Puran Thinks · Philosophy & Science

Who am I, really?
Asking Shankara's question
with a scientist's eye.

June 2026  ·  A long read  ·  No answers promised

Sometime in the 8th century, a man sat down and wrote six verses. He wasn't writing a poem, exactly. He was answering a question — the oldest question a human being can ask: Who am I?

His name was Adi Shankaracharya. And his answer was not the kind you put on a form. He didn't say: I am a brahmin, I am a scholar, I am from Kerala, I am the son of so-and-so. He said something far stranger. He said: I am none of those things. I am not even the thing behind those things. I am Chidananda roopa, Shivoham, Shivoham — the form of pure consciousness and bliss. I am Shiva.

Now, I am not asking you to believe that. I am not asking you to believe anything today. What I want to do is something a little strange: I want to take each verse of this poem — this Nirvana Shatakam, this six-verse declaration of identity — and hold it up to what science actually knows about what we are. And then I want to ask you, honestly and plainly: does this feel true to you?

Not philosophically true. Not spiritually true. Just — when you hear it — does something in you nod quietly?

· · ·

Verse I

Mano buddhyahankara chittani naaham
Na cha shrotra jihve, na cha ghrana netre
Na cha vyoma bhumirna tejo na vaayuhu
Chidananda roopa, Shivoham Shivoham

"I am not the mind, the intellect, the ego, or memory. I am not the ears, tongue, nose, or eyes. I am not earth, ether, fire, or wind. I am the form of consciousness and bliss — I am Shiva."

What science says

Here is what modern neuroscience will tell you without any philosophy attached to it: there is no fixed "self" inside the brain. The "I" you feel — the one reading this sentence right now — is constructed. It is a model. A narrative the brain builds, moment to moment, from sensory data, memory, and prediction. When you go under anaesthesia, it vanishes completely. When certain parts of your temporal lobe are disrupted, it fragments or disappears entirely. The neuroscientist Anil Seth calls the self "a controlled hallucination."

The split-brain experiments of Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga showed that when the two hemispheres of the brain are separated, each half produces its own version of "I" — its own explanations, its own story. Two selves in one skull. Which one was real? Both. Neither. The question stops making sense.

And what about the body itself — the ears, the eyes, the nose Shankara lists? Chemistry. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, bound into proteins, fats, sugars. The iron in your blood was forged in a dying star. The calcium in your bones was made in a supernova explosion before our solar system even existed. You are, in a very literal sense, not from here.

So when Shankara says: I am not the senses, not the elements — he is not making a mystical claim. He is making an empirical one. Can you identify a single atom in your body that belongs uniquely to "you"?

· · ·

Verse II

Na cha prana sangyo na vai pancha vaayuhu
Na va sapta dhaturna va pancha koshah
Na vak pani padau na chopastha payu
Chidananda roopa, Shivoham Shivoham

"I am not the life-breath, nor the five vital forces. I am not the seven substances of the body, nor the five sheaths. I am not the voice, hands, feet, or organs of generation and elimination. I am consciousness and bliss — I am Shiva."

What science says

The body replaces itself. Almost completely. The lining of your gut renews every 4 to 5 days. Your red blood cells last about 120 days. Your skeleton — which feels so solid and permanent — is replaced almost entirely over 10 years. Physicist Max Tegmark estimated that almost none of the atoms currently in your body were there when you were seven years old.

If every single substance that composes you today is different from the substance that composed you at age seven — what, exactly, has stayed the same? What is the "you" that persists through all this constant replacement?

The ancient Greek paradox asks: if you replace every plank of a ship one by one, is it still the same ship? We resolve it by saying the pattern persists, not the material. You are a pattern. A form. A wave in a river — the river keeps flowing but the wave has a shape, a coherence, a direction. The water is never the same water. The wave is always the same wave. For a while.

Shankara refuses to identify with the wave. He is looking for what the water itself is. Have you ever tried to find the edge of yourself — where you end and the air begins?

· · ·

Verse III

Na me dvesha ragau na me lobha mohau
Mado naiva me naiva matsarya bhavah
Na dharmo na chartho na kamo na mokshah
Chidananda roopa, Shivoham Shivoham

"I have no hatred or desire, no greed or delusion, no pride or envy. I seek neither righteousness nor wealth, neither pleasure nor liberation. I am consciousness and bliss — I am Shiva."

What science says

This is the hardest verse. Because desire, fear, envy, pride — these feel most like us. These feel like the truest part of who we are. And yet.

Every emotion you have ever felt is a product of electrochemical signals. Desire is dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. Fear is the amygdala firing. Envy, jealousy, pride — these are ancient evolutionary programs that run because they once helped creatures like us survive and reproduce. They are not signals of your truth. They are signals of your ancestors' survival pressures.

Robert Sapolsky's research across decades shows that virtually every human behavior — aggression, compassion, tribalism, generosity — has identifiable biological underpinnings. The feeling that you chose your emotions, you generated them freely, out of some pure self? That is the last illusion to fall. You did not choose to want what you want. You arrived wanting it.

Shankara is not saying: stop wanting. He is saying: don't be the wanting. The desire arises in you the way a cloud arises in sky. The sky does not become the cloud. Is there something in you that watches the desire — that notices it rising — without being consumed by it?

· · ·

Verse IV

Na punyam na papam na saukhyam na dukham
Na mantro na tirtham na veda na yajnaha
Aham bhojanam naiva bhojyam na bhokta
Chidananda roopa, Shivoham Shivoham

"I am neither virtue nor sin, neither pleasure nor pain. I need no mantra, no pilgrimage, no scripture, no ritual. I am neither the act of eating, nor the food, nor the one who eats. I am consciousness and bliss — I am Shiva."

What science says

Morality, scientists now tell us, is not handed down from some external ledger in the sky. It evolved. Jonathan Haidt's work on moral foundations shows that what feels like "good" and "bad" varies enormously across cultures, across centuries, across contexts — because what is useful for group survival varies enormously. The categories are real, and they matter deeply, but they are not written into the fabric of the universe. They are written into the fabric of social primates.

Pain and pleasure — the most immediate reality of life — are also constructions. Phantom limb pain is real pain in a limb that no longer exists. Placebo analgesia is the brain manufacturing its own painkillers from belief alone. What we experience as the sharp edge of reality is, at its core, the brain's best guess about what's happening.

Thermodynamics does not know good from bad. The laws of physics do not distinguish between a saint and a criminal. Entropy does not negotiate. At the level of fundamental physics, there is no moral charge embedded in matter. The distinction is real — it matters for living — but it is not ultimate.

Shankara is pointing to something beyond the accounting of merit and sin, pleasure and suffering. He is pointing to what remains when you subtract all the labels. What would you be if you were neither good nor bad — just aware?

· · ·

Verse V

Na mrityu na shanka na me jati bhedaha
Pita naiva me naiva mata na janma
Na bandhurna mitram gurur naiva shishyaha
Chidananda roopa, Shivoham Shivoham

"I have no death, no doubt, no caste distinction. I have no father, no mother, no birth. I have no relative, no friend, no teacher, no student. I am consciousness and bliss — I am Shiva."

What science says

This is the verse that science handles most beautifully. No death. That sounds absurd. Except — think about what death actually is, physically. It is not the end of the matter that was you. The first law of thermodynamics is absolute: energy is neither created nor destroyed. Every atom of you will persist. Every quantum of energy that was you will continue, transformed. The star that died to give you your iron is not gone. It became you. You will become something else.

No birth, either, in that sense. The carbon that is now in your lungs was once in a Cretaceous ocean, then in a dinosaur's tooth, then in limestone, then released by a volcano, then absorbed by a tree, then eaten. When exactly was it born? Was it ever not here?

The physicist Carlo Rovelli writes that we are not things — we are processes. Events. Not nouns, but verbs. The universe is not made of stable objects; it is made of interactions, relations, transformations. The "you" that exists is a process, not a substance — a knot in a net of relationships, temporary, real, and eventually untied.

And the relationships Shankara lists — father, mother, teacher, friend — these are real, and they shape us profoundly. But they are not what we are. They are the net in which we find ourselves knotted. If you lost every label you carry — every relationship, every category — what would remain?

· · ·

Verse VI

Aham nirvikalpo nirakara rupo
Vibhutvascha sarvatra sarvendriyaanam
Na cha sangatham naiva muktirna meyaha
Chidananda roopa, Shivoham Shivoham

"I am without thought-modifications, without form. I pervade all senses everywhere, yet I am beyond attachment, beyond liberation, beyond measure. I am consciousness and bliss — I am Shiva."

What science says

Here is the strangest thing modern physics has quietly discovered: at the most fundamental level, the universe is not made of separate things. It is made of fields — quantum fields that permeate all of space. The electron is not a small ball sitting in space; it is an excitation in the electron field, which is everywhere. You are an excitation. I am an excitation. The rock, the star, the void between galaxies — all excitations of the same underlying fields.

And these fields are entangled. Quantum entanglement means that particles which have interacted remain connected across any distance — a measurement of one instantly affects the other, regardless of space between them. The universe is non-local. It does not respect our sense of separateness. How separate are you, really, from everything else?

The physicist John Wheeler, near the end of his life, proposed what he called "It from Bit" — the idea that information, not matter, is the fundamental substrate of reality. The universe, at bottom, may be participatory: it exists because it is observed, because it is known. Consciousness, in this picture, is not an accident inside the universe — it may be the universe knowing itself.

Shankara says: I pervade all senses everywhere, yet I am not attached to any of them. Not escapism. Not detachment from life. Something more precise: witnessing without being consumed. Present without being imprisoned.

· · ·

Now. I want to be clear about something before I finish.

None of this is an instruction to withdraw. Not a philosophy of giving up. Not a reason to stop caring about the things and people around you. Quite the opposite, actually.

If you are a temporary arrangement of ancient stardust — if the atoms that form you were forged in supernovae billions of years ago, and will return to the universe long after this brief configuration dissolves — then what you are experiencing right now, this specific awareness, this exact moment of being alive and conscious on a small wet rock orbiting an ordinary star in the unfashionable arm of an average galaxy — this is extraordinarily rare.

The universe is 13.8 billion years old and almost entirely made of emptiness, plasma, and dark matter. Life — actual, aware, feeling life — is vanishingly improbable. You are a traveller who got the rarest ticket that exists. You are briefly, impossibly, here. And you will return. Not to nothing — to everything. Back to the universe that made you.

Shankara didn't write the Nirvana Shatakam as a resignation letter from life. He wrote it as a liberation from a false identity — the identity built from labels, possessions, comparisons, fears, and roles. He was saying: you are not the things you cling to. You are something that cannot be taken from you. And if that's true — if the deepest layer of you is not your job, your reputation, your grief, your nation, your bank balance — then how much lighter does it become to carry all of those things? How much more freely can you hold them?

The suffering that comes from clutching an identity — from building your entire sense of self on something the universe will inevitably reclaim — that suffering has a trapdoor. And this poem, strange as it sounds in the 21st century, is pointing at it.

"After all that — after the atoms and the quantum fields and the collapsing self and the stardust we are made of — do you feel, even slightly, less afraid of losing what you think you are?"

That question is not for me to answer.
Sit with it.

Written by Puran Prasad Adhikari  ·  puranadhikar.blogspot.com  ·  Chitwan, Nepal