What is me? Two perspectives from East and West

If I have to define who I am – not me in particular but as an individual – I might say that I am the aggregate of my experiences. At any given moment, a human life is a conscious experience plus a recollection of previous experiences stripped off their spatial and temporal aspects: memories, knowledge, skills… They make up who I am. I am my life. Or so I thought before moving to India.

There is a short anecdote about Pablo Picasso which I’ve always loved. Once, he was sitting in a park when a woman walked by and asked him for her portrait. Picasso drew for a few minutes and handed her the sketch. The woman was amazed by its beauty and likeness, and asked Picasso how much she owed him. “5000 francs, madam,” said Picasso. “Why so much?” the woman asked. “It only took you a few minutes!” Picasso answered: “No, madam, it took me my whole life.”

I am very aware that I am enabled to do the things I do because I learned it some time earlier on in my life: through those echoes of the past that have fixed themselves in my mind. I have called my memories the most precious thing I own: indeed, they constitute me. Then I moved to India and this idea, among many others, was challenged by a modest insight into different ontologies. 

The Indian spiritual leader Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 – 1986), for example, held a diametrically opposed position: that we have to rid ourselves of the baggage of the mind. If we base what we do on past experiences and previously acquired knowledge, we are restricted by the limits of our own history. One has to free the mind from those things that are holding it back. Thought itself is always tied to the past, and therefore thought is an obstacle to truth. 

Krishnamurti brutally played down all of my precious knowledge and experiences as limiting rather than empowering. Pointing out the limits of our thinking, he says that we have ‘small minds.’ And we approach the enormous problems that life presents us with in terms of the pettiness of our own minds. For example, if a little mind thinks of God, the God of its thinking will be a little God. Krishnamurti’s endeavor is to transform the small and petty mind into something not bound by its own limitations. How?

Many Indian thinkers conceptualize consciousness, in line with the Vedic tradition, as something like the essential nature of the world; the absolute aspect of all reality; the energy that creates and moves. It doesn’t only exist in individuals, but in all things and also on a cosmic scale; the human mind is just one lower and limited manifestation of this infinite and eternal consciousness. My so highly esteemed brains were put in its place in India.

Western science does not claim that our brain is perfect, but at least it is superior to other things we find in nature. With all its flaws, it is the only thing capable of observing nature. This is reversed in Indian philosophies: our thinking is just a small indication of something much larger. Nature is not disparaged as something to be observed in order for it to be understood, but lifted up as something to become part of in order for it to be understood. 

Of course, for those with a Western upbringing, the Picasso story resonates probably more than Eastern wisdom. I know that I am almost anxiously holding on to everything I learned in my life, afraid to forget any skill or knowledge. What Krishnamurti tells me is to approach things with a mind that is unconstrained by fixed ideas and to incorporate some modesty in my approach to the world.