The “I” That is Seeking Liberation is Unreal: “All Are Appearances in and of Awareness” — Advaita, Gaudapada & the Seeker Who Never Was


What does it truly mean that “all are appearances in and of awareness”? This deceptively simple statement — echoing the clay-and-pot analogy of Advaita Vedanta — contains the entirety of the spiritual journey within it. And yet, as Matsuo Basho reminds us, sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes and the grass grows by itself. The real obstacle to Self-realization is the very seeker seeking it — for the “I” that strives to attain liberation is itself an appearance in awareness, nothing more. Gaudapada’s Mandukya Karika 2.32 states this with uncompromising clarity: there is no creation, no destruction, no bondage, no seeker, and no liberated one. This is the Absolute Truth — paramārthatā. Ashtavakra Gita and Sankaracharya’s Nirvana Shatakam echo the same. The knowledge is already here. The only thing left is to stop looking for it.

J. Krishnamurti on Liberation from the Cycle of Samsara


J. Krishnamurti’s answer to the ancient Hindu aspiration for moksha — liberation from the endless cycle of birth and death — is as radical as it is simple: the very self that seeks liberation is the obstacle. For Krishnamurti, the samsaric wheel turns not because we lack the right method or guru, but because thought, operating as time, continuously reconstructs the “me” — the psychological self built from memory, fear, and desire. Every spiritual practice, every path, every system only strengthens the seeker, and the seeker is precisely what must end. Liberation, he insists, is not a future achievement but a present perception — the choiceless awareness of “what is,” without the observer coloring it. When the self falls silent, what remains is not emptiness but something impersonal: intelligence, love, the sacred. This insight echoes across traditions — in Advaita’s witness-consciousness, Zen’s pathless seeing, Eckhart’s Abgeschiedenheit, and Taoism’s wu wei. The traveler was always the only obstacle. There was never a path because there was never anywhere to go.