Will you get This?

Facebook > Living Zen > Claudio Vestrini

When speaking about non-duality, it is often said that there are two levels of realization. This is a useful simplification, as long as it is not taken as a spiritual path to collect achievements, but rather as an inquiry that progressively dismantles identifications.

The first level is the most familiar and widely shared one:

I am not the body, I am not the mind, I am not my personal story, I am not the psychological self. All of this is observable, changeable, impermanent.

What seems to remain is the simple sense of being, conscious presence, the “I am.”

This shift has a powerful effect: identity moves from the object to the witness. I no longer experience myself as a limited entity navigating the world, but as something more spacious, stable, and present. It is often felt as a great liberation, and it is understandable to stop here.

But this is not yet the final point.

The second level begins when the inquiry does not spare even that presence. One looks honestly at the “I am,” the sense of being, consciousness itself, and notices something very simple: this too appears.

It appears upon waking, disappears in deep sleep, varies in intensity, has a beginning and an end. It is not always present. And what appears cannot be what we are.

At this point, no new, subtler identity emerges, nor an absolute consciousness observing everything. On the contrary, the very idea of a center, of an ultimate subject, of someone who owns experience, collapses.

What remains is only what is happening.

Experience without an author.

Process without an owner.

There is no “someone” who realizes this. There is no goal to reach. There are only identifications that stop holding.

The first level dismantles the gross self.

The second dismantles the subtle self, the spiritual one.

And perhaps this is why many stop before going further: the first reassures, the second offers no handholds. The first provides an elevated identity; the second removes identity altogether.

In this sense, even speaking of “levels” is misleading.

It is not about becoming something, but about seeing that there was never anyone who needed to become anything else.

Only this.

A comment on the post: None of what you say would work without there initially being a someone. Even now there is a someone who seems to be talking about levels.

RESPONSE

I think you’re both touching something true: on the everyday, functional level there absolutely is a “someone” here—body, mind, memory, responsibility, and ordinary language all work that way. But the post isn’t (or doesn’t need to be) denying that conventional personhood; it’s questioning whether, on close inspection, there’s an ultimately real, separate inner owner/controller behind experience. Nonduality points to “agency functions, but it isn’t an entity”: intentions, speech, and decisions arise dependently, yet when you look for an independent self-substance that possesses them, nothing solid is found. So the caution is simply not to reify either side—don’t deny the conventional person, and don’t inflate it into a metaphysical ‘someone’ who exists apart from the unfolding. 🙂