It started, innocently enough, with another talk on Dṛg-Dṛśya-Viveka — Verse 7, this time delivered with Swami Tattvavidananda’s characteristic crispness. His teaching on chit, chāyā, and aham hit home — especially through metaphors of sunlight, reflection, and the subtle pulse of ‘I am.’
The first two — chit and its reflection — are real. Even the arising of the ‘I am’ is real, in the sense that it too is illumined by chit. But the moment that ‘I am’ begins to identify with being tall, rich, suffering, undervalued, right, wrong, or righteous — that’s the birth of ahaṁkāra, and that’s where the misidentification takes hold.
And then he said it plainly:
“Non-identification is psychological death while living.”
That line landed hard.
There’s something raw and disarming about that phrasing — not metaphorical death, not a nice sunset-image of letting go. Just: death while living. And yet, it wasn’t dramatic. He wasn’t asking for renunciation, suppression, or withdrawal from life. Just a correction of identity: stop taking the reflection to be the source.
And still — somewhere in me, a quiet protest rose:
“But wait… if I go all in on this, what happens to me? Do I disappear?”
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The Fear Behind the Insight
It’s not that the logic wasn’t clear.
If the ego is a bundle of identifications — “I am the thinker, the doer, the sufferer” — then clarity must mean the end of that illusion.
The false “I” dissolves.
But here’s the thing:
When the mind hears “impersonal awareness,” it often translates it as:
absence of everything I know and like about myself.
We associate “impersonal” with:
• no agency
• no personality
• no warmth
• no fun
Basically: oblivion.
So the mind jumps in:
“Isn’t a confused ‘me’ still better than no me at all?”
If the ego dissolves, do I still get to choose the toppings on my pizza?
That is — do I still get to have preferences, choose from a menu, hand over my driver’s licence at the pharmacy, laugh at a joke, feel a pull toward a person or a place? Or is this ‘realisation’ some sterile, flattened landscape of non-reactivity where the self is a ghost, and the world just a cardboard set?
But then perhaps the test isn’t what I order.
The test is: what happens when the order is wrong.
That’s where the “I” slips in — the one who feels slighted, ignored, annoyed, diminished.
Not the one who orders. The one who reacts.
That subtle shift — from the reflected I (chhāyā) to the imagined owner (ahaṅkāra) — is the entire trap.
The body still functions. The mind still thinks. The tongue still tastes.
But none of it has to belong to “me.”
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A Different Kind of Death
Swamiji’s metaphor sticks:
Reflected light is not sunlight.
Chit-chhāyā is not chit.
The ego is not the Self.
The psychological death he refers to isn’t annihilation. It’s a correction.
The real tragedy is not that we disappear —
It’s that we never checked what exactly we took ourselves to be.
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So Where Does This Leave Me?
Still unsure, to be honest.
There’s some clarity, yes — but no abiding in it. Not yet.
Just enough of a gap between the reaction and the seeing, and enough of a pause to ask:
“Who exactly is getting bothered here?”
“Is this a mistake with the pizza… or a reappearance of the reflected ‘I’?”
If there’s a takeaway at all, it’s this:
I’m not writing this because I’ve nailed it.
I’m writing because something was seen — and something resisted it.
And it felt worth journaling.
For now, I’ll continue to experiment. Not a performative one, and not a pretend renunciate trip. Just living with the hypothesis that the pulsating ‘I am’ is not to be denied, but the ahaṁkāra that piggybacks on it is a fiction.
We’ll see what shows up.
And if nothing does — if it’s all just a blip — I’ll still have the pizza.
Simply Vedanta 