V E D A N T A V I L L EAdvaita Vedanta for serious seekers

Who Am I

The direction of inquiry

The question "Who am I?" is central to Vedantic inquiry because it turns attention away from objects and toward the one to whom all objects appear.

The method is not to invent a new identity, but to examine each layer that is usually taken to be the self and see whether it is truly constant, self-revealing, and fundamental.

Neti neti in practice

Body, possessions, thoughts, emotions, and the ego-sense are all available to observation. Because they are known, they cannot be the final knower.

Vedanta calls this method neti neti - not this, not this. What remains after the negation of the non-self is not emptiness, but awareness itself.

What the image is showing

The diagram moves from outer identifications to subtler inner identifications, ending in the recognition that awareness is the witness of all of them.

This is why self-knowledge in Vedanta is described as the removal of misidentification rather than the acquisition of new information.