It’s notable how many people claim enlightenment after engaging with spiritual texts or having transient insights. Genuine non-dual realization—where everything is understood as a reflection of the self—is far more elusive. I speak from personal experience, living from this awareness where the boundary between myself and the world dissolves, yet I still interact with it, maintaining a delicate balance between recognizing the unity of all things and engaging with them practically.
This insight transcends many spiritual and religious traditions. Advaita Vedanta in Hinduism teaches that the self (Atman) is identical with the ultimate reality (Brahman). Buddhism highlights the illusion of a separate self through śūnyatā (emptiness). Sufism in Islam speaks of the unity of existence and the divine’s presence in all things. Taoism in China describes the Tao as the fundamental, unifying principle of the universe. Even Christian mysticism reflects this, with teachings about the divine indwelling, where God is seen as immanent within creation, suggesting a deep interconnectedness between the self and the divine.
However, the difference between intellectual understanding and embodied realization is immense. Many people believe they have achieved enlightenment simply because they grasp the concepts. In reality, true non-dual realization involves living this awareness continuously, integrating it into every moment of life. This level of embodiment, where one consistently perceives and acts from the understanding of unity, is achieved by fewer than 0.1% of people.
In spiritual communities, it’s common to encounter individuals who mistake their intellectual grasp of these teachings for genuine enlightenment. From my perspective, it’s evident that while many may have glimpsed the concept, they have not fully embodied it. They understand the theory but do not live it as a constant, present reality.
The distinction between conceptual knowledge and living from non-duality is profound. True realization is not merely an intellectual exercise; it’s a lived experience of unity that very few genuinely achieve.
Sundari: I agree, well written. We emphasize the subtlety of assimilating and living Self-knowledge a great deal for this reason. It is one thing to claim enlightenment as the ego and quite another to not have to claim it because you are the Self. Nobody who has actualized Self-knowledge (and I agree this is the minority) would ever claim they are enlightened. They would know that nobody ever gets enlightened because the Self, by whatever name, was never unenlightened.
The Self’s experience of itself is qualitatively different from the ego’s experience of the Self as an object or as objects. The realization “I am Awareness” does not give you the experience of Awareness or make you Awareness because you always have been Awareness. It negates the idea “I am the ego or conceptual identity.” When you know you are the Self and the knowledge is firm the recognition (re-knowing) that there is nothing special about being the Self is automatic. Self-knowledge is reality, it is what is true. It is the return to normal, not some ‘special status”.
The mind is functioning properly for the first time because the reversal that Maya imposed on it with the hypnosis of duality has been removed by Self-knowledge. The ‘veil’ that covered the mind is gone and you are free of the jiva or ego program. The jiva who is free does not change except in the way it contacts objects, which of course, indirectly greatly improves life for it because it no longer chases objects to complete itself, has no need for validation or to impress, and does not fear loss.
Freedom is huge for the jiva at first, but it does not feel like anything because it is not a feeling. It is just knowledge, and hard to describe the Self as the witness who does not condition to what it witnesses. Perhaps what comes closest to describing the indescribable with the inherent limitation of words is this: it is permanently being the observer ‘in’ the ‘place’ between feeling and not feeling. It is neutral, but far from uncaring. It is an ocean of compassion. It is caring and infinitely compassionate but never invested.
Love, Sundari
