One of the most well-known philosophical slogans in the West is ‘I think therefore I am’.
It originates from the French philosopher Descartes, born in 1586. Descartes was trying to answer some of the fundamental questions that face us today: What is real? What is consciousness? What can I know?
Descartes reasoned that there are many things that we are conscious of, but that are not real (white unicorns, castles that float in the air, and so on), but that our mind is capable of doubting the reality of all of them. In fact, he said, everything we are capable of thinking can be put into question except of one: the fact that we are thinking. Thinking, he concluded is the absolute foundation of our being: I think therefore I am.
Through the eyes of Bhakti this conclusion makes no sense for at least two reasons.
First, the mind, the seat of thinking, is not eternal. It is material and disappears with the material body. Its reality is a function of time. It is not eternally real.
Second, and more importantly, thought, the cornerstone of Descartes’ theory, does not completely reflect our experience. Our experience of the world is more and different than a logical or scientific one. It is a spiritual one.
While thought can help us to understand the qualities a thing has, it cannot help us to experience what the thing is.
Let’s take a tree for an example. All the facts I can collect about a tree—it’s size, colour, shape, texture, smell, even molecular make-up—will never add up to my experience of the tree.
This is because these empirical facts do not capture the feelings that I hold for the tree. They cannot capture my spiritual relationship to the tree. This relationship is created by the completely unique experience that we all share at the level of the soul: the thrill in my heart when I first climbed a tree as a child, the fragrance of the girl with whom I shared my first kiss beneath the branches of the tree, the memory of the thunderstorm whose winds that caused a giant tree to crash down at my feet.
We know the world through facts, but facts only have meaning when they are animated by feelings. Facts are meaningful when they touch our hearts, when they are put to music through the voice of our soul.
The highest form of feeling is love, and the highest form of love is the unfettered love of God (prema). Without love there is no experience, no feeling, no life, no reality.
There is therefore only irrefutable statement: I love you. If you are appear to my senses as an other, as an other soul, it is because we are already linked together through the love of the soul.
We must therefore revise Descartes. The correct formulation is not ‘I think therefore I am’, but rather ‘I love therefore I am’. The one aspect of our experience that cannot be doubted is not thought, but love.
What is real is the soul. The reality of our spiritual form is our absolute foundation, our everyday existence our ‘constitutional position’. The full experience of the soul, one that radiates through living beings, is love.