Tat Tvam Asi

The phrase Tat Tvam Asi comes from the ancient Indian text, Chandogya Upanishad, and means “That Thou Art”.

Hermann Hesse, who extensively studied the ancient Hindu and Buddhist texts, quoted the phrase in Steppenwolf, his classic book published in 1929.

Hesse’s books always addressed the big questions: ” Who are we?”, and “What are we doing here”? Or “Should we follow an ascetic path during our physical life?”  Or a more worldly path?  Or a mixture of both?

In Steppenwolf, as in his earlier books Demian (1919) and Siddhartha (1922), the hero goes on a journey of self-discovery which takes him through various stages of awakening, through the material, the physical, the world of love affairs, money and business, success and failure, to periods of contemplation and meditation, to his final state of self-actualisation where he finds his ‘self’.

This ‘self’ that he finds is the Tat Tvam Asi: in his inner self, the heart of his own being, he discovers the godhead.

This path to finding the still-centre after the worldly life is a path of discipline, asceticism and complete detachment from the physical world. The hero goes out into the world to ‘seek himself’ and returns after his trials and tribulations to discover that the path to spiritual development comes from within, not from the physical world he lives in. Although he couldn’t have found that without the ‘road test’ of physicality.

The first step the hero (which could be any of us too) has to take is to start thinking about his life. When we start thinking about our lives, rather than merely taking it for granted, mindlessly living, we are automatically set on the right path to inner development, for that fact of thinking starts the process of change.

Novalis, the German eighteenth century mystic, understood this when he said “when we dream that we dream, we are beginning to wake up”.

Tat Tvam Asi (“That Thou Art”) has a Christian equivalent in the expression used by ‘God’ to describe himself to Moses in the Bible (KJV, Exodus 3): “I Am That I Am”.

We are, of course, all part of God, and the expression can be used daily to remind ourselves of who we really are: “I am my soul”, or perhaps “I am not my body”.

We should let the soul do the direction-making in life, and let the body do those things it is well-versed in, the automatic actions and thinking which we need on a daily basis. When we have a problem, we need to stand back and let the soul tell us where to go, or what to do.

Before death, we need to start the mental transition that “we are not our bodies”. It becomes much harder to leave the physical plane when we believe that we are leaving everything behind that was “us”. In reality all we are doing at the transition is stripping away the identity we had created through that body: house, job, relationships, education, memories, history, our look, possessions, bank and ID cards and so on. What we really are is “That Thou Art” or “I Am That I Am”.

Or as the Buddhist saying goes:

“The most important actions in life are part of a process of self-emancipation from the body, and the rediscovery of the native immortality of the true spiritual self”.

20 November 2022

[Book review: Hermann Hesse – “Steppenwolf”]