“That Thou Art”

The saying “That thou art” is often quoted in connection with Advaita Vedānta, but its exact meaning is quite often ignored — consciously by some, unconsciously by others. In any case, two initial questions can be raised about this saying: the first has to do with its origin, and the second with its real meaning. The first question is more or less easy to answer: “That thou art” is a translation of the Sanskrit “Tat tvam asi”, which appears in the Chāndogyopaniṣad (6:8:7) of the Sāmaveda, one of the Vedas revealed to the Hindu ṛṣis, as are the Ṛgveda, the Yajurveda, and the Atharvaṇavedaḥ. This is important to emphasise in order to clarify that “Tat tvam asi” is not an Advaita Vedānta saying, nor exactly a Vedāntine saying, but a Vedic saying, that is, one that is in the Vedas themselves. Answering the question of the real meaning of “Tat tvam asi”, in turn, takes us to the Upaniṣads, specifically to the Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣad (4:5:15), in which we find: “Ātman is not this, not that [neti neti]. He is inapprehensible, […] indestructible, […] unnatached, […] free […]. That thou art [tat tvam asi]”. “That”, then, is neither this nor that — which is to say: it is none of the things we can point to — but it is inapprehensible, indestructible, unnatached, and free; “that” is the “Ātman”, and “that thou art”.

“Ātman” is what, in Western translations, is usually translated as “I”, or “Self”, with a capital initial, in order to distinguish the word from the individual “self”, with a lower case initial. According to Rāmana Mahāṛṣi: “The sense of [individual] ‘self’ belongs to the person, the body, and the brain. When a man knows his true ‘Self’ for the first time, something else arises from the depths of his being and takes possession of him. This […] is infinite, divine, eternal. […] When this happens, man does not really lose himself; on the contrary, he finds himself” (quoted by Arthur Osborne, in Rāmana Mahāṛṣi and the Path of Self-Knowledge). In its literalness, the word “ātman” has the same root as the German word “âtem”, which today simply means ‘breath’, but in medieval German referred more properly to “spirit”, so that “the Holy Spirit” in old German was called “der Heilege Âtem”. Now, “in the domain of the sacred, there is no such thing as luck, and […] things that seem like mere coincidences are actually predetermined. This explains why, in the Middle Ages, the smallest details of the Scriptures, even the names themselves, were studied and interpreted variously according to their symbolism — and with an inspiration that rejects any accusation of artificiality” (Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy). On this basis, then, the etymological relationship between the Sanskrit word and the Old German word reveals something that the Hindus themselves affirm: “This Ātman is indeed Brahman in the beginning” (Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣad 1:4:10). “Brahman” is the name by which Hindus designate the Real, or the Absolute, who laid alone at the beginning of the cosmos and illuminated the darkness, giving it a multitude of forms, which are, in reality, an image of Himself to Himself.

Brahman is like a sculptor, but whose material — an infinite material — is Himself, and it is from this material that He makes all things. From the block of marble that is Himself, Brahman takes the angels, genies, men, animals, plants, rocks, and everything else that exists in this world, the various concrete beings whose figures are mutually exclusive, but which, nevertheless, from the point of view of Being, are Himself, just as various objects made of gold — a jewel, a plate, a statuette, etc. — exclude each other in their figures but can only exist to the extent that gold possesses their possibilities in itself. It is in this same sense that Blessed Jan van Ruusbroec says that “the first and highest unity of man [and of all things in Creation] is in God; for all creatures are linked to this Divine Unity as to essence, life, and preservation; and if, in this respect, they were separated from God, they would fall into nothingness and become nothing. […] We have this unity within ourselves, and yet above ourselves, as the principle and support of our being and our life” (The Spiritual Espousals).

It is this same perception of the ultimate identity between Brahman and Ātman, between the Real and the “Self”, that underlies the Semitic ḥādīṯ: “He who knows himself knows his Lord”. Also leading to this perception is the Greek adage — therefore more akin to the Hindu mentality — popularised by Plato: “Know thyself”. In Greek: “Gnóthi seautón”. Interestingly, the Greek word “autón”, accusative of “autós”, which refers to the “I”, has a similar sound to the Sanskrit “ātman”, and, as we have already said, quoting Titus Burckhardt, in the realm of the sacred there is no such thing as luck or coincidence. “Gnóthi”, in turn, comes from the Greek word “gnósis”, the meaning of which is analogous to that of “jñāna”, which in Sanskrit means “knowledge”, hence “Jñana-Yoga” is the path of union with God through knowledge, according to the Hindus, whose greatest representative of recent times was Rāmana Mahāṛṣi.

In the Christian context, the word “gnosis” — in its orthodox sense, not referring to the “gnosis with a false name” that Saint Irenaeus of Lyon confronts in his Adversus Hæreses — was used by Evagrius Ponticus, master of Saint John Cassian, to refer to his set of six books on metaphysics and cosmology: the Gnostic Chapters. In this same treatise, he explains that “God is said to be wherever He operates, […] [therefore] the Divinity is everywhere, and yet It is not in a specific place. It is everywhere, insofar as It is in everything that has come into existence […]. However, It is not in a specific place, because It is not one of those who came into existence” (Kephálaia Gnostikà 1:42–43). Now, if God illuminates the darkness and brings all things into being, nevertheless He is not summed up in all things, because He is not one of the things that comes into being. There is a sense, then, in which God is Beyond-Being, when considered not as the Divine Light that illuminates all things, but as the Divine Darkness that is independent of all things. Light, after all, already implies an aspect of relationship between a centre of radiance, a ray, and a circumference of luminosity, while the positive symbolism of darkness reminds us of the certainty that God is the “One without a Second” (sicut Bhagavad-Gītā 4:5).

However, as the Jewish məqūbbālīm say, although there is only one, it must appear that there are two. God is like a king who sends his son on a pilgrimage and waits for him to return; but when he does, he is in for two surprises: the first, that God was with him all along; the second, that he never left home, but it had to appear that he did. Insofar as the Real, then, relates to Creation — giving it being, consciousness, and happiness — He is what the Hindus call “Saguṇa Brahman”, which means “Brahman with Qualities”, that is, the one we can talk about and whose face is turned towards us, in contrast to “Nirguṇa Brahman”, the “Brahman without Qualities”, the Divinity that lies “in the bright darkness of hidden silence” (Theologia Mystica 1:1), as Saint Dionysius the Areopagite tells us. It is of Saguṇa Brahman that Hindus say “Sat-Cit-Ānanda”, that is, “Being-Consciousness-Blessing”, a ternary that results from the cosmogonic process itself: Brahman has, on the one hand, consciousness as the Absolute, and, on the other, is inexhaustible bliss as the Infinite. It is this Divine Biunity — using a term from Ānanda Kumāraswāmī — that gives birth to Being, and from the ternary composed of the three terms, manifesting below in all degrees of reality, it can be said: “Sat-Cit-Ānanda”. God as Creator who reveals Himself to His Creation is what the Hindus call “Īśvara”, whose approximate meaning is “Lord”, — in the same sense that Western Christians understand “Dominus” and in which Muslims understand the Divine Name “al-Rabb” (الرب).

In the Hindu context, the most common symbol used both to refer to this Divine Presence and, more profoundly, to the Divine in general is the syllable “Auṃ” (ॐ), whose three letters each refer to a specific set of “kośas” — literally, “sheaths” — that Ātman, or Brahman (which is to say the same thing), takes on in manifestation. The very pronunciation of the syllable reveals something about the cosmogonic process: the mouth begins closed, opens to pronounce the “A”, closes when pronouncing the “U”, closes when pronouncing the “Ṃ”, and ends closed again. The first letter refers to the gross bodies, which are ontologically less dense, that is, what is corporeal, or material, and yet still endowed with being; the second letter refers to the subtle manifestations, which are denser than the gross bodies; and the third letter refers to the spiritual, or angelic realities, whose causal “body” is practically made of “bliss”, or “ānanda”. The first category is conditioned to space, time, and number; the second category to time and number; and the third category only to number. It is in the third category — which includes all the causative tendencies of the other two — that the devas and their śaktis are found, that is, the gods and their consorts, including the Trimūrti: Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Śiva. The first signifies the creative aspect of Īśvara, in that He is the source of all things; the second signifies the preserving aspect of Īśvara, who sustains things in Creation; and the third signifies the destroying, or transforming, aspect of Īśvara, the one responsible for bringing things to an end and reintegrating them. But there is also a “fourth” — “turīya” in Sanskrit — category, which is symbolised by the silence that both precedes and surrounds and closes the pronunciation of the syllable “Auṃ” (ॐ).

These four realities “comprise the totality of the manifestation of Ātman / Brahman as a syllable. Just as the sound ‘Auṃ’ manifests, grows, transforms into its vocal quality, and finally disappears into the silence that follows (and which must be considered as part of its sound in a state of latent and meaningful repose), in the same way the four ‘states’ [...] are transformations of the single existence which, taken together, constitute the totality of its modes, whether they are considered from a microcosmic or macrocosmic point of view” (Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India 3:2). In a microcosmic sense, these four states correspond to the states of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep, as well as to the witness — the Ātman — who observes all these states, without identifying with any of them. In the waking state, man is focused on his exterior and on what his body and its nourishing powers are capable of. In the dream, man is focused on his interior and on what his soul and its sensitive, appetitive and intellectual powers are capable of. In deep sleep, we can say — in a somewhat laconic way — that man simply is, therefore he is good, because being and good are convertible; to say that a thing is and to say that it is good is the same thing. And this even if his “Self” is still a “fourth” reality — the witness — that observes the three states.

To reach the state of deep sleep, in terms of Spiritual Realisation, is to have — even in this world — the paradisiacal experience that Father Angelus Silesius talks about: “Here [in this world], I still flow in God, like a stream in time, there [in God] I will be the sea of divine bliss. My spirit, once in God, will become eternal bliss, just as the Sun’s own ray is the Sun within the Sun. Who can distinguish the spark within the fire? And who, once inside God, can realise what I am?” (Der Cherubinische Wandersmann 4:135–137). Taking advantage of this solar symbolism, we could say that man is like a lake on which the Sun’s rays fall. The earth that supports the mass of water is both the body and the exterior, while the water is both the psyche and the interior of man. The “Self”, or the Ātman, is not the centre of this mass of water, but the sky that encompasses the whole scene. The macrocosmic summary of this sky is the Sun (just as the heart is the microcosmic summary of man) from which a luminous ray flows over the lake, allowing it to reflect both the sky and the Sun that transmits the sky to its surface. This ray corresponds to the spirit.

So much is the Sun a natural symbol of God that, in the Republic, Plato says that if the light generated by the Sun provides the principle of growth for all things, the Good, or the unknowable Beyond-Being, like the Sun, generates Being, by which He provides the principle of being for all things. Now, both the traditional philosophical path and the jñānic path insist that man needs to travel it in his waking state, because in order to reflect the sky and the sun above him, the lake of the psyche needs to be ordered, and this requires the adherence of the will, since the element of the Infinite in man is found in the freedom of will. Man is not objectively intelligent like the devas, who are never wrong, but he is, in a sense, objectively free, even to exercise his intelligence in practice or not.

This is why Rāmana Mahāṛṣi defines “dhyāna” — the same word that is translated as the “ch’an” and, later, the “zen” of Chinese and Japanese Buddhists respectively — as contemplation “through deliberate mental effort” on the nature of the Ātman. If the human psyche can’t encompass the Ātman, like a lake can’t encompass the sky that surrounds it, nevertheless it can, like a lake, reflect that same sky clearly enough, as long as it rests serenely, and even if a reflection of the Sun in a lake isn’t the Sun, it allows us to identify what the Sun is like. The consummation of this endeavour is samādhi, in which there is no longer either subject or object of knowledge, but only “knowledge”, or “jñāna”, — like when a river flows into the sea and can no longer be taken out of the ocean. Because, in the final analysis, as Saint Bernard of Clairvaux says: “Just as a drop of water, poured over a lot of wine, seems to fade completely […] and as the air with the Sun pouring light through it is transformed into clarity in the same light, without being as bright as the light itself: so the saints will be in God” (De Amore Dei 10:2).

This union, as Father Bede Griffiths says in his commentary on the Bhagavad-Gītā, is to realise “all Creation at its foundation, at its source, and in its fullness. In God's vision, all things are present. Every grain of sand, every plant and every tree, in all their stages of development; the waves in the sea, the drops of water in the river, neither changing nor passing away, but in their eternal reality. […] one enjoys this whole world, because everything in it is present, without any flux, without the change, suffering, corruption and death that there is in the present world” (River of Compassion). Since there is, from Brahman’s point of view, a continuity between the Being that He is and all particular beings, he who no longer sees the distinctive characteristics muddying the waters of his psyche, but the Being that all beings are made of, sees both himself — not the ego, but who he really is — and all other beings. For this individual, the Upaniṣadic words are not simply a discursive arrangement, but an experience: “That thou art”.

There’s a fascinating Hindu story that illustrates this “non-dual” perspective — although calling it a “perspective” isn’t quite accurate, because it’s the relative that is a perspective, not the Absolute. Anyway, the story tells of a young prince from India who, once, in the underground part of the palace, found an old painting of a girl, labelled “Princess of Kāśī”. She looked so pure, grateful, and beautiful that the prince fell in love. As well as her name, there was also the date the portrait was made on the frame, and he realised that the girl must have been around his age. So he decided he had to find her and marry her. From that moment on, all the prince could think about was the Princess of Kāśī, and he couldn’t hide the fact that something had changed. His mother, the queen, worried, asked one of the royal ministers to go and talk to the prince, and the young man told him that he was in love and would like to get married. They went underground to the castle together, and the prince showed the minister the painting. Laughing, he explained to the young man who the princess was: many years ago, there was a play in which one of the characters was a very beautiful girl, and as the prince was still very young, the queen decided to put him in the role of the girl, of whom the portrait was painted.

There were never two, but only one, and the apparent duality stems from forgetfulness. For the prince, the princess served as a symbol of his own spirit — pure, grateful, and beautiful — which he had forgotten. To realise that “That thou art” is to see the qualities of the spirit in all beings. It is for a man to see in his beloved the purity, gratitude and beauty of the spirit, for a woman to see in her beloved the strength, love and majesty of the spirit, and for both to see in themselves that this is what they really are, as all things are. Whoever does this knows their Lord, because “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth” (John 4:24). Even a master, on the spiritual path, is a symbol of this realisation, which is why Rāmana Mahāṛṣi compares the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit on the one hand, to Īśvara, the guru, and the Ātman on the other: the spiritual identity of all (true) masters is the same, and it aims to communicate to the disciple the Real that is the ultimate foundation of both him and the master. It was to convey this truth that the Christ said to Saint Catherine of Siena: “If thou knowest these two things, thou wilt be blessed and the Enemy will never deceive thee. I am He who Is, and thou art she who is not” (Il Dialogo della Divina Provvidenza).

As René Guénon said in an article: “[…] the path to true knowledge is not reason, but the spirit and the whole being […]. In reality, what belongs to the soul, and even to the mind, are only degrees on the path towards the inner essence that is the true ‘Self’, which can only be found when the being has reached its own centre, with all its powers united and concentrated in a single point, in which all things appear to it as contained in that point as in its first and only principle, and thus it can know all things in itself and by itself as the totality of existence in the unity of its own essence. […] When man knows himself in his deepest essence, that is, in the centre of his being, then he knows his Lord. And knowing his Lord, he knows at the same time all the things that come from Him and return to Him. He knows everything in the supreme unity of the Divine Principle” (Gnóthi Seautón, originally published in Al-Maʿrifa, in May 1931). He knows, not by theory, but by experience: “That thou art”.