I’ve long been interested in the spiritual traditions of nondual awareness and have posted here half a dozen times, including excerpts from I Am That and Be As You Are. I uploaded my notes from those two books as part of my Book Archive experiment with ChatGPT.

While I’ve had very mixed results, I prompted ChatGPT to summarize the salient points on nonduality from those two books (see below). What I found more interesting was the process by which ChatGPT chooses passages to quote [PDF].

Non-Duality: As Seen Through Nisargadatta and Ramana

At its heart, non-duality (Advaita) is the realization that there is no separate self. What we take to be “I” — the thinker, the doer, the feeler — is simply a temporary bundle of thoughts and sensations appearing in pure awareness.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj – I Am That

“You are not what you take yourself to be. Find out what you are. Watch the sense ‘I am’, find your real Self.”

For Nisargadatta, everything begins with the felt sense of I am — the raw awareness of being, prior to thought or identity. To abide there is to rest in the formless presence that exists before the story of “me” arises.

He relentlessly points the seeker away from all content — body, mind, memory, sensation — and back to that which witnesses it:

“The self is not in the body. The body is in the self.”

In other words: you are not in the world. The world — and the experience of having a self — arises within you, the awareness.

Ramana Maharshi – Be As You Are

“The mind turned inward is the Self. Turned outward, it becomes the ego and the world.”

Ramana taught that liberation comes through a simple but radical practice: self-inquiry. Not analyzing the self, but asking:

“Who am I?”

Not to find an answer — but to exhaust the questioner.

He makes clear:

“There is no such thing as the ‘I’. There is only the Self.”

That Self is not personal. It does not think. It does not act. It is awareness itself — motionless, silent, prior to all appearances. When all thoughts are seen as temporary appearances, what remains is being-consciousness-bliss (sat-chit-ananda).

The Core Insight

There is no “you” to awaken. There is only awakening from the idea that you ever were. This is the view that unites both teachers:

• The “I” is not real.
• Awareness is not a product of the mind — the mind is a movement within awareness.
• Liberation is not attainment. It is the recognition of what has always been present, unnoticed because we were too busy being someone.