Is Your Deepest Self the Same as Everyone Else's?
Tat Tvam Asi meets Jung's collective unconscious.
Chandogya Upanishad vs Jung. Not just a shared unconscious, but a shared being.
The Boy Who Thought He Had Learned Everything
Shvetaketu walked back into his father's courtyard at twenty four, certain he knew everything worth knowing. It was somewhere in the Kuru Panchala country, late Vedic period, and he had been away twelve years at the forest school. His sacred thread hung correctly across his chest. His hair was oiled and knotted in the scholar's style. He carried the posture of a young man who had run out of questions. The household fire was still burning in the corner where his mother had left it that morning. The smell of woodsmoke and boiled rice filled the courtyard.
His father, Uddalaka Aruni, looked at him across the fire and saw the problem immediately. 'Did you ask your teacher,' Uddalaka said, 'for the teaching by which the unheard becomes heard, the unthought becomes thought, the unknown becomes known?'
Shvetaketu had not. He had learned facts. He had not learned the thing that makes all facts intelligible. He stood there with his credentials, suddenly aware that twelve years of study had not touched the one question his father was pointing at. And so, in the sixth book of the Chandogya Upanishad, the father becomes the teacher, and one of the most influential dialogues in the history of human thought begins.
The question at stake is simple and vertigo inducing. When you go all the way down, past personality, past thought, past even awareness of being a particular person, what is there? And is the answer the same for everyone?
Uddalaka's Argument
Uddalaka does not lecture. He runs experiments.
He asks Shvetaketu to fetch a fruit from the banyan tree outside. Break it open. What do you see? Seeds. Break a seed open. What do you see? Nothing. Uddalaka pressed the point:
sa ya eṣo'ṇimaitadātmyam idaṃ sarvaṃ tat satyaṃ sa ātmā tat tvam asi śvetaketo That which is the subtle essence, in it all that exists has its self. That is the Real. That is the Self. Tat Tvam Asi. That thou art, Shvetaketu.