Subjectivity is the Foundation of All Knowing
In the quest to understand the nature of reality, we look for foundational elements, building blocks from which everything else arises. Physical materialism posits matter as primary, with consciousness or subjectivity emerging as a byproduct. According to the nondual understanding, however, subjectivity is not a secondary property of something more fundamental; it is the fundamental reality, the very basis from which anything at all is known.
The most undeniable fact of your existence is that you are aware. This awareness, this feeling of “I am,” is inherently subjective. It is our most intimate and immediate experience. It is the lens through which all other experiences are known. You cannot step outside of your own subjectivity to objectively verify its existence or find something more basic that precedes it. Any attempt to reduce subjectivity to something else inevitably relies on subjective experience itself.
A materialist might argue that consciousness arises from complex neural processes in the brain. But this very assertion, this understanding of neural processes and their supposed link to consciousness is itself a product of observation, interpretation, and ultimately, subjective awareness. The scientist observing the brain or the theorist formulating the hypothesis are operating within the realm of their own conscious experience.
The claim that subjectivity is merely an emergent property of objective matter is like saying a painting is more fundamental than the canvas. A particular oil painting, with its colors and shapes, cannot exist without a substrate. Similarly, all our knowledge, all our understanding of the universe, is painted, so to speak, onto the canvas of our subjective awareness. And to try and reduce a painting to the properties of the canvas alone would be to miss the very essence of what makes it a painting.
Reducing subjectivity to objective phenomena ultimately leads to incoherence. How can the qualitative richness of conscious experience—the feeling of redness, the taste of sweetness, the pang of sadness—be fully explained by purely quantitative descriptions of neural activity? There is an explanatory gap, a fundamental difference in kind between the subjective “what it is like” and the objective “what it does.” This gap suggests that subjectivity is not simply a more complex arrangement of something fundamentally non-subjective.
From the nondual standpoint, the universe is not a collection of inert objects that somehow gave rise to awareness. Rather, awareness itself is the primordial ground, the infinite potential that manifests as the diverse forms we perceive. Subjectivity, the inherent capacity for experience, is not a latecomer to the scene but the very essence of the scene. The objects we perceive, including our own apparent bodies and brains, are themselves expressions within this field of awareness, known by awareness through the perceptual lens of the mind.
The feeling of being a separate subject perceiving an external object is a powerful and persistent aspect of our experience. This duality, however, is a conceptual construct within the larger unity of awareness. The subject and the object are both temporary patterns arising and dissolving within the same conscious field.
Therefore, the search for a more fundamental reality that underpins subjectivity is a search in the wrong direction. Subjectivity is not something to be explained away or reduced. It is experience itself. It is the irreducible core, the light that illuminates all that is known.