I am, therefore I think: When René Descartes met Ramana Maharshi

‘God made the senses turn outwards, man therefore looks outwards, not into himself. Now and again a daring soul, desiring immortality, has looked back and found himself.’ 

Katha Upanishad

When I was fifteen we had the internet installed in the house for the first time. I didn’t appreciate this ‘installation’ was done remotely, and sat waiting for the team of engineers to turn up, such was the mystery of the World Wide Web. Five minutes of listening to a dial up modem bleeping (it didn’t bleep, but there are no comparable sounds) and I was away, at the lightning speed of 28.8 kbps! (whatever that means). 1998, What a time to be alive.

Whether I should be proud or ashamed of this I’m not sure; but one of the very first things I used AltaVista to search for were the philosophical writings of René Descartes. I can’t exactly recall, but I assume they either weren’t available at the school library, or I didn't want to take them out. Twenty minutes of listening to my dot matrix printer do its very best impersonation of a TIE fighter, and I had my copy.

As you can probably tell, I’m connecting with a certain nostalgia in writing this. It was my first foray into philosophy. I planned on getting the meaning of existence nailed down quickly, then I could get on with the important business of making lots of money.

Descartes didn’t disappoint. We’d all heard his famous ‘cogito ergo sum’, but reading his reasoning of how he got to that point convinced me of my own existence. Like René, I had emptied my barrel of all its rotten apples, vanquished the demon that tried to deceive me, and now stood on a solid existential footing. There was something that I could definitely—definitely—know.

Until the day I didn’t.

Over the following years this ‘thinking thing’ that I was, came to doubt that it really was me. As I turned eighteen and became (technically) an adult, I couldn’t shake the strange sense that I was somehow exactly the same as when I’d been three years old. Everything about me that I could point to had changed, so why did ‘I’ feel the same? I also remember feeling tired one morning, and recognising how much a lack of sleep affected my ability to concentrate. It suddenly struck me as strange, that who ‘I’ was would change at the whim of factors like sleep and diet. At this point, it still escaped my notice that ‘I’ dissolved into a void of nothingness for several hours each night.

Beginning at age sixteen, a series of mystical satori-like experiences led me to an interest in Zen Buddhism. Initially, I somehow missed the parts about questioning the nature of the self, and I hadn’t thought to pay any attention to it in my direct experiences. Beginning to practice meditation may have contributed to what happened next though: the spontaneous insight that there was no ‘I’ resident in my head. Rather, ‘I’ appeared as a stream of consciousness, a flow of one thought leading to the next, and the next, and the next. 

Having no philosophical grounding to understand this within, it was not an experience that provoked any sense of joy or mystical oneness with the universe. I actually became depressed. The one thing I thought I could stand upon—my one good apple—was now rotten too.

Cutting a long story (that I’ve told elsewhere) short, I eventually came to immerse myself in the Indian philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, which we commonly translate as non-duality. I could then understand my predicament not as a disastrous loss of my last vestiges of identity, but rather as an opening to a far greater one. Advaita points beyond Descartes ‘thinking thing’, to the consciousness in which thought arises as being our true identity. To quote the 20th century Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi:

‘The Truth is that Self is constant and unintermittent Awareness. The object of inquiry is to find the true nature of the Self as Awareness.’

This awareness/consciousness is seen as one ultimate whole, underlying all of existence. We are but dreams in the mind of Brahman. The goal of jnana-vichara, or self-inquiry, is to realise one’s self as this universal consciousness, attaining moksha—liberation from the suffering identification with our individual character brings about. In this sense, Eastern philosophy has a much more experiential aspect than Western, which merges seamlessly with mythology, religion and mysticism. To quote Ramana once more:

‘Only if one knows the truth of love, which is the real nature of Self, will the strong entangled knot of life be untied. Only if one attains the height of love will liberation be attained. Such is the heart of all religions. The experience of Self is only love - which is seeing only love, hearing only love, feeling only love, tasting only love, and smelling only love, which is bliss.’

It’s hard for Descartes to compete with this. It’s like comparing my old 28.8 kbps modem to whatever high speed optical fibre I’m running today. They’re just in entirely different leagues. Western philosophy may have given rise to our modern scientific world, but when it comes to making direct inquiry into the nature of the self, it’s just not on the same level as India’s.

For a long period I pushed away any association with Descartes' work. I did not see my philosophical or spiritual journey as a continuum, beginning with reading his Meditations. At best it was an antecedent, at worst a meaningless chapter, a wrong turn before I discovered the real stuff. I recall this being the general feeling towards Descartes in spiritual circles, that he got things entirely the wrong way round: It’s not that I think therefore I am—rather: I am, therefore I think. 

With the passage of time (and perhaps some maturing) I have come to wonder if my desire to exclude Descartes from my biography was born of a wanting to push away any association with my own thinking mind. With non-dual spirituality, there is often a period of struggle, where aspects of the self—especially the cognitive aspects—can be seen as the bad guy. Thought seems to stand in the way of attaining moksha: that sense of cosmic bliss.

As I’ve come to feel more comfortable integrating all aspects of my being, recognising that they are not enemies within, I have come to desire to include Descartes’ influence on me as part of the continuum of my journey. The very origin of it, in a sense. I have also come to consider that maybe René Descartes offers Westerners a way into what can be a very tricky philosophy. In many ways I feel more culturally similar to this Frenchman from the 17th century than I do to Indians from the 20th. Their whole conceptual language can be so different, rooted as it is in entirely different religious and philosophical suppositions. 

There are overwhelming similarities. Descartes too is involved in a form of self-inquiry. I would absolutely contend that he did not get as far with it, but that is not necessarily a reason to jettison his efforts. It could be said that the obvious implication of Descartes' statement ‘I think, therefore I am’, is that there must also be something that is witnessing the thinking. This witnessing awareness could very well be said to be a truer form of identity than anything arising within it. In answer to the question 'what am I?’ Descartes contends that he is a ‘thinking thing’. Surely he could also have observed himself as a ‘witnessing thing’.

With this small shift, Descartes’ philosophy starts to look very similar to Advaita Vedanta. From noticing that one is a ‘witnessing thing’, it is just another small step to begin inquiring into the nature of that witnessing awareness. Perhaps that in turn gives rise to the kind of mystical experiences that caused Ramana to declare that ‘the truth of love… is the real nature of Self.’ Western philosophy would then not only step towards the East, but also be more able to embrace Europe’s home grown mystical traditions; from the Neoplatonists through to the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages.

It may also be the case (as I have argued elsewhere), that the kind of reasoning from first principle Descartes engages in could itself cause shifts in perception into a direct seeing of the oneness of consciousness. I am not personally convinced that the methodologies are all that different. 

There was a line of philosophy—inquiry into the nature of the self—that, for whatever reason, simply did not develop in Europe as it did in Asia. René Descartes made what was perhaps our best effort. Given the difficulty of expressing mystical concepts, perhaps, four hundred years later, he still offers a way into the East for the Western mind.