There Is No Final Resolution For the Jiva

After years of studying Vedanta, the knowledge remains remarkably subtle.

Perhaps this is because the mind keeps expecting a final resolution that the teaching cannot give it. The jiva wants to arrive somewhere. It wants finally to understand what the Self is, grasp it completely, and rest in the certainty that the problem has been solved. But there is a difficulty: anything the mind grasps becomes an object.

We may begin with the understanding, “I am not the body; I am the Self.” This is an essential correction. If I identify myself with the body-mind, absolute security is impossible. The body is vulnerable. The mind is changeable. Relationships end. Possessions disappear. Societies deteriorate. Eventually the body dies.

Nothing within conditional existence can provide unconditional security.

Vedanta therefore shifts our attention away from the body-mind and toward the Self. I am not this limited individual. I am Brahman—limitless, attributeless, unborn awareness.

But even here a subtle problem appears. The mind hears “the Self” and begins imagining something called the Self. Perhaps it is vast awareness behind experience. Perhaps it is an infinite field in which the universe appears. Perhaps it is an eternal witness silently observing the changing body and mind. However sophisticated these conceptions become, the Self has once again been objectified. There is still “me,” over here, contemplating “the Self,” over there. The duality has merely become more refined.

This is why Vedanta must employ both affirmation and negation. The affirmations are necessary. Tat tvam asi. You are That. Aham brahmasmi. I am Brahman. Without such statements, the process of negation could easily collapse into nihilism. If I am not the body, not the mind, not my thoughts, not my personality, not my history, one might reasonably ask: Is there anything left Vedanta answers emphatically: yes. You are not nothing.

And yet the moment we try to say positively what that something is, language begins to betray us.

“I am awareness.”

“I am infinite.”

“I am the Self.”

Each statement is useful. Each points in the right direction. But each can subtly transform the Self into something possessing attributes—something the mind can understand, contemplate, or experience. So Vedanta negates again. Neti, neti. Not this. Not this.

The body is known, so it cannot ultimately be the knower.

The mind is known.

Thought is known.

Emotion is known.

The sense of individuality itself is known.

Even the most profound spiritual experience is known.

And, most unsettlingly, my conception of “the Self” is also known.

Neti.

The jiva is left grasping. It wants to say, “Fine. If I am not any of these things, then tell me what I actually am.”

But any answer the mind can hold becomes another object of knowledge. This leads to an important distinction. Vedanta does not say that the Self is unknown. It says that the Self cannot be known as an object. The Self is not something hidden that we will eventually discover if only our meditation becomes deep enough or our philosophical understanding sufficiently refined. The Self is that because of which every object, thought, sensation, doubt, and experience is known.

We therefore encounter a strange epistemological limit. The one thing we can never know in the ordinary subject-object sense is the one thing whose existence we can never seriously doubt. I can doubt what I am. I cannot doubt that I am.

Perhaps this is why, after all the elaborate metaphysics, we eventually arrive at something extraordinarily simple:

I am.

Even this is not a definition of the Self. It is merely what remains when we resist adding another predicate.

And there is another limit that Vedanta must acknowledge.

Experience continues.

The world appears.

Multiplicity appears.

Bodies appear.

Minds appear.

Pleasure and suffering appear.

Vedanta can describe this appearance as mithya and provisionally explain it through concepts such as maya and avidya. But if we continue asking why—why maya, why manifestation, why should nondual Brahman appear as a world at all?—the explanatory chain eventually ends. We do not know.

Vedanta can negate the world's claim to absolute reality without providing an ultimate explanation for why appearance exists. This is an important limit to acknowledge. Calling the world maya should not become a sophisticated way of pretending that we have explained something that remains fundamentally inscrutable.

There is experience.

Why?

Ultimately, we cannot say.

And yet experience can still be understood as dependent reality. The world does not have to be nonexistent to be mithya. The traditional rope-snake illustrates the distinction. The snake is experienced and may even produce genuine fear, but it never possesses an existence independent of the rope. Likewise, Vedanta does not conclude that nothing exists. It concludes that what we ordinarily take to be independently real is not independently real.

This brings us back to the search for absolute security. At first, I want Dan to be absolutely secure. I want the body to remain healthy, the family safe, the finances sufficient, the world stable. These are perfectly reasonable concerns within ordinary life. Vedanta does not ask us to become indifferent to them.

But absolute security cannot be obtained this way. No arrangement of conditional reality can become unconditional. The more radical discovery is that the one I have been trying to make absolutely secure cannot ultimately be what I am.

“No Dan, no problem” is deliberately provocative, but it points toward something important. It does not mean Dan ceases to exist empirically. Dan still has responsibilities, preferences, fears, pleasures, relationships, and a body that must eventually die. It means that Dan has no independent, absolute reality. Absolute security therefore does not mean:

“I have finally found something that will keep Dan safe forever.”

It means:

I cannot ultimately be the one I have spent my life trying to make absolutely safe.

And still the jiva wants more. It wants liberation to provide a final psychological resolution. Perhaps permanent peace. Permanent certainty. An uninterrupted experience of nonduality. A condition in which all existential questions have finally disappeared. But those too would be conditions of the jiva, and conditions come and go. There may therefore be no final resolution for the jiva.

This does not mean there is no moksha. It means moksha cannot be the perfected condition of the person. The person remains part of conditional reality. The mind may sometimes be peaceful and sometimes disturbed. The body ages. Difficult decisions remain difficult. Loss still hurts. Preferences remain preferences.

Perhaps this is what makes Gaudapada's observation that there are no standpoints in advaitam so profound. The jiva keeps searching for the final standpoint:

I am the body.

No.

I am the witness.

Not quite.

I am awareness.

Useful, but easily objectified.

I am Brahman.

True as teaching, yet still susceptible to becoming a concept possessed by the mind.

I am.

And eventually even the words become unnecessary.

There is no final philosophical platform upon which the jiva can stand and announce, “Now I have it.” And perhaps the entire predicament can be reduced to a short conversation:

Jiva: “But I still don't quite have it.”

Vedanta: “Correct. You never will.”

Jiva: “That's frustrating.”

Vedanta: “That frustration is known too.”

Neti, neti.

And life goes on 🙂

But the humor conceals something profound. The jiva's inability to grasp the Self is not a defect that still needs to be overcome. The Self was never available for grasping because it was never an object separate from the one doing the grasping.

The desire for final resolution belongs to the jiva. That desire too is known. And yet the fundamental error has been challenged: I need not ask this changing person, or this changing world, to provide the absolute security they are constitutionally incapable of providing.

Perhaps that is enough.

Nothing ultimately needed to be resolved.

And everything conditionally still needs attending to.