What are you? Do you know or do you merely assume things about your being so as to not have to inquire too deeply or experience too vastly? We could of course keep these questions impersonal and ask, what is the Self, as if the Self, You or I, were merely an abstract object. A “self” can be a kind of objective entity for the material brain to think about, in which case it can be easily construed to be a common epiphenomenon of the neurocognitive activity of human bodies. When the question pertains to you and your relationship with your own supposedly “thinking” material brain, you can feel the issue more personally as having something existential and not merely ontological. So let’s ask You:
What are you?
Your material brain is an object within your body, which is also an object. Through these organic objects of yours you are able to have cognitive sensory experiences of surrounding physical objects. Your body is your most intimate and persistent objective neurocognitive sensory experience for You, the Dualistic Subject, who has Consciousness as a gap between You and your objects of your world. Consciousness through the body and its brain is a phenomenal timespace subject-object relation. On the objective pole, consciousness is dualistic and phenomenological, but going within from your body to your selfhood as a subject has no apparent gap or inner space, so it seems to be nondual as if you are your body. Object is a phenomenal duality; subject is a noumenal nonduality or it is not a pure and real subject or self.
A body is made of organic matter, but a self is not made of any kind of matter, for only a phenomenal object can be made of matter. A noumenal subject is immaterial and immeasurable by any form of material instrumentation.
You are not your body! It is your most vivid and persistent experiential cognitive activity during your waking sensory hours, but in a “flying dream” you are in your subtle body of death and dreaming. Your subtle body is what you call your mind of perception and imagination, as well as your emotional states, throughout the day. The mind, the subtle body, can be energetically detached from the physical body and be developed to do extraordinary things. If you have read the books of Robert Monroe, Carlos Castaneda or Swami Muktananda, you can begin to see, at least theoretically, how this works. From the standpoint of physical sensory duality of physical world, objects and other human bodies, your selfhood is all too easily identified as a bodily subjective object, which makes the mind or subtle body, the dreamer, seem to be a relative noumenal subject transcendentally above and beyond the physical world and physical bodies of physical phenomenal subject-object consciousness as neuro-cognition.
Developing the subtle body and its extraordinary faculties, powers or siddhis is a big deal for most human beings who can do such things or who at least aspire to do such things. The human soul (whatever that might turn out to be) eventually outgrows the ignorance of naïve materialism and develops a kind of subtle supermaterialism of identifying conscious selfhood with the mind or subtle body as a subtle subjective object (the subtle or dream body) that experiences subtle subject-object phenomenal consciousness of subtle worlds, objects and other subtle bodily persons, such as ghosts of the dead or nonhuman spirits such as are called angels and demons. But the subtle “self” is not real because the even subtler causal plane or world of sheer abstractions or pure ideas, thought-structures, then becomes the relative noumenal subject in nondual consciousness of the subtle subject-object phenomenal dualistic realm. The causal seeming noumenal self sees then that the Dreamer is the Dream, the Perceiver is the Perceived, the Feeler the Felt, just as before it was the seeming subtle noumenal self or supersensory mind that could see that the physical seer is the physical seen and the physical doer the physical thing done. But the causal self is still a mere concept and not an ultimate transcendental reality, not a phenomenological transcendental ego as conceived by Edmund Husserl. It is still a third plane of duality of phenomenal abstract subjective object looking at phenomenal abstract objective objects.
If you are not your physical body nor your subtle emotional mind nor your supersubtle abstract consciousness of causal karma and reincarnation, what are You? According to Hindu Vedanta and Samkhya traditions of India, you are a Fourth Level seemingly noumenal subject or pure witnessing self called Atman or Purusha. Unfortunately, that level is still an extremely supersensory and supracausal body! So you can kiss Vedanta and Samkhya goodbye! Though that level of apparent noumenal subject or self sees all three of the lower worlds as nondual, it has dualistic superconsciousness on its own plane of existence. Each supracausal bodily “self” appears there as a visible white star. That is the plane of existence where, as Aleister Crowley, once transmitted from his Teacher that “each man and woman is a star” possessing Thelema, True Will. Kashmir Shaivism also says that each Godself, Shivatma, of that level has truly Free Will, Swatantrya or Icchashakti, Power of Lordship. So, in this light, the supracausal bodily self seems rather ultimate and final from an ordinary human metaphysical point of view. But it is rumored in circles of secret ancient Yoga that there is a Fifth Level of Paramatma, Superself, that is Noumenal Subject looking down nondualistically on the Divine dualities of the Fourth Level. That Fifth Body is Paramatma Linga, the black Linga Sharira, which is one and the same as a black hole. But, it too is also only relative Noumenality of Subject. There seems to be no metaphysical upper limit to spiritual subtlety of higher dimensions. However many layers of grosser consciousness or duality we peel off the noumenal onion of selfhood, there seems to be no finite core in any absolute sense of the meaning. Noumenal Subject simply now means any plane or body of consciousness above a lower plane or body of consciousness. Subject and Object, as well as Noumenality and Duality, become totally relative only. This is the view in Vajrayana Buddhism called Dzog Chen, Maha Ati or the Great Ending, which Chögyam Trungpa describes as “the sky falling on your head”.
If you want to go beyond naïve scientific Eliminative Materialism and can somehow perceive immaterial selfhood or noumenal subjectivity, then you might as well go all the way as I have described above. The implications can be quite devastating even if you have the spiritual courage to think beyond virtually all scientific and philosophical schools or traditions on Earth.
What are you(?) is a loaded question! A “what” implies some level of body or subjective object. The idea of a fully noumenal subject gets inevitably pushed higher and higher beyond our conceptual ability. You are not a “what”, but more of an unidentifiable Who with ever higher levels of Self-discovery awaiting you. So welcome to My Realm, which is the realm of Pyaj Dev, the Onion God, who will never absolutely know even Himself.
There cannot be a final definition or description of You or any self of any body in any universe on any level of Existence. There is, however, always a final definition or description of any body and its dualistic realm of the level that pertains to it. The final definition of a body happens precisely through transcending it and rising into the next higher level, plane or dimension consciously as an experiential mode and not a mere intellectual belief, opinion or conclusion. Each of us is ultimately an Onion God of eternal ever-new Self-discovery. For someone overly focused in the material intellectual activity of the brain, such a thought is usually either highly terrifying or utterly unacceptable. Rare indeed is the human quasi-self who wants to go all the way with existential metaphysics or cosmic ontology.
What is the real and fully rational meaning of Subject, Object and Consciousness? Who dares look into all this without prejudice or self-defensive brain egotism? The Object is always an Object for a Subject; the Subject is always a Subject for an Object. These two facts are always phenomenological, but the truth of them is always noumenological.
