What proof does Vedanta show that experience is non-dual?

Vedanta defines non-duality as that which is free from subject–object division. In other words, there’s no real separation between you as awareness and the objects you perceive as “out there.” Everything comes out of awareness and eventually dissolves back into it.

Let’s be clear from the start: Vedanta can’t prove non-duality in the empirical sense. Awareness—the subject—can’t be turned into an object we can point to. We’re like a camera trying to find itself in the photograph. Even if a reflection appeared, it would only be a distortion of the original. And because both science and Vedanta rely on the same sense instruments, neither has an independent vantage point to check its findings against.

So what’s the point? Well, Vedanta doesn’t try to prove non-duality the way science proves a theorem. It tries to indicate it—using logic, direct experience, and scripture. The rest is up to us.

Think about this: all objects in empirical reality can be divided into smaller and smaller parts until, eventually, they vanish into empty space. Space isn’t “nothing” for either science or Vedanta. Science tells us it has matter-like properties. Vedanta calls it one of the five basic elements. But Vedanta goes a step further—saying even space can be “divided” into something more fundamental: pure awareness. Once you arrive at awareness, you’ve hit the end of the line. Awareness has no parts, no cause, and nothing comes after it. It’s the is-ness of all experience—even space.

We take awareness for granted, just as we take light for granted. If I raise my hand and ask what you see, you’ll say “your hand,” not “the light that makes your hand visible.” Light is a common metaphor for awareness in Vedanta because, like light, awareness reveals everything without acting on it.

Or consider the simple question: when you see a table, where is the table actually located—“out there” or in your mind? Sense data (shape, color, texture, smell) come in through your sense organs, and the mind then assembles that data, adds a name and a form, and—voilà—calls it “table.” The table you “see” is already a mental construction. Vedanta turns the usual assumption that objects exist outside of us completely on its head.

Could Vedanta still make a case for non-duality? If you apply Occam’s razor—the idea that the simplest explanation with the fewest assumptions should be preferred—non-duality becomes interesting. It neatly sidesteps the “hard problem” of consciousness: how awareness could evolve from inert matter. (Spoiler: it didn’t.)

In the end, the goal of Vedanta isn’t to win a philosophical debate but to show that what you truly are is unchanging, unbounded awareness—not the small, limited body–mind you’ve taken yourself to be. Without that shift, non-duality is just an intriguing intellectual exercise. With it, it becomes a means of dissolving the very sense of limitation itself.