Does he who is Rama require the help of
a mirror to know
that he is Rama? (1)

On your screen is a picture of my grandson, Evan. When that photograph was taken on Valentine’s Day in 2024, he was barely a day old. Something about him in that moment set me thinking about the mystery of the human mind and spirit. I wondered whether his mind was like Aristotle’s tabula rasa—a blank slate (2), yet one endowed with an inner potential and orientation toward truth—or like John Locke’s later view, in which the mind is shaped almost entirely by experience³.

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Indian spiritual thought seems to stand quietly beyond this opposition. It suggests that the deepest self is neither produced by experience nor absent at birth, but ever-present, though veiled. Life does not create this self; it only obscures or reveals it. Christian mysticism speaks in a similar key. The human being is grounded not in achievement or accumulation, but in being—in the image of God—called not to become something else, but to awaken to what already is.

 

Watching a life begin has a way of turning the gaze inward. As a septuagenarian, I find the question returning to me from the opposite end of the journey. After decades of learning, striving, roles, and responsibilities, do I still need the world to tell me who I am? Or, as Ramana Maharshi once asked, “Does he who is Rama require the help of a mirror to know that he is Rama?”

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At this stage, the ancient declaration Aham Brahmāsmi—I am Brahman (4).—no longer appears as a metaphysical claim demanding belief. Read carelessly, it can sound grand or abstract. Read patiently, it points to something simpler and more demanding: that the deepest self one seeks is not an object to be known, but the very ground of knowing itself. It does not inflate the ego; it quietly dismantles it. What is affirmed is not the small, constructed self, but that which remains when all constructions fall away.

 

Perhaps the arc of life bends not toward accumulation, but toward recognition. The child begins in unknowing innocence; the elder, if fortunate, arrives at a knowing that no longer needs proof. What lies between is not the manufacture of a self, but the long, patient removal of what one is not. |