind. The fleeing gazelle doesn’t question, as far as we know, why it must exist in order to satisfy the leopard’s hunger; neither does the leopard feel the slightest guilt for killing the gazelle. Tennyson might have been shocked at the sight of ‘Nature red in tooth and claw,’ but neither a predator that is ‘red in tooth and claw’, nor its prey feel any such emotion.
With the appearance of the human being on earth, there was a radical change, not just in its leap over the abilities of other sentient beings but also in its fundamental nature. This change can only be called an existential one, because this being questioned the nature of its own existence and the nature of the world it found itself in. This being was not only conscious, but also conscious of being conscious; it was self-conscious. This is not to say that human beings are ‘superior’ to other beings—only that our place in the order of beings is different.
Self-consciousness enabled this new being to face itself and ask What or who is this ‘I’ that I call myself, and what is my nature? This ‘I’ also questioned the world itself, asking Who or what are you? What is your substance, and whereof are you made? This being also wanted to know why at all there should be gratuitous suffering in the world both for itself and for other sentient beings. It asked What is death and is there life after death? This was a break into a totally new dimension of Being.
This specific ‘human question’ is found thus at the very dawn of recorded history in the Nasadiya Sukta of the Rig Veda:
Then even nothingness was not, nor existence,
There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it.
What covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?
Was there then cosmic water, in depths unfathomed?
But, after all, who knows, and who can say
Whence it all came, and how creation happened?
The gods themselves are later than creation, so who knows truly whence it has arisen?
Whence all creation had its origin, he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not, he, who surveys it all from highest heaven, He knows—or maybe even he does not know.
Extracts from Wendy Doniger’s translation of the
Rig Veda Sukta (circa 1500 BCE)
Here we see a being who is a part of nature but not completely defined by it, because the being has also confronted nature with questions like ‘Whence is all this?’, ‘What am I and what am I doing here?’ or ‘Is there a transcendental infinite dimension of which this world is a manifestation?’ In such questioning, the human being is unique. Baudelaire’s steely barb has pierced the human heart and soul. These and other similar questions were asked in other civilizations of antiquity, such as in ancient Greece and China. And there are no immediate answers forthcoming to these questions.
This was the turning point, the radical existential break away into a new dimension that human beings landed in—the dimension of ‘not knowing.’ For we do not know the answers to the fundamental questions of who or what we are, why we are here, and what the universe is. In Ancient Greece, the Delphic oracle’s dictum was ‘Know thyself,’—but legend has it that she also declared that Socrates was the wisest man in Greece because he alone ‘knows that he knows nothing’.
The space in which we ask the question ‘Who am I?’ is an empty space, a space of ‘not knowing’. This space, seemingly specific to human beings, offers an opportunity for us to fulfil a specific human destiny — that of being free of any identification and fixed self-definition, unlike other beings whose identities are fixed by nature itself. Here the statement by Krishnamurti on the nature of human beings is relevant. He says:
Any species that specializes obviously comes to an end. The greatness of man is that he cannot specialize. He may specialize technically, but in structure he cannot specialize. An acorn seed is specialized—it cannot be anything but what it is. But the human being does not end completely. There is the possibility of constant renewal; he is not limited by specialization.
J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life, 21st November
Here as I understand it, ‘specialization’ means a fixed nature. The elephant with all its intelligence and capacity for empathy remains an elephant and nothing more. It does not question itself or the world. This is true for all beings except human beings, who are not ‘specialized’ in this way, for they have gone beyond this specialized equipment in their self conscious questioning of the self.
Thus the free space in which human beings find themselves is an opportunity for them to be free to look clearly at different emerging life situations as time passes, and to respond with clear vision and appropriate actions. In other words, here is the opportunity to take responsibility for our lives and actions. As long as we remain in this free space, we can look at all the events that pass through the mind non-judgmentally, or in other words, with ‘choiceless awareness’.
It is impartial looking that makes possible the acceptance of painful or uncomfortable truths. The history of science shows that however painful it might have been to accept, for example, that a sun-centred universe explains the movements of the planets much better than an earth-centred one, the fact eventually had to be accepted. In science, such impersonal choiceless looking has been relatively easy. Though the Newtonian system had been well established for over two centuries, it was relatively easy for scientists to recognise its limits at the turn of the 19th century. We now accept the concept of space-time in relativity theory and even accept weird concepts in quantum mechanics like ‘probability waves’ and ‘quantum entanglement’ because they are successful and bring us the internet and laser surgery! It is this pragmatic success that makes it possible for non scientists to accept the weird theories of quantum physics.
It is apparently very difficult for us to be impersonal in our lived experience and exercise choiceless awareness of the thoughts and emotions that pass through our minds. When we lose sight of that choiceless awareness and identify with one or other of the elements in our consciousness, the free space which is our inheritance contracts, and our minds continue to run in a narrow groove.
1 Rainer Maria Rilke
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Quantum mechanics and experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things, a continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities. A set of vibrations…A world of happenings, not of things.
— Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics