The Ogre, the Onion and the Atman

I am like an onion. Not, as Donkey says to Shrek in the first Shrek movie, “because you stink and make people cry” (though that can happen occasionally). But because as a human being I have layers. On the outside, I appear as a physical organism (a body) with a social status (a name, a job, a wife and kid). On the inside, there is my consciousness, the sum of all my sensations, feelings and thoughts, the mental construction of my personal identity (my convictions, my likes and dislikes, my love for my wife and kid, and so on). Deeper still, there is a formative psychological layer going back to early childhood, formed by DNA and upbringing…

But, and this is the irony of the onion model, ultimately an onion has no core – at least not in the way fruit has one or more seeds at its centre. The centre of an onion is just another layer – with nothing under it! Peel away that final layer and nothing remains. Now, one could say: “This is where the onion metaphor for the human being breaks down.” But is that so? Isn’t there an inner nothingness at my centre, covered up by all these physical, social, and psychological layers and yet holding them all together as my layers? Namely, the nothingness of my pure ‘I’ as the unconditioned source of my radical freedom?

As the German Idealist Schelling (1775 - 1854) said, the unconditioned (“das Unbedingte”) cannot be a thing (“Ding”), because a thing is always conditioned (“be-dingt”). That is to say: a thing is always some-thing and thus determined, limited, finite, conditioned by its (causal or conceptual) relations to other things. Therefore, the source of my freedom – in being unconditioned – cannot be a thing: it must be no-thing, the indefinable void out of which all my free thoughts and actions emerge (and to which they return once they have run their course). But this unconditioned at the centre of my being, isn’t it the same as the unconditioned source of all that exists, of the entire universe?

After all, the unconditioned must be no-thing. But how can the nothing in me differ in any way from the nothing out of which the universe emerged? (And into which it will dissolve again once it has run its course.) Obviously, there cannot be multiple nothings, since they have no distinguishing characteristics – indeed, what is nothing has no characteristics at all! So, the nothing in me, the unconditioned source of my freedom, must be the same nothing that is the unconditioned source of reality-as-a-whole. I guess that’s what those ancient Indian philosophers meant when they said that “Atman is Brahman”, i.e. that the Self is the Ultimate Reality. This comes out beautifully in the famous dialogue between the sage Uddalaka and his son Svetaketu.

Having told his son to cut open one of the tiny seeds of the fruit of the banyan tree, Uddalaka asks: “What do you see there?” To which Svetaketu replies: “Nothing, sir.” Then Uddalaka says: “This finest essence here, son, that you can’t even see – look how on account of that finest essence this huge banyan tree stands here. Believe, my son: the finest essence here – that constitutes the Self of this whole world; that is the truth; that is the Self. And you are that, Svetaketu.” (Chandogya Upanishad 6.12)