Trying to reason about the leap that Advaita Vedanta makes from individual subjective awareness to a global absolute awareness shared by all.
I am not my thoughts
I am not my feelings
I am not my emotions
I am not my limbs
I am not the things that I am smelling
I am not the colors that I am perceiving
I am not the hight differences that I am perceiving
I am not the things I am attaching to
I am not the profession I am professing
I am not the identity that I am dressing up with
Well, here we have a classical approach to what the ‘I AM’ not is. It is used in nondualism to come closer to the realization that all the subjects are changing while it is the ‘I AM’ that is the object that never changes, and that it makes those ‘I AM not’ statements. Positive affirmations look like:
I am observing
I am looking
I am listening
I am experiencing
I am working
The ‘I AM’ undergoes actions but it's not the I AM that is being acted upon. The I AM is always there.
From this, it is clear that the I AM is an unchanging actor. And it's clear that this sense of I AM is shared among all individuals, in that sense every person alive shares in this same I AM ‘experience’. They share a common being, the unchanging I AM. The reflected consciousness (cons.) is the normal ego or mind with the constant I AM.
However, nonduality goes a step further. They claim that there are not multiple beings/minds with a sense of I AM, but that there is only one I AM that is the ultimate Self. And that a subjective experience of the I AM (reflected cons.) is a pointer to this ultimate reality. The reflected conscious experience is a ‘reflection’ of that absolute so to speak.
This is where I personally have trouble leaping from my personal I AM into a universal absolute I AM. I look at this from a materialistic perspective. However, in quantum physics, differences at a small scale fade away into a shared universe so to speak. And from this perspective, I can see that I am the same ‘matter’ or ‘substance’ as other people. This substance gives presence to the individualities that we know we are. But I see a boundary, the boundary of my brain which is why I put the I AM in a box in Figure 1.
Nonduality would state that this fundamental substance is awareness and not matter, which to me seems like a big leap to make. They would point out that anything experienced by the observer is a subject and that, in that way, we can prove the observer is the only absolute.
“my awareness ends at my brain” is just another thought appearing in awareness. The unchanging awareness doesn’t inherently belong to anyone — it simply is.
But the above quote from ChatGPT finally fills the missing link for me. The I AM statements in the beginning miss a fundamental one, I AM is anything that is perceived including assumptions made by the brain, including the brain itself. Awareness is prior to Perception. My awareness is considering all the thoughts in this article, it is the awareness that is most certain to exist. Awarenness it self is a grounded truth. Does awareness have any boundaries?
My defacto thinking is brain emerges from physics, the mind emerges from the brain, and the experience of self emerges from the mind. Even tho there is no good understanding of how this happens in the materialistic paradigm. But it is a sensible perspective too. Advaita does not disregard this perse they just describe it as Maya, the illusionary contents of awareness. Matter is a subjective object. This is why I now think Advaita Vedanta is a reasonable ontological framework. It is an inclusive one that states that all we can really know is that I AM That.
Anyhow, from now on this is the worldview I hold. It's approved by chat-GPT, Copilot, Gemini to be a sensible one — who seem strangely optimistic about non-duality.
