Consciousness and the Not-Self

The most structurally clear argument in the Upadeśasāhasrī for the identity of self and Brahman proceeds from the invariance of consciousness. Throughout my life, the contents of consciousness change continuously: the body I had at five is different from the body I have now; the thoughts I had an hour ago are different from the thoughts I have now; the self I identified with yesterday is different in its beliefs, moods, and concerns from the self I identify with today. But something persists through all these changes without itself changing: the awareness in which all these changing contents appear. That invariant awareness cannot be any of the changing contents — the body, the mind, the ego — since it outlasts each of them without modification. It must be a distinct reality, and the most economical account of that reality is that it is Brahman itself appearing as the individual witness.

A natural objection to Advaita is that if the self is pure consciousness and pure consciousness is Brahman, there should be only one consciousness — but there appear to be many individual conscious beings, each experiencing their own unique stream of experience. Shankara's response in the Upadeśasāhasrī uses the analogy of space: the space inside a pot is numerically the same space as the space outside the pot, though it appears to be enclosed and limited by the pot. When the pot is broken, the "interior space" does not merge with the "exterior space" — the distinction was always only apparent, imposed by the pot's walls, not constitutive of space itself. Individual consciousnesses are like space appearing to be enclosed by the pots of individual bodies and minds: the enclosure is the product of ignorance, not of any real division within consciousness.

The culmination of the Upadeśasāhasrī's method is the teacher's direct statement to the prepared student: "You are that — you are Brahman." This is not an assertion about an external object but a pointing at the student's own self. The student who hears this and genuinely understands does not acquire a new belief about an external object called Brahman; they recognise what their own awareness already is and always was. Shankara describes this recognition as immediate and self-certifying: it cannot be doubted in the way that empirical beliefs can be doubted, because it is not a cognition of something other than the recogniser — it is the recogniser recognising itself. This self-recognition is liberation.

The Upadeśasāhasrī's prose section (the Bodha chapter in the Gadyabandha) is Shankara's most extended systematic treatment of the analysis of consciousness. The pot-space analogy (ghatakasha-mahakasha) becomes standard in later Advaita pedagogy. The question of how many Brahman-consciousnesses there are — whether liberation produces many liberated selves or reveals the one self — is a point of ongoing internal debate within the Advaita tradition.