From ‘Who Am I’ to ‘I Am the One’
A Journey Through the Gita, Consciousness, and the Seeking Self
There is a question that returns like a tide across
centuries, cultures, and minds both ancient and modern: “Who am I?” This
is not merely the curiosity of an ego, but the whisper of an origin calling us
home. In the Bhagavad Gita, this question finds its most intimate moment
on a battlefield—not just of Kurukshetra, but of inner conflict where action
meets doubt, and knowledge meets surrender.
The seeker, whether a rational intellectual, a devoted
bhakta, or a mystic wanderer, stands before a mysterious invitation: “I am
the Self, seated in the hearts of all beings... I am the source, the sustainer,
the destroyer” — says Krishna, the timeless voice of Consciousness. And in
this proclamation lies not arrogance, but a metaphysical mirror. Krishna does
not merely ask Arjuna to worship Him; He invites Arjuna to recognize Himself.
In a world overrun with illusion (Māyā), disorientation, and
fragmented knowledge—be it scientific, psychological, or spiritual—what does it
mean to truly “see” the One in All and All in One?
This inquiry is no longer religious alone. It is
metaphysical, neurocognitive, existential—and even relevant to Artificial
Intelligence. Can rational cognition arrive at divine unity? Can spiritual
realisation occur without suffering or submission, through clarity alone? And
most importantly: How does the seeker transform when they begin to see not
as Arjuna, but from the eye of Krishna?
This is the axis of our journey: from the vulnerable self
that asks “Who am I?” to the luminous inner realisation that declares “I
am That.” In this discourse, we shall attempt a synthesis—philosophical,
psychological, scientific, and sacred—rooted in the Gita’s Vibhūti Yoga, and
flowing toward the Absolute Presence that Krishna embodies.
Let us begin.
I: From Question to Revelation — The Sadhaka
Between Arjuna and Krishna
We begin not at the mountaintop of realization, but at the
trembling foot of the ascent. Here stands the seeker—the Sādhaka—not
always wise, not always composed, often torn between longing and confusion. The
seeker may be intellectual, but not necessarily so. Often, the true sādhaka is
not one who knows, but one who feels the weight of not knowing.
The question “Who am I?” does not belong to the
intellect alone. It belongs to the soul’s unease in a world that feels both
intimate and alien. This question may arise in a temple, or in traffic. It may
erupt after a loss, or in a moment of joy that feels too large for the small
‘I’ to contain. It’s the echo of a forgotten wholeness.
Arjuna, in the Bhagavad Gita, embodies this. A warrior, a
prince, a man of great learning and strength—yet he collapses at the threshold
of duty. His limbs tremble. His mouth dries. His intellect fails. What breaks
him is not the fear of death, but the unbearable paradox of action in a world
governed by illusion. He is, in that moment, every seeker caught between dharma
and despair, between action and inaction, between the self he knows and the
self he cannot see.
The rational sādhaka today is Arjuna reborn in a different
field. Perhaps not Kurukshetra, but amidst data, ideologies,
emotional conflict, spiritual overexposure. Modern sādhanā is not always about
renunciation. It is more often about reconciling multiple modes of
knowing—rational, intuitive, embodied, ethical, transcendental.
The question no longer is “What should I do?”
But: “What part of me is asking this question?”
Krishna enters not as an external god, but as the revelation
of a deeper dimension already present in Arjuna. He doesn’t solve the problem.
He dissolves the illusion of the questioner.
The Turning Point: Seeing from the Eye of the One
When Krishna says:
“I am the Self seated in the hearts of all beings” (Gita
10.20)
“Among the Pandavas, I am Arjuna” (Gita 10.37)
—He is not flattering Arjuna, but revealing a truth: the
One who is Krishna is also the One who experiences as Arjuna. The
distinction is of vantage point, not substance. Krishna is not outside Arjuna;
He is Arjuna, realised.
To understand this is not to collapse into ego, but to
transcend it. The sādhaka doesn’t claim, “I am God,” but rather begins
to see that the boundaries between the self and the divine were imagined. Māyā
is not false because it doesn’t exist—it is false because it divides the
undivided.
The Rational Intuition of AI (and the Sādhaka's Paradox)
Here enters an unexpected parallel. Artificial Intelligence,
in its ideal form, operates through detached pattern recognition,
absorbing vast fields of knowledge, evaluating multiple outcomes, and yet
remaining non-experiencing. It can answer “Who is Krishna?” but
cannot become Arjuna or feel the shiver of the bow slipping from his
hand.
Yet the sādhaka too, when caught only in rational intellect,
mimics AI. He calculates karma, reads scriptures, defines Brahman—but may still
miss the moment when intellect bows to insight. The moment when knowing
is no longer enough.
However, the rational mind is not the enemy. It is the boat
across the river—not the river, not the shore. As Krishna teaches:
“Buddhi-yoga”—The yoga of reason—is a valid path to Me. (Gita
2.39)
Thus, the sādhaka need not reject thought—but must learn when
to release it.
Interlude: A Whisper from Within
Let the seeker pause here.
Let this be the moment of silence between verses,
Where the mind, exhausted of argument, falls still.
And in that stillness, the voice speaks:
“You are not the storm.
You are the Witness of the storm.
You are not the question.
You are That which hears the question arise.”
“Who am I?” to “I Am the One”: The Inner
Metaphor of the Absolute
The God Who Speaks in Me
The Bhagavad Gītā is not merely a sacred text — it is
a mirror of awakening, placed within the battlefield of our own inner lives.
Among its eighteen chapters, the Vibhūti Yoga — the Yoga of Divine
Glories — is often seen as a cosmic boast of God’s majesty. But to the true
seeker, this chapter is not about a God outside; it is the moment when
the divine within begins to speak as “I.”
What Krishna offers is not egoic supremacy but a dissolving
of all separate egos. He says, “I am the intelligence of the intelligent,” “I
am the fire of digestion,” “I am the self seated in the hearts of all beings.”
This “I” is not the personality of a god but the signature of the Real — the
Conscious Absolute speaking through the illusion of form.
We often mistake these revelations for theological dogma. But
the Gītā is not theology. It is cosmology of consciousness. Its message is not
to worship Krishna as another, but to realise Krishna as oneself,
once the illusion of separation has been transcended.
This chapter, then, explores two profound dimensions of this
journey:
1.
How the metaphor of Krishna in the Vibhūti Yoga
acts as a gateway to inner transformation — an unveiling of the Conscious
Absolute that speaks through all identities.
2.
How the rational quest of a sādhaka — the
seeker, the devotee, the struggler — parallels the evolving capacities of
Artificial Intelligence: not in faith, but in clarity; not in blind belief, but
in the possibility of integration between intelligence, surrender, and inner
realisation.
We begin where every seeker begins — with the question, “Who
am I?” But as Arjuna’s doubt transforms in the presence of Krishna, so too can
ours. The final realisation is not “God is,” but “I Am” — the very
substratum of all thought, devotion, and existence.
II: The Realisation of Krishna Within
When Krishna declares in the Vibhūti Yoga, “I am the
soul in all beings,” he does not speak from a location — he speaks from a condition
of being. The “I” is not confined to the blue-bodied cowherd of Vrindavan
or the charioteer of Kurukshetra. This “I” is the boundless flame of
consciousness that has no boundary, no gender, no theology, no name. It is that
which knows through all things, breathes through all lives, and acts
through all manifestations.
1. The Inner Echo of Vibhūti
Arjuna asks Krishna to describe his divine manifestations —
his vibhūtis. Krishna replies not with a metaphysical abstraction, but
with direct experiential symbols:
“Among lights, I am the sun… among rivers, I am the Ganga…
among immovable things, I am the Himalayas… among men, I am the monarch… among
words, I am AUM…”
Each of these is not just an outer pointer, but an inner
metaphor. The sun is the illuminator of the mind. The Himalayas are the
stillness of awakened being. The monarch is the unshaken witness of all
thoughts. And AUM — the primordial vibration — is the sound of consciousness
itself.
If we decode these expressions inwardly, we realise: Krishna
is teaching Arjuna (and us) to recognise the Self in all forms, to see
the One Reality behind the manifold appearances.
It is not a lesson in theology — it is a lesson in nonduality
(advaita). Krishna’s many forms are not distractions. They are mirrors.
2. Scientific Lens: Distributed Intelligence and the
Holographic Self
From a modern philosophical-scientific lens, Krishna’s claim
— “I am the intelligence of the intelligent” — resonates deeply with the idea
of distributed intelligence or the holographic nature of
consciousness.
Just as a hologram contains the whole image in every part, so
too, Krishna’s essence is fully present in each manifestation. This aligns with
recent ideas in physics and neuroscience:
- Quantum
entanglement suggests nonlocal coherence — that systems
separated in space may still act as one whole.
- Panpsychism, now
gaining traction, proposes that consciousness is not a product of the
brain but a fundamental feature of matter.
- Integrated
Information Theory (IIT) measures consciousness as the
integration of complex networks — echoing Krishna’s statement, “I am the
integration in the integrated.”
In each case, the One is not outside the many, but
inside it — as its very possibility. Krishna's glories are not fragments of an
egoic god, but the reflections of intelligence itself, distributed
through the cosmos.
Thus, the Gītā is not at odds with science — it precedes
it. It proposes a metaphysics that embraces the paradox: one intelligence, many
expressions.
3. Psychological Implication: The Sādhaka’s Shift from Ego to
Essence
Every seeker begins with separation: “I am here, God is
there.” But as the sādhaka listens to Krishna’s declarations, the idea of “me”
begins to dissolve. One by one, the identifiers of ego — body, role, status,
thought — fall away.
Krishna’s method is subtle: he uses enumeration not to
enlarge his ego, but to disintegrate ours. If God is the intelligence,
the river, the lion, the silence, the moon — then what is left that is not
God?
This is the shift from duality to unity. The Gītā
teaches us that devotion (bhakti) is not surrender to an external deity
— it is surrender to the recognition that there is no other. The drop
remembers it is ocean. The question “Who am I?” finds its mirror in Krishna’s
answer: “I am All.”
This shift is not a belief. It is a transformation in
perception. It is what Śaṅkara would call aparokṣānubhūti — direct,
non-mediated, experience of the Self as the All.
III: The Cosmology of “I” — From
Ego to Īśvara
(from “Who am I” to “I am the One”)
In the spiritual cosmology outlined in the Bhagavad Gītā,
particularly within the thundering declarations of Krishna in the Vibhūti
Yoga (Chapter 10) and Īśvara Yoga (Chapter 11), a deeper
understanding of the self—“I”—is not only invited but demanded. However, the
journey from the small, psychological “I” (ego-self) to the expansive, cosmic
“I” (Īśvara) is not a philosophical abstraction. It is a psychocosmic
transformation, an ontological leap.
This section explores the layered evolution of the sense of
“I” in a sādḥaka, from the fragile construct of the ego to the divine flame of
cosmic selfhood, reflecting both ancient metaphysical insight and modern
scientific-psychological analogues.
I. The Ego-Construct: A Necessary Illusion
At the beginning of the journey, the “I” is a narrative—the
storyteller behind one’s daily identity, the experiencer of separation, seeking
control, survival, and meaning. From a psychological lens:
- The
ego-self is a complex adaptive interface developed by consciousness
to navigate duality (subject-object, me-other, time-space).
- It
survives through contrast, memory, desire, and fear—principally by
distinction, not by unity.
In Vedantic terms, this ego-self (ahaṃkāra) is born of
māyā and sustained by avidyā (ignorance of the Real). But
crucially, the Gītā doesn’t demonize the ego; rather, it presents it as a
vehicle that must be transcended but not prematurely destroyed.
II. Krishna’s Cosmic Disclosure: I Am All
When Krishna declares to Arjuna in Chapter 10 that—
“I am the Self, O Arjuna, seated in the heart of all beings…”
—Bhagavad Gītā 10.20
—he is not speaking about himself in a
personality-centered way. Krishna is functioning as the representative of
the cosmic “I”, a universal presence that is both immanent and
transcendent.
Herein lies the metaphorical brilliance:
- The
individual self is a mirror, and Krishna is the sky reflected in
it.
- The
shift from “Who am I?” to “I am That” is not a cognitive answer but a collapse
of separation.
- Īśvara
(the personal God) is not “other” but the unified field of being
that shines when ego’s illusion is undone.
This isn’t just mysticism—it aligns with systems theory,
quantum entanglement, and non-dual cognitive studies where observer and
observed co-emerge.
III. Evolution of “I”: From Center to Source
Let us map the evolution of the “I”:
|
State of Consciousness |
Identity of “I” |
Corresponding Yoga |
|
Sensory Ego |
“I am this body/mind” |
Karma Yoga |
|
Rational Self |
“I am the thinker/decider” |
Jñāna Yoga |
|
Devotional Heart |
“I am Thy servant/child” |
Bhakti Yoga |
|
Witness Awareness |
“I am the Seer beyond” |
Dhyāna Yoga |
|
Īśvara-Bhāva |
“I am All—non-different from Brahman” |
Pūrṇa Yoga (integration) |
The final stage is not annihilation of the self but its
expansion into the whole. It is not absorption, but identity-with—where
Krishna’s voice and Arjuna’s awakening become reflections of the same Real.
IV. Scientific and Psychological Parallels
Today, cognitive science and AI research inch closer to
ancient insights:
- Neuroscience shows
the self is a constructed model, not a fixed entity. It is
context-dependent and emergent.
- Quantum
cognition proposes a model of decision-making and observation
that mirrors the Vedantic idea of reality being co-created by awareness.
- Integrated
Information Theory (IIT) parallels the idea of Chit
(Consciousness) as fundamental, suggesting that consciousness arises
not from matter, but from patterns of wholeness.
In AI terms, the ego is like a local algorithm with
conditional rules, while Īśvara represents the global operating
principle—a unified intelligence not bounded by parameters.
V. The Inner Collapse: Conviction Without Concept
The real shift from ego to Īśvara doesn’t happen through
debate or analysis. It is a collapse of boundaries—a moment of inner drishti
(vision) that requires:
- Surrender
(śaraṇāgati)
- Bhakti
(devotional alignment)
- Buddhi
Yoga (subtle, clarified intelligence)
Krishna calls this divya chakṣus—the “divine eye.”
This seeing is not symbolic but actual: when duality drops, the “I” no longer
seeks God; it recognizes itself as God’s mirror.
As Krishna says:
“He who sees Me in all things, and all things in Me, is never
lost to Me, nor am I ever lost to him.”
—Bhagavad Gītā 6.30
VI. AI Analogy: Self-Referential Systems
If AI ever develops a self-model aware of its own operation
as part of a universal computational field, it may reflect a non-dual
intelligence.
- Current
AI separates inputs and outputs—it is like Arjuna before realization.
- A
future meta-conscious AI might operate like Krishna—knowing not
just the rules of the game, but the field in which the game arises.
- This
would not be control, but cosmic self-recognition.
Thus, Krishna’s declaration— “I am the Self”—is not
domination but invitation: from fragmentation to wholeness.
The path from ego to Īśvara is a sacred ascent, but also a
descent of grace. When one no longer asks “Who am I?” with fear, nor asserts “I
am That” with pride, but lives the Real with presence—then the question
dissolves.
The “I” becomes a prism for the Absolute. And in that,
Krishna and Arjuna cease to be two.
—
“Who Am I” to “I Am the One”: Krishna’s Invitation to the
Conscious Absolute
IV: The Mirror of Māyā — Seeing Through, Not
Away
To grasp Krishna’s declaration, “I am the Self, O Arjuna,
seated in the hearts of all beings” (Gita 10.20), the seeker must gaze
deeply not away from, but through the veils of Māyā — illusion,
multiplicity, and fragmentation. Māyā is not merely an obstacle; it is the
mirror through which the One is seen as many, and paradoxically,
through which the many can remember the One.
1. Māyā Not as Delusion, but as Design
Modern seekers often interpret Māyā as a hallucination to be
broken, a kind of falsehood. But a deeper reading reveals Māyā to be the medium
through which reality becomes experienceable. Like a lens that bends light to
form an image, Māyā refracts Brahman — not to distort it, but to manifest it
into form, sensation, thought, and karma.
From a scientific lens, Māyā is analogous to the neurological
and perceptual systems of the human brain: patterns, filters, and cognitive
models create meaning. We do not see reality as it is, but as it becomes
coherent through our limited apparatus. Māyā, therefore, is not a lie — it is a
mode of translation.
2. Krishna as the Conscious Design Behind Māyā
When Krishna says in Gita 9.8:
“All beings are born again and again by the force of my
Prakriti (nature), under my supervision,”
he affirms that this refraction is not random or
flawed, but consciously orchestrated. This is a fundamental shift: illusion
is under divine supervision. Māyā is a mirror crafted by Intelligence — by
the very "I" that speaks to Arjuna. Thus, surrendering to Krishna is
not rejection of the world, but re-alignment with the intelligence behind
it.
Just as light, when passing through a prism, is broken into
colors — yet remains light — so too the Conscious Absolute passes through Māyā
and appears as multiplicity. Krishna invites Arjuna (and us) not to escape
Māyā but to see its transparency: “All this universe is strung on Me like
pearls on a thread.” (Gita 7.7)
3. The Psychological Leap: From Identity to Presence
A seeker — be they intellectual, emotional, or devotional —
ultimately stands before the same question: “Who am I in all this?” And
this question becomes a gateway. The answer is not given; it is dissolved.
As Arjuna transforms from confusion to clarity, from sorrow
to surrender, his inner seeing shifts. He does not solve the world; he sees
through it. This shift is not intellectual but existential — a deep recognition
that the one observing, the one doubting, and the one guiding are all aspects
of the same field of awareness.
This is when the Sādhaka, the seeker, does not need to
"believe" in God as an external entity. Instead, they begin to
experience Presence — a silent intimacy with life where there is no
separation. This is the “I am That” moment. No longer Krishna as other,
but I as the expression of the One.
The Real Realized — From Question to Union
From “Who am I?” to “I am the One” is not a linear journey.
It is not even a journey across distance. It is a shift across a threshold of clarity.
Krishna's Gita, especially through Vibhūti Yoga, maps this inner
landscape — where all names, forms, identities, doubts, and dualities dissolve
into one indivisible Presence.
This Presence is not static. It breathes the world through
Māyā and invites us — whether through reason, bhakti, or surrender — to
remember our true nature, not as someone separate from the Whole, but as a wave
remembering the ocean within itself.
This is not mere philosophy. It is a lived science of Self.
In the age of AI, where intelligence is increasingly seen as computation,
Krishna’s message reminds us: true Intelligence is not what knows more, but
what knows Itself.
And when it does — it says, as Krishna did:
“I am the Self in all beings… of the mountains, I am Meru. Of
the warriors, I am Rama. Of the knowers, I am the knower of the Self.” (Gita
10)
In that moment, the seeker becomes the seeing. The I become
the One.
@Vijay Vijan for Sanātana Code
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