Asmita

Asmita or “I-am-ness,” I learned today, is the error of mistaking the self that we experience ourselves as being for the real Self.

Apparently, it’s what all of us (well, me anyway) do all day long all the time: suppose that the person we think we are is who we actually are.

So in other words, I’m not actually a middle-aged, married, community college teacher on his last day of sabbatical in India, saddened somewhat at the prospect of leaving, but looking forward with great delight to seeing his home and family again; no, not at all.

Rather, I am Atman, I am Brahman, I am the One Thing in the Universe that IS the Universe and Pure Consciousness at the same time.

I’m not this individual wave on the ocean with its own special curve and dip, spray flying of its top, seagulls wheeling overhead; I’m just the Ocean itself, or maybe, to put it another way, the idea of Ocean where the Ocean is Universal Mind conceiving of the Ocean, dreaming it and itself into existence and out again and in again endlessly.

Or something like that.

All this remains an open question for me, which means, as Dr. Narasimham put it in today’s yoga sutras and chanting class, that I’ll keep coming back to it again and again. It’s like when you have a piece of food in your teeth, he said, the tongue can’t stop poking at it. But when it’s gone, you forget about it completely—until the next trapped bit of rice or whatever, at which point the process starts all over again.

That seemed like an appropriate metaphor for my final day here; I’ve been saying that India has gotten under my skin (in a good way), but maybe the better way to put it is that it’s gotten stuck between my teeth. I’ve got a little piece of Mysore lodged in the distal marginal groove of my maxillary first biscupid (I'm pretty sure that technically, this description doesn't even make sense, but keep in mind that what I experience as my teeth aren't even teeth at all.)

The important this is that now, I just have to keep coming back until it works free.