Psychological self, transcendental Self, Atman

 

We look for a permanent term, something to hold on to, that serves as a reference when the whirlwind of becoming is no longer valid as a reliable explanation and everyday experience says nothing about our identity. There is nothing anywhere that tells us that such a foundation makes sense, just a basic intuition about something genuine in our existence that seems to suggest the concept of something fundamental and permanent. Different mythical traditions offered a wide variety of possible terms that exhausted the senses of the concept of divinity. The last of these, that of contemporary science, loses itself in the inherent limitations of the paradoxical logic that it uses, and in exchange for the toys of technology, it keeps the promises of a scientific foundation for existence that is merely a metaphysical phantasmagoria.

We then return to the subject that we think we are, disenchanted with the objects that satisfied our childish curiosity, and by doing this we realize that we were already underway, that we were being the reference we were looking for, we simply did not suspect that our need for a foundation is precisely what points to the foundation. When we looked for the permanent term we doubted that the point at which we were standing was solid enough to provide the foundation, and this doubt was already an unspoken question, the most basic, the most genuine. A question expresses a wish, and the wish is dissatisfaction, doubt about the current state. We seek fulfillment, satisfaction, the dissolution of the question, or what is the same, a total indubitability, and we find that what is undoubted is the desire to find, the annulment of the desire in its fulfillment. The desire-question is prior to reflective thought, it is not made by the psychological self, which builds and responds from the past, from memory, both personal and transpersonal. It is about a different self, that shows a desire to know before any personal story is elaborated, that doubts any narration, of any conditioning established by memory, by the group, a self that deliberately suspends any belief, trying to arrive naked in the here and now. This is the transcendental Self of which phenomenological philosophy has spoken, which has been awarded the ability to lead the thought that takes us to the foundation. It is a personal Self that would like to be impersonal and offer a transparent image of Reality, but it cannot stop being an object that is projected onto mental objects and shapes them. The transcendental subject is not the Atman because it is an "I am the inquisitive thought", it is the minimum form that the desire-question takes, and therefore an object. No object can be a permanent term, since it is only a representation.