Sikh ethics sees self-centeredness as the source of human evil
According to the Sikh worldview, the whole is prior to its parts. The level of reality at which we are all individuals is a less fundamental reality than the level at which we are all One. This is a different worldview from that of most philosophers in the Western canon, who have usually posited the individual as fundamental. Western philosophers tend to think of the parts (us) as prior to the whole (if any whole even exists).
Correspondingly, the Sikh tradition ends up giving a different story about morality from most of Western philosophy, one that’s grounded in a belief in the fundamental unity of all things. Central in that story is the concept of haumai, which literally translates as ‘I am’. Haumai is a person’s false sense of themselves as singularly important, that the world revolves around them, and that the experiences, wants and needs of others are somehow less real or significant than their own.
According to Sikh scripture, haumai is the source of all injustice and human evil. It leads us to fail to recognise that other people share the very same ethical significance we have. The more consumed we are by haumai, the more we focus on our own wants and needs at the expense of our concern for others. At the extreme, we start to think of ourselves as the only ones who matter at all. Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji tells us that ‘those who have virtue as their treasure destroy haumai’.
Haumai is also the main obstacle to achieving spiritual enlightenment, which is a matter of apprehending and connecting with the Divine. And we connect with the Divine by recognising the sense in which we are fundamentally all One. Haumai, then, is essentially an excessive sense of individuality that leads us to misperceive reality. And this leads to an important insight: failing to care for others and treat them well quite literally gets things wrong, by manifesting the false view that we are all disconnected individuals, and that one person’s wants and needs can have a significance that others’ wants and needs don’t. [Continue reading…]