Saya versus AKU, or Me versus ME

The German poet Goethe put it this way, “Zwei Seelen leben, ach!, in meiner Brust!” Or in English, “Two souls live, alas, in my breast!” Danny Kaye, in a comic vein, voiced a related idea: “She was beside herself—her favorite position!” Today’s theme is more Goethe than Kaye and, in its implications for living a good life, serious rather than comic...

Different languages, in reflecting their cultures, emphasize different things. Many European languages, for example, in following the Latin scire and cognoscere, have two verbs “to know.” The first is for factual knowledge, for example, “I know that New York is a metropolis.” The second describes knowledge from experience. Thus, “After having lived there for 17 years, I know Honolulu well.” English subsumes both these activities under the single verb “to know.” Similarly, Scandinavia languages along with German have two verb for “to eat.” The Norwegian saying sums this distinction up: Dyr eter, menesker spiser (“Animals eat, human beings dine.”) The German equivalent is Tiere fressen, Menschen essen. The study of world languages opens one to discovering these, uh, delicious differences.

In this vein, I’d like to riff today off the distinction made in the two Malay-Indonesian words for I/Me/My: Saya and Aku. In the culture these words derive from, there is a strong emphasis on mystical realities. What one sees isn’t necessarily all there is. Indonesia especially had hundreds of years of exposure to Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, then Western Christianity and secularism, the last two thanks to 350 years of Dutch colonization. Since Southeast Asian cultures are syncretistic, none of these influences went away. Rather, the newest one was simply added in, like the latest vegetable cut into a salad.

​Saya is the word normally used in conversation. Saya pergi ke kota; “I’m going to town.” This term refers to the everyday self, what the Russian mystic Gurdjieff (d. 1949) called the Personality Self. It has a name, a birthdate and place, parents, teachers, etc. It is formed with major influences from all these factors. Aku, on the other hand, refers to one’s true inner self, in religious terms the specifications and characteristics of one’s soul. It is the Self put there by the creative forces of Universal Spirit. My sense of things as I’ve proceeded with spiritual work over my adult years is that my life’s mission, above and before all else, is the docking, like of Soyuz and Apollo, of my everyday Saya self with what I like to call my “biggest and best self,” or AKU. If and when that happens, Saya, I believe, will follow the promptings of AKU and will realize a state the Sufis, the mystics of Islam, refer to as the Insan al-kamil, or Noble Human Being. Gurdjieff called this realization “Person Number 5,” or the Harmoniously Developed Human Being whose heart, mind, and body are integrated under the leadership of the soul. My sense is that all serious and respectable spiritual-development programs have this goal in mind: helping us become the person the Universe wants us to be. If that is true, may we all realize our own AKU in our lifetimes. Amen.

The U.S. Apollo docks with the U.S.S.R. Soyuz July 17, 1975, 138 miles above Earth.