Question:

Dear Ekta Didi, When this ‘I’ is present in every being, why is it that I am not able to experience another person’s ‘I’? I am able to experience only my awareness within my body complex. Could you enlighten me on this?

Answer:

That’s a beautiful question my dear but It is Intellectual, and not experiential. If one experientially recognizes the dissolution of the mind into awareness/knowingness, one knows that the ‘I’ is simply a thought. When It looks inwards, it collapses. The collapsing of the ‘I’ into the ocean of awareness reveals the truth.

‘I’ cannot exist there, It’s like a drop of water trying to understand the ocean, the moment when the drop of water merges with the ocean, it is not the drop anymore.

Similarly, when your ‘I’ merges with the awareness, you taste the sweet peace of awareness.

In awareness there is no mind, there are no words, there is no concept… just the pure sense of Being! There is no ‘I’. There is no other. 

In the next step one recognizes that: 

• • awareness in action is called the mind.
  • mind at rest is called the awareness.

When it becomes the mind and formulates this understanding into a question, it will never ask the question, ‘why am I not able to experience another person’s ‘I’? One who experiences won’t need to ask something like this because he knows that there is no ‘I’. Only the one who has intellectualized the Advaita knowledge without experiencing it may ask this because, at the intellectual level, you cannot experience the collapse of the ‘I’ into awareness.

When the drop of water is nonexistent, the individuality has completely faded and become ONE with the ocean, then how can it experience another drop?

#AtmaNirvriti #AtmanandaKrishnaMenon #AdvaitaVedanta #Non-Duality