Who Is Having the Thought?

A thought arrives, and with it, one more thought that is easy to miss: this is mine. Two writers, one in eighteenth-century Scotland and one in twentieth-century India, asked who the “mine” is. They looked in the same place and described different things. KTT counts the “mine” as a thought, noticed or not, even when it comes as a plain sense of ownership. The sources read for this article are Hume’s text in his own words and a presentation of Ramana Maharshi’s teaching by a long-time student. Neither writer ran an experiment.

What Hume found

In the Treatise of Human Nature (1739, Book 1, Part 4, Section 6), David Hume wrote: “When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception.” Heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. He never caught himself without a perception, and never observed anything but the perception. When his perceptions were removed, as in deep sleep, he said, he was insensible of himself. He took other people to be a bundle of perceptions in constant flux.

A caution from modern readers: Hume did not conclude that there is no self. He later wrote that his hopes of explaining what unites the perceptions had vanished.

What Ramana Maharshi taught

The Indian teacher Ramana Maharshi pointed at the same place and reported something else. In the account given by his student David Godman, he taught that of all the thoughts that arise, the “I”-thought is the first, and the others come only after it. His practice is a question put to each thought as it arises: to whom has this thought arisen? The answer that comes is “to me.” Then the question turns: who am I? He taught that following the “I”-thought back to its source quiets the thought that arose.

Two searches

Hume looked inward and found thoughts, one after another, with no thought that was “I.” Ramana asked each thought who it belonged to and found the “I”-thought underneath. Both treat the “I” as something that can be looked for. One finds no separate item. The other finds a thought that is first and that can be followed back.

What is not known

Whether an “I”-thought comes before other thoughts is not known. Ramana taught it, and Hume’s search did not find it. Neither tested it.

Whether the two findings are the same observation described in different words is open. KTT does not equate them.

How Ramana’s students tell the “I”-thought from the thought “I” is not known from this source.