Esteemed colleagues, students, ladies and gentlemen: I am grateful to the Department of Philosophy and to the Center for South Asia Studies for inviting me to speak with you this evening. And thank you, Professor Merritt, for your generous introduction and welcome.
Today, let’s consider the concept Ātmajit, one who has conquered the self.
The Bhagavad Gītā states:
uddhared ātmanātmānaṃ nātmānam avasādayet
ātmaiva hy ātmano bandhur ātmaiva ripur ātmanaḥ
“Let a man raise himself by himself.
Let him not degrade himself.
The self alone is the friend of oneself;
the self alone is the enemy of oneself.”
How is it that there is a self that lifts and a self that is lifted, both friend and enemy? This short verse raises the question: what is the self? When I was a young man, it was this seemingly simple inquiry which led me to take up the study of philosophy. More recently, about seven years ago, I published a small book under the title Ātmajit, A Study of Self-Mastery. The first half of the book answers questions about the nature of the self, and the meaning of mastery, while the second half is a philosophical discipline of life through which mastery is gained. I should add that the title describes the subject of the book, not the condition of its author. The University of Mysore Press made no such claim on my behalf.
Let us ask, now, what is the self? The Sanskrit word ātman is usually translated into English as “self” and sometimes as “soul.” Neither word is exact. Depending on the context in which the term is used, ātman may refer to oneself in the ordinary sense, to the embodied individual person, or to that which the Vedānta takes to be the true Self: unborn, undying, not an object among objects, the very ground of awareness. For the purposes of this discussion, I shall refer to the ordinary self, with its thoughts, desires and emotions, as the lower self, written with a small s, and to the unchanging awareness as the higher Self, written with a capital S.
Now, ātmajit. What is this? The word joins ātman, the self, with jit, from the root ji, to conquer or overcome. An ātmajit is therefore one who has conquered the self. But here again we must ask which sense of the word “self” is intended. Conquest cannot perfect the higher Self, as its perfection is given. It is therefore the lower self that must be mastered, the mind and senses as they are governed by appetite, aversion, attachment and habit. Conquest, in this context, does not mean destruction. It means bringing the faculties into right relation. The disciplined mind becomes clear, action becomes deliberate. When the small s self is conquered, the higher Self may be known.
When I was nearly finished writing the manuscript, my wife Lila, who has a gift for seeing through a long philosophical argument to the mere human making it, asked me, “Why did you call it Ātmajit, rather than Jitātmā?” The established Vedāntic expression is jitātmā: one whose self has been mastered. Ātmajit, by contrast, means one who conquers the self. You see, I was raised in northern India, with Punjabi spoken around me. Its word for ātman is atam, and Atamjit had always sounded familiar to my ear. In Punjabi names, jit carries the sense of victory, and Atamjit may also be heard as the victory of the atam, the triumph of the soul or spirit. I liked the double meaning. One masters the lower self, and in doing so permits the higher Self to prevail. I told Lila, “Victory of the Soul sounds rather poetic, doesn’t it?” She considered this for a moment, and then she smiled, “I see. You are asserting yourself.” It is sometimes imagined in the West that self-mastery is the domain of yogi renunciants. I can only say that marriage provides no shortage of opportunities for its practice.
