disregard these connotations for the mom ent and consider whether the above inference is not the closest a

biologist can get to p roving also their God and immo rtality at one stroke. In itself, the insight is not new.

The earliest records to m y knowledge date back some 2,5 00 years or more. From the early great

Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN upheld in (the personal self equals the omnipresent,

all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, fa r from being blasphemous, to represent

the quintessence of deepest insight into t he happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of

Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in t heir minds this

grandest of all thoughts. Again, th e mystics of many centuries, indepen dently, yet in perfect harmony with

each other (somewhat like the parti cles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique exp erience

of his or her life in term s that can be condensed in the phrase: D EUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God).

To Western ideology the thought has remained a stranger, in spite of Schopenhauer and others who stood

for it and in spite of those true lovers who, as they look into each other's eyes, become aware t hat their

thought and their joy are numerically o ne -not merely similar or ident ical; but they, as a rule, are

emotionally too busy to ind ulge in clear thinking, which respect they v ery much resemble the

mystic. Allow me a few further comm ents. Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the

singular. Even in the p athological cases of split consciousness or double personality the two persons

alternate, they are never m anifest simultaneously. In a dream we do perform several characters at the sam e

time, but not indiscrimin ately: we are one of them; in him we act an d speak directly, while we of ten eagerly

await answer or response of anoth er person, unaware of the f act that it is we who control his m ovements

and his speech just as much as our o wn. How does the idea of plurality (so emphatically opposed by the

Upanishad writers) arise at all? Consciousness f inds itself intimately connected with, and dependent on, the

physical state of a limited region of matter, the body. (Consider the ch anges of mind during the

development of the bod y, at puberty, ageing, dotag e, etc., or consider the effects of fever intoxication,

narcosis, lesion of the brain and so on.) Now there is a great pluralit y of similar bodies. Hence the

pluralization of consciousnesses or minds seem s a very suggestive hypothesis. Probably all simpl e,

ingenuous people, as well as the great m ajority of Western philosophers, have accep ted it. It leads almost

immediately to the inv ention of souls, as many as there are bo dies, and to the question wheth er they are

mortal as the body is or wheth er they are imm ortal and capable of existing by them selves. The former

alternative is distasteful while the latter frankly forg ets, ignores or disowns the fact upon which the

plurality hypothesis rests. Much sillier questions ha ve been asked: Do anim als also have souls? It has even

been questioned whether wom en, or only men, have souls. Such con sequences, even if only tentative, m ust

make us suspicious of the plurality hypothesis, wh ich is common to all official Western creeds. Are we not

inclining to much greater nonsense, if in discarding their gross superstitions we retain their naive idea of

plurality of souls, but 'remedy' it by declaring the souls to be perishable, t o be annihilated with the

respective bodies? The only possible alternative i s simply to keep to the imm ediate experience that

consciousness is a singular of less is never wh ich the plural is unknown; that there is only one t hing and

Even in the that what seem s to be a plurality is merely a seri es of different personality aspects of th is one

thing, produced by a deception (the Indian MAJA ); the same illusion is produced in a gallery of mirrors,

and in the same way Gaurisank ar and Mt Everest turned out to be t he same peak seen from different

valleys. There are, of cou rse, elaborate ghost-stories fixed in our m inds to hamper our acceptance of such

simple recognition. E.g. it has been said that there is a tree there outside m y window but I do not really see

the tree. By some cunning d evice of which only the initial, relatively simple steps are itself explored, the

real tree throws an image of itself into my the physical consciou sness, and that is what I perceive. If you

stand by my side and look at the same tree, the latter m anages to throw an image into your soul as well . I

see my tree and you see yours (rem arkably like mine), and what the t ree in itself is we do not know. For

this extravagance Kant is responsible. In the order of ideas which regards consciousness as a singulare

tanturn it is conveniently replaced by the stat ement that there is obviously only on e tree and all the image

business is a ghost-story. Yet each of us has the indisputable impression that the sum total o f his own

experience and memory forms a unit , quite distinct from that of any other person. He refers to it as 'I' and

What is this 'I'? If you analyse it closely you will, I think, f ind that it is just the facts li ttle more than a

collection of single data (experiences and m emories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected.

And you will, on close in trospection, find that what you really m ean by 'I' is that ground-stuff upon which

they are collected. You may com e to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget

them; you acquire new friends, you share li fe with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones.

Less and less important will becom e the fact that, while living your new life, you still recollect the old one.

“The youth that was I', you may com e to speak of him in the third person, indeed the protagon ist of the