Abstract
The Universal Self and the Individual self in Vedanta
Highlights
In this article, by the word ‘mind’ we will mean the accumulation of the information content of an individual’s experiences, desires, emotions, thoughts, etc
We recognize that mind-body interactions as described in Vedanta are in some ways analogous to software-hardware interactions in today’s computers. We suggest that this analogy sums up Vedanta’s answer to the ‘hard problem’, namely, the difficult question of how subjective experience occurs in living beings but not in lifeless matter
Both the mind and the body are required for consciousness to appear in a living being; clearly this position is consistent with the neuroscience finding that the existence of a neural correlate is necessary and sufficient for the corresponding conscious experience to occur; in other words, every experience-causing biological trace in the brain’s memory has an associated ‘meaning’
Summary
In the ancient Hindu philosophy known as Vedanta, the mind — understood as an accumulation of memories, desires, emotions, thoughts, etc., including the self, that is, the ‘I’-thought present in every conscious experience — is said to be a sense like any other physical sense: see, hear, touch, taste, or smell. Vedanta affirms the existence of a state in which one’s self does not see itself as belonging to only one’s own body/brain and mind but one sees nobody and nothing in the universe as different from oneself; in other words, this awareness (called Universal Self) identifies itself with everything in the universe, whether living or lifeless. Vedanta claims that in our ordinary lives, in those moments when we express love and sympathy towards others, we are in that state of infinite oneness whether we know it or not, and that the expression of love is a manifestation of nothing but the Universal Self.
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