Müller on the Self

Friedrich Max Müller · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 3 pages

Three pages quoting Max Müller's Chips from a German Workshop, volume I pages 69-70, by way of a long footnote in Isis Unveiled, volume II page 317. The frontispiece is by Naoto Hattori.

The passage opens by identifying the Self with what the Greek philosophers called the Augoeides, the Shining One, and then lets Müller describe how the idea was arrived at. Showing the Veda to be the first book of the Aryan nations, he argues that it preserves a period of the intellectual life of man with no parallel anywhere else — man left to himself to solve the riddle of the world, invoking, praising and worshipping the gods around him, and still ill at rest within himself. What unsettles him is a power discovered in his own breast that is never mute when he prays and never absent when he fears, which seems both to inspire his prayers and to listen to them, to live in him and yet to support him and everything around him. The only name he can find for it at first is Brāhman, a word originally meaning force, will, wish and the propulsive power of creation — but once named, Müller says, it grows into something strange and divine and ends by becoming one god among many in the great triad. The thought itself still has no real name, floating before the mind conceived but unexpressed, until at last he calls it Ātman: a word originally meaning breath or spirit which comes to mean Self and Self alone — Self whether divine or human, creating or suffering, one or all, but always Self, independent and free. A Vedic verse is quoted asking who saw the first-born when he who had no bones bore him that had bones, and where the life, the blood, the Self of the world was — and the passage ends with the point that once the idea of a divine Self is expressed, everything else must acknowledge its supremacy.

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