Ulladu-Narpadu Verse 23: 'I Am'
Channel: Consciousness Research Centre
Date: 2017-05-01

This series is classified Ajata-vāda | Jñāna-yoga | Turīya | Sahasrāra-cakra

"Since it is insentient, this body does not say ‘I’. That is, it does not have any inherent self-consciousness. No one says, “In sleep—where the body does not exist—I do not exist.” After an ‘I’ arises from sleep as ‘I am the body’, everything—all the second- and third-person objects of the world—arises. When one scrutinizes with keen mind “Where does this ‘I’ arise?”, it will slip away, being found to be nonexistent."

In this verse Sri Bhagavan speaks about three distinct things, namely (1) the body, which, being insentient, has no ‘I’ – consciousness, (2) the consciousness ‘I’ (the real Self) which exists even in sleep, where the body and all else do not exist, and (3) another ‘I’ (the individual self) after whose rising all else rises. Since this rising ‘I’ is clearly distinct from the body and from the real ‘I’ which exists in sleep, Sri Bhagavan instructs us to scrutinize where it rises, for when we scrutinize thus it will be found to be non- existent. Then in the next two verses He reveals more about the nature of this rising ‘I’, whose form is the feeling ‘I am the body’, and explains how it is distinct both from the body and from the real Self, and yet at the same time assumes the properties of both.

When Sri Bhagavan first composed this verse in venba metre, He concluded it with the word ‘en’, which is an imperative meaning ‘scrutinize’ or ‘enquire’. But when He converted the verse into Kalivenba metre, He changed the word ‘en’ into ‘enna’, which means ‘when one scrutinizes’ or ‘when one enquiries’, and added the word ‘nazhuvum’, which means ‘it will slip away’.

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