The Self as Perspectival Consciousness: Advaita Vedānta and the Elusive Sense of Self

The sense of self is a pervasive yet elusive feature of conscious experience. The author argues that this elusiveness arises because we experience ourselves as beings in the world, but this is not what we truly are. The paradox of self-identity is explored through the lens of Advaita Vedānta, which holds that the true self, the ātman, is not a subject of consciousness but consciousness itself. This consciousness is not a worldly phenomenon and does not exist within us, which explains why the self cannot be objectified. The paper presents this philosophical solution to the paradox.

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Abstract

The sense of self is a ubiquitous feature of consciousness experience, but it is also notoriously elusive. It is elusive, I argue, because although I experience myself as a being in the world, this is not what I am. But how can it be that I exist even though there is nothing that I am? This is the paradox of self-identity and, in this paper, I explore how the paradox is solved by Advaita Vedānta. The Advaitic view is that the true self, the ātman, is not a subject of consciousness, but consciousness itself. This is what I truly am, and it is what we all are in the depths of our being. But consciousness is not a worldly phenomenon; it does not exist or occur within us; and this is why the self is not objectifiable.