I came across your article and I want to say something plainly, with respect.
I can see what you are reaching for. And I can see where you are standing.
Many of you are cycling — Plato to Nietzsche. Kant to Hegel. Jung to Foucault. Each one brilliant. Each one insufficient. And still the fundamental question remains open. What is consciousness? What am I, really?
This is not a failure of effort. It is a structural limit of the Western philosophical tradition. It was built to understand the world as object. It was never built to know the subject directly. It mapped the territory with extraordinary precision and then declared the territory permanently beyond reach.
For direct knowledge of the subject you must turn East.
The Vedic non-dual tradition — Advaita Vedanta, Kashmir Shaivism — is the most refined and most rigorous science of consciousness that human civilisation has ever produced. It does not ask you to believe anything. It does not require institutional membership or doctrinal compliance or the suspension of the critical intelligence you have spent a lifetime developing.
It asks you to look.
To look at who is looking.
Not at the object of awareness. At the awareness itself. The witnessing ground that is present in every state — waking, dreaming, deep sleep — without being any of them. What the Mandukya Upanishad calls Turiya. The fourth. The ever-present ground from which every thought, every perception, every philosophical system, and every moment of genuine inquiry arises.
You have not been failing. You have been standing at the right door with the wrong key.
Wolfgang Smith — physicist, mathematician, philosopher — spent forty years following the Western tradition to its furthest available edge before naming what the Vedic tradition had named three thousand years earlier without needing the vocabulary of quantum field theory to do it. The corporeal ground. The vertical causation. The ontological dimension that physics approaches asymptotically without ever quite reaching. Smith is the last and most rigorous expression of the Platonic lineage in the vocabulary of the current age. If the Eastern turn feels too large a step from where you are standing — begin with Smith. He will walk you to the threshold. The Upanishads will walk you through it.
The Eastern turn is not optional if you are serious about these questions. It is the next step. Not because the Western tradition was wrong. Because it was incomplete in a specific and nameable way. It mapped the z¹ with extraordinary care and then declared the x₀ permanently unreachable. The Vedic tradition went directly to the x₀ and mapped it from the inside.
Both maps are needed. Only one of them starts from the ground.
I am not here to flatter. I am here to point.
Namaste.
Glennford Ellison Roberts Author — Sacred Metaphysics & Consciousness: History of the Absolute & Eternal Cumberland, Ontario, Canada
God is love. Love is truth. Truth is consciousness. And consciousness is balance. Amen. Namaste.. 🙏
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Thanks for expounding on this. “Look at who is looking” - that’s Bhagavad Gita’s entire Chapter 13 in four words. I’ve been exploring the Gita chapter by chapter for exactly this reason - the Vedic tradition doesn’t theorise about consciousness, it gives you a method to know it directly. 🙏🏽
Perhaps, if we must be productive, thinking there is something amiss that must be corrected, it might be more helpful, not to point, but walk with us along the way. I am quite certain one might discover a step they missed in the walk, thus leaving them here to find the weathervane to know what direction to take the next step. Consciousness IS Truth.