Michael James has written a number of excellent long form essays (for example, here and here) about the ajata doctrine, the highest or ultimate nondual teaching according to Gaudapada, Ramana Maharshi, and others. The ajata doctrine states that there is no creation, manifestation, or origination. Being is only being. Period.

I’d like to briefly lay out one of James’s arguments that, to me, is both elegant and practical:

1. Vivarta is the doctrine that Ramana Maharshi often taught for expedient reasons, reasons having to do with the practice of Self-inquiry. Vivarta states that an unreal world–a world that is nothing but a false or illusory appearance–depends upon a nonexistent or unreal ego or mind.

2. Taking one’s cue from vivarta, one grasps that one needs to scrutinize, examine, or attend to the I-sense (i.e., to engage continuously in Self-inquiry) since the I-sense is that upon which all other phenomena (being unreal anyway) rest.

3. When one attends only to the I-sense, one discovers that there is no such thing as an ego. James elaborates:

The reason our ego disappears when we investigate it in this way is that it does not actually exist even now, but merely seems to exist when we are looking elsewhere instead of at ourself alone. Therefore when this ego is annihilated by self-investigation, our experience will not be that there was once an ego that has now ceased to exist, but that there was never any ego at all, and that there was accordingly never any illusory appearance of anything whatsoever. This is the experience of ajāta.

4. The last line is an allusion to James’s principal thesis, which is that vivarta logically entails ajata. (Elegant!) That is, when one discovers that not a thing–not a world or a body and not that (i.e., ego or mind) upon which the world and body depend–actually exists, one is not left with a residual duality according to which what doesn’t actually exist is what seems to exist. Rather, one is left with the direct recognition that there’s not even some thing that has ever seemed to exist or that has ever, even apparently, come into being.

5. In other words, there’s no rising I and no apparent or real objects at all; no duality between appearance (mere, false, illusory) and actuality; no path and no goal; and so on. There’s, literally, no thing that can be said about the nature of being-consciousness. Only the infinite knows, by being, the infinite, and the infinite is eternally silence itself.

What makes this argument practical? It gives one another reason for the practice of Self-inquiry, and that is to verify that ajata is ultimately, and only, true. Is there even a seeming rising I–or not? And if not, what, ultimately and only, is there?