The Final Non-Duality 4 – Modern Non-Duality: Awareness, Realization, and the Trap of Sudden Awakening

The Self Does Not Awaken — It Eternally Is

Modern non-duality, especially in the traditions emerging from Advaita Vedānta and later crystallized in the teachings of figures like Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, and more recently Rupert Spira and Francis Lucille, offers what seems to be one of the most radical breaks from ordinary consciousness. The core insight is clear: awareness is not an object among others; it is not a thought, not a perception, not a memory — it is the condition for the appearing of all of these. In this view, the true “I” is not the personal ego but the Self: impersonal, timeless, without boundary or form.

This is a deep and true intuition. It recognizes that consciousness cannot be placed within time, that it is not born and does not die, and that it is never absent — even in the midst of confusion. It reveals that awareness is not the result of a process, nor the product of a brain or body, but rather the open field within which all appearances arise and pass.

Yet even in these radical teachings, a subtle contradiction remains — one that undermines the very foundation they seek to affirm. It is the idea of realization, the notion that at some point a person awakens to their true nature. Even when teachers insist that the Self is always present, the language of sudden insight, of a shift in awareness, of a dissolution of the ego, betrays a deeper assumption: that the Self was once hidden, and then revealed; that the ego was once dominant, and then collapsed; that there was once ignorance, and then awakening.

Here emerges once more what Emanuele Severino calls contraddizione C: the idea that Being — what is — can come into existence or pass away, that something not yet realized can become realized, or that the Self can move from non-appearance to appearance through some interior transformation.

This contradiction is often present even in the most subtle teachings. Take Ramana Maharshi, for example. His invitation to inquire “Who am I?” leads not to an object of thought, but to the dissolution of the questioner in the Self that always already is. And yet, many interpret this as a path to be walked, a condition to be attained — as if the Self were not already fully present, and needed to be uncovered.

Or take Rupert Spira, whose articulate and precise explorations of awareness emphasize its changeless, ever-present nature. Still, the language of “recognizing” awareness or “shifting out of identification” implies a movement from unawareness to awareness, as if there could be a prior time in which the Self was lost or asleep.

But if awareness is eternal, then it cannot be attained. It does not “realize” itself. The Self does not awaken — it eternally is. And if this is true, then the ego does not dissolve into the Self, nor does the individual disappear — rather, the illusion of becoming fades, and the eternal structure of Being appears as what it has always been.

What is called “awakening” is not a change in Being, but the disappearance of the contradiction — the mistaken belief that one could have ever been other than what one is. Realization, in this deeper sense, is not something that happens, but something that is eternally true. It does not occur in time, and it does not belong to the will, the intellect, or even to the subtle body of awareness.

To say that one awakens is still to place Being within the movement of time — to say that it once was hidden and now is revealed. But if Being is eternal, this cannot be. What appears to be the “moment” of awakening is not the appearance of something new, but the disappearance of the illusion that something was missing. Nothing is gained. Nothing is lost.

In this light, even the highest non-dual teachings are preparatory — not because they are wrong, but because they still permit the contradiction to appear. They still speak, however subtly, the language of before and after, of time, of transformation. They glimpse the eternal, but frame it within the very structure of becoming that it denies.

But Being is not a shift. It is not a realization. It is not a process. It is — necessarily, eternally, and without condition. No practice, no insight, no silence can bring it about. What appears as spiritual “progress” is nothing but the vanishing of a contradiction that never truly was.