"Fundamental Urges & Essential Self"

Fundamental Urges:
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What are the fundamental urges of the individual? Hunger, libido and fame. Hunger is the foremost among the instincts which limit the individual to a circumscribed field. "I must feed my body – I must feed every member of my family" is an instinctive feeling. Here an individual need has been recognised in other individuals with whom a particular individual has identified himself. There is also the desire for fame, power, respect and honour. No one wishes to be censured or degraded.
Everybody wishes to retain self-respect, self-esteem. This individual characteristic is transferred to the family. No one wishes that one's family should be censured or be inferior. "As I am honoured, my family, too, should be honoured and exalted." These individual characteristics are, again, transferred to the community. "My community should not be censured, my community should be fed well." The same feeling is transferred to the nation. "Everybody in my nation should be fed, nobody in my nation should starve. My country should not be censured or lowered in any way." The fundamental instincts which drag the individual to earthly life are the desire for wealth, power and sex-fulfilment. These fundamental gross urges are transferred in various degrees, gradually, from the individual to the environment, through family, country, nation, etc., which are but names of groups of individuals enjoying common characteristics.


Essential Self :
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But are these the essential properties of the self? Is the self merely an aggregate of divided bodies? As we have noted before, the self is a centre of experience. Experience is nothing if it is not attended with awareness or consciousness. Now, can this consciousness of the self be expanded, in the way stated before, to the external environment in space and time? Is there any such thing as a family-self, a community-self or a country-self? Though people identify their selves with such external forms and suffer or rejoice, those who had the intuitional experience of the Truth have declared that the self cannot be divided in such a way.
We cannot have a multiplicity of selves, because the moment a second self is posited, it becomes not a self, but a 'not-self,' Anatman. It is something external to the self. That which is posited as something external to the self can be experienced only through the senses. Now let us come back to our previous analysis. Nothing that is not known through the senses is known to man. So, if there is a second self, it ought to be a body known through the senses, as everything in this world is an object of the senses. We know the world merely as made up of particles or bodies of matter. Our own bodies are the configurations of matter.
So the external sensible forms of the self ought to be material expressions. They are not conscious entities. We cannot see consciousness or hear consciousness. We cannot sense it in any way. There is no such thing as sensuous experience of consciousness. This leads us to the conclusion that there is no sense-experience of the Atman. The moment you objectify the self, it becomes a material body, and not a centre of consciousness. If I know you are intelligent, it is not because I directly perceive your intelligence, but because I perceive in you certain effects of intelligence which I perceive in myself.
So there is no such thing as objective perception of the self. There is only inference of the characteristics of the presence of the intelligent self in others. It is on account of this inference that I deduce that there is a self in you all. This inference is drawn from my own experience. The fundamental experience is of the self, not of the 'not-self', not of the family, society or country, not of anything outside me. The entirety of life, therefore, is based on the fact of self-consciousness.