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Self-awareness and Ultimate Selfhood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Affiliation:
Director, Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy
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The fruit of several centuries of rationalistic thought in the West has been to reduce both the objective and the subjective poles of knowledge to a single level. In the same way that the Cogito of Descartes is based on reducing the knowing subject to a single mode of awareness, the external world which this ‘knowing self’ perceives is reduced to a spatio-temporal complex limited to a single level of reality – no matter how far this complex is extended beyond the galaxies or into aeons of time, past and future. The traditional view as expressed in the metaphysical teachings of both the Eastern and Western traditions is based, on the contrary, upon a hierarchic vision of reality, not only of reality's objective aspect but also of its subjective one. Not only are there many levels of reality or existence stretching from the material plane to Absolute and Infinite Reality, but there are also many levels of subjective reality or consciousness, many envelopes of the self, leading to the Ultimate Self which is Infinite and Eternal and which is none other than the Transcendent Reality beyond. Moreover, the relation between the subjective and the objective is not bound to a single mode. There is not just one form of perception or awareness. There are modes and degrees of awareness leading from the so-called ‘normal’ perception by man of both his own ‘ego’ and the external world to awareness of Ultimate Selfhood, in which the subject and object of knowledge become unified in a single reality beyond all separation and distinction.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , September 1977 , pp. 319 - 325
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

References

page 319 note 1 Traditional metaphysics speaks of Ultimate Reality either as the absolutely Transcendent or the absolutely Immanent which however are one, brahman being the same as atman. Hindu meta-physics, however, emphasizes more the language of immanence, and Islamic metaphysics that of transcendence without one language excluding the other.

See Schuon, F., Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, trans. by Matheson, D. M. (London, 1953), pp. 95 ffGoogle Scholar. See also Schuon, , Language of the Self trans. by Pallis, M. and Matheson, D. M. (Madras, 1959), especially chapter xi, ‘Gnosis, Language of the Self’.Google Scholar

page 320 note 1 See Coomaraswamy, A. K., Hinduism and Buddhism (New York, 1943), pp. 10 ff.Google Scholar

page 320 note 2 See Corbin, H., L'homme de lumière dans le soufisme iranien (Paris, 1971). In diverse traditions, the return of the self to Self has been compared to the shedding of outward skin by a snake which by virtue of this unsheathing gains a new skin and a new life.Google Scholar

page 320 note 3 See Schuon, F., ‘Atma-Maya’, Studies in Comparative Religion (summer 1973), pp. 130–8.Google Scholar

page 321 note 1 It is of interest to recall that in Greek τελέω means at once to gain perfection, to become married and to die.

page 321 note 2 Nicholson, R. A., Rumi-Poet and Mystic (London, 1950), p. 103.Google Scholar

page 322 note 1 Quoted in Izutsu, T., ‘Two Dimensions of Ego Consciousness in Zen’, Sophia Perennis (Tehran), II, no. i (1976), p. 20.Google Scholar

page 323 note 1 See Nasr, S. H., An Introduction to Cosmological Doctrines (Cambridge, 1964; second editionLondon, in press), chapter 15.Google Scholar

page 324 note 1 Rumi, , Mathnawi, ed. by Nicholson, R. A. (London, 1930), IV, Book Iv, v. 519–28, trans. by P. Wilson.Google Scholar

page 324 note 2 Meister Eckhart, trans. by Evans, C. de B., 1.139. Quoted from Coomaraswamy, op. cit. p. 13.Google Scholar

page 325 note 1 Izutsu, OP. Cit. p. 33.Google Scholar

page 325 note 2 Sri Ramana Maharshi in fact based the whole of his teachings upon the method based on asking ‘who am I?’. His most famous work, a collection of answers given to one of his disciples, Pillai, Sivaprakasam, who arranged and amplified them, is called Who am I? (Tiruvannamalai, 1955)Google Scholar. See Osborne, A., Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self Knowledge (Bombay, 1957).Google Scholar

page 325 note 3 From the Mantiq al-tayr, trans. by Fitzgerald, F. S.. Arberry, A. J., Classical Persian Literature (London, 1958), p. 131.Google Scholar

page 325 note 4 Schuon, F., Light on the Ancient World, trans. by Northbourne, Lord (London, 1965), p. 117.Google Scholar