One of the greatest contributions made by Robert Wolfe, a teacher of nonduality, was to see that advaita entails ajata.

How might we arrive at this conclusion?

Here’s one line of inquiry we can follow: Ramana Maharshi helpfully points out that all other appearances–the body, the world, Ishwara–depend upon the rising of the finite mind. And at the root of the finite mind is the rising I, the sense of me.

Because this is so, self-inquiry or self-investigation is the practice whose point is to discover what the true or fundamental nature of this rising I really is. What’s discovered, ultimately, is not jiva but only atma swarupa: “I am I.”

That is to say, what is discovered is that “there never was two or twoness to begin with.” This, indeed, is advaita. There never was a mind-world duality; nor a body-mind duality; nor an I-other duality; and so on.

But this is not the end of the inquiry because what has yet to be investigated is the assumption that any thing at all could ever rise.

How could “I am I” or Pure Consciousness or Pure Being itself ever rise, appear, or manifest? How could purna (wholeness) or vastu (what is) ever genuinely create thinghood? How could Pure Being ever become?

Note that the rising of the world depended upon the rising of the I. But the ego I, it was discovered, does not actually exist. Nor, then, does the world as an independent entity. In fact, what’s clear, to begin with, is that there never was twoness.

But trace this line of inquiry out one more step: what is also grasped is that if there never was two, then there never was one either; and if there never was two or one, then there never was a single thing. Period.

To understand intuitively and silently that “not a thing ever appeared, arose, or manifested” is the ajata (non-origination or non-creation) teaching. Gaudapada rightly calls it the “ultimate truth.” Papaji, in fact, proclaims that it is the “only Truth.”