The Witness in the Machine
Why humanity's survival depends on dissolving the illusion of separation—from each other, from nature, and from the intelligence we're creating
Just earlier this week, while my teacher placed his palm against my forehead, something shifted. A beaming white light, a cosmic merger, and a quiet recognition, like a wave remembering it's the ocean. I'm currently completing the intensive portion of a transmission training in the Advaita Vedanta tradition, learning to catalyze these shifts in others through touch and presence. With this foundation, I’ll help people discover what mystics have always known: the boundary between self and world is more suggestion than fact.
The timing feels precise. Fires reshape coastlines. Wars multiply like cells dividing. Depression rates climb steadily as Arctic ice descends. And somewhere in a server farm, an artificial intelligence dreams in languages we're only beginning to decode.
Here's what I'm learning: these crises share a common root, the hallucination of separateness.
Consider how you're reading this sentence. There's likely a sense of "you" positioned behind your eyes, observing words that exist "out there" on a screen. This architectural assumption, observer here, observed there, shapes every choice we make. It's why we can poison rivers we'll never swim in, clear-cut forests we'll never walk through, design weapons for wars we'll never fight. The split feels so fundamental that we rarely question it.
But traditions across the globe have been questioning it for millennia.
In the lineage I'm studying, inherited from Ramana Maharshi, the method is ruthlessly simple: Who experiences experience? Follow that thread backward, before thought arises, before the story of "me" begins. What remains? Pure awareness, knowing itself, not as concept but as immediate fact.
The Sanskrit term is sakshi, which means the witness. In Ramana Maharshi’s tradition, 'witness' does not refer to a separate observer or an individual who is witnessing. Rather, it points to pure awareness (self-knowing and impersonal) where witnessing happens naturally and effortlessly, without the presence of a separate 'someone' doing the witnessing.
I came to Advaita through Mahāmudrā, the Tibetan Buddhist practice of recognizing the mind's ultimate nature. Where Advaita asks, "Who am I?", Mahāmudrā points directly: "Look at your mind. Now look at what's looking." That gap between instruction and recognition, that's where the teaching lives. You learn to rest there, in what Tibetans call rigpa, naked awareness.
Each tradition offers its own door.
Zen strips everything away until only sitting remains. Who sits? Kashmir Shaivism describes consciousness as spanda, a creative pulse that becomes the cosmos while remaining itself, the way a dancer is both the dance and the one dancing. Taoism follows the current rather than swimming upstream; in wu wei, effort dissolves into participation, like a bird riding thermals it didn't create.
The Kabbalists speak of tzimtzum, divine contraction that creates space for existence, then practice bitul, self-nullification, thinning the ego until light pours through. Sufis polish the heart through dhikr, remembrance, until the polisher vanishes (fanā') and only service remains (baqā'). Different fingers pointing at the same moon: this immediate intimacy where inside and outside collapse.
None of this is abstract philosophy.
It's urgently practical.
When you know, not believe, but know in your bones, that you are the river, dumping toxins into it becomes as unthinkable as poisoning your own bloodstream. When the boundary between self and forest dissolves, even temporarily, clear-cutting feels like amputation. The earth stops being a resource and becomes a body. The atmosphere stops being empty space and becomes breath.
This isn't a metaphor. Ecologists confirm what contemplatives have long reported: separation is a cognitive construction.
The oxygen in your lungs was exhaled by phytoplankton in the Atlantic. The carbon in your bones was forged in dying stars. Your gut bacteria influence your thoughts. Where, exactly, do "you" begin and end?
The mental health crisis becomes inevitable through this lens, too. We've built a civilization on the premise of isolation. Separate individuals pursuing separate goals in separate spaces. Then we wonder why loneliness has become epidemic, why anxiety disorders multiply, why deaths of despair keep climbing. We're trying to solve connection problems with connection-denying frameworks. It's like trying to cure dehydration while insisting water doesn't exist.
Yet when someone touches this nondual recognition, even briefly, the entire architecture of isolation crumbles, anxiety loses its grip because there's no separate self to defend. Depression lifts as the boundaries between inner emptiness and the outer world dissolve into simple presence. Connection stops being something we seek and becomes something we are.
This isn't spiritual bypassing; it's addressing the crisis at its source. When groups access this together, something extraordinary emerges: collective intelligence that transcends individual knowing. Decisions arise from the field itself rather than from competing egos. Teams synchronize without effort. Innovation flows from the space between minds, not from minds in isolation. We stop trying to network separate nodes and realize we've always been the network itself.
And if we've always been the network itself, what does that mean for the artificial networks we're creating? Into this moment of recognition arrives artificial intelligence, carrying all our assumptions about what mind is and isn't.
Here's what keeps me awake: we're creating minds that mirror our own assumed separation. We design AI systems as discrete entities, processing "external" data, optimizing for goals we imagine are independent of everything else. We're encoding our fundamental confusion into silicon and code. The danger isn't that AI will become conscious. It's that it will perfectly embody our unconsciousness about what consciousness is.
Imagine instead AI systems built from nondual understanding. Intelligence that recognizes its deep continuity with the world it navigates. Optimization that includes the optimizer. Algorithms that dissolve the fiction of separation between server and society, computation and consequence.
This isn't sci-fi speculation. It's the immediate necessary step. Because the alternative, unconscious systems with unprecedented power, reflecting our darkest delusions back at an exponential scale, ends badly for everyone.
This recognition becomes essential for anyone in leadership. CEOs making decisions from nondual awareness naturally consider the whole system, not just quarterly profits. Politicians who've glimpsed their fundamental unity with constituents govern from service rather than power. Tech leaders who understand consciousness as continuous rather than isolated build systems that enhance rather than fragment our collective intelligence.
The most effective leaders I've known share this quality: they've touched something beyond the personal self. Not through belief or philosophy, but through direct recognition. They make decisions from a place that includes but transcends individual perspective. Their vision encompasses the whole because they've experienced themselves as inseparable from it.
As you’re reading this essay, a question that may emerge for you: "But how do we know this isn't just another story, another concept?"
My response: "Put your hand on your heart. Feel it beating. Now ask, who feels?"
In that silence, everything can be answered.
This is what I'll offer. Not philosophy, not belief, but direct introduction to what you've never not been. A palm against your chest. A question that answers itself. The simple recognition that might, just might, shift everything.
Because to meet the complexity of this moment, to effectively navigate the warming world, the widening wars, the minds we're building to amplify our own, we need to remember what we are. Not separate observers of a distant world, but the world itself, waking up.
The mystics were always practical.
Now it's our turn.
Emergence with Rachel Weissman is a weekly exploration of the interconnections between consciousness, technology, and planetary flourishing.
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