The Final Non-Duality 1 – Advaita Vedānta: The Identity of Self and Brahman

The Eternal Truth Beyond the Path of Realization

Among the world’s spiritual philosophies, few have exerted as profound an influence as Advaita Vedānta. With clarity and subtlety, it proclaims a truth that stands at the heart of the human search: that the Self (ātman) is not separate from the ultimate reality (Brahman), and that the apparent world of multiplicity is not ultimately real. The ancient mahāvākya — tat tvam asi (“you are that”) — still echoes with liberating force. It suggests a truth already present, not something to be acquired.

Advaita means non-dual. Its essential claim is not simply that all things are one, but that there is no second — that Being is undivided, eternal, whole. In this, Advaita comes closer than most traditions to the structure of Being itself. It recognizes that the ordinary perception of the world — filled with opposites, change, time, birth and death — conceals a deeper, timeless unity. Its greatest teachers, from Śaṅkara to modern figures like Ramana Maharshi, have pointed not to another world, but to the immediacy of Self, prior to thought, experience, or becoming.

And yet, even within this profound vision, a contradiction remains. For while Advaita insists that the Self is never absent, it also speaks of a path — a movement of realization, a transition from ignorance (avidyā) to knowledge (jñāna), from bondage to liberation (mokṣa). The seeker is told that through discrimination (viveka), detachment, meditation, and grace, one may eventually realize the non-dual truth.

Here the structure of the contradiction appears. If the Self is Brahman, and Brahman is eternal and unchanging, how could there ever have been ignorance of it? How can that which is eternally present be attained through time? How could Being ever be absent, and then appear?

This is what Emanuele Severino names contraddizione C: the hidden but universal belief that Being can become non-being, and that non-being can become Being. In Advaita, this belief is not denied but relocated — from the world of ultimate reality to the realm of māyā, illusion. Māyā is that power which causes the eternal to appear as temporal, the undivided to appear as divided. But here, too, lies danger: for to call the world unreal is to risk falling into nihilism — the idea that what appears does not truly exist, or exists only contingently. Yet if something truly did not exist, it could not even appear. What appears is — necessarily, eternally, unavoidably.

Thus the issue is not only that Advaita proposes a path to what is already present. It is that in positing māyā as illusion, and liberation as a release from illusion, it suggests that Being — the appearing of beings — can be mistaken, contingent, or false. But nothing that appears can be false, for what appears is necessarily, already, a manifestation of Being. There is no illusion “beneath” which lies the real; rather, everything that appears is real, and appears necessarily.

From the perspective of the structure of Being, the insight of Advaita — that the Self is not separate from Being, and that reality is not dual — is true and eternal. But its method, its path of realization, still rests on the contradiction of becoming. It still assumes a time in which the Self was not known, a seeker who must move toward truth, a process that ends in liberation.

The truth, however, is that the Self is eternally manifest. It is not hidden, not veiled, not waiting to be realized. The appearance of ignorance, of seeking, of spiritual practice — all of these are themselves eternal and necessary parts of Being’s appearing. They are not errors, nor stages to be overcome, but expressions of the same Self they seek.

To read Advaita Vedānta in the light of Being, then, is not to reject its insight, but to complete it. What it names as the highest truth — that the Self is Brahman — becomes not a goal, but the eternal condition of every moment. Liberation is not the end of a process, but the recognition that there is no process. There is only what is — eternally, gloriously, necessarily.

And so we do not become liberated. We do not awaken. We do not realize.
We are — and that is the final, unchangeable truth.