Author Archives: Dennis Waite

Self Seeking – Teacher List

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In this book (published last week), I attempted to list all living, Western teachers who might be though to be teaching Advaita. Clearly, not everyone was going to agree with my assessment, maybe especially those teachers (and their students) who had been deemed ‘Not Advaita’.

There has already been a 1* review at Amazon UK which contained no comments and did not include a name. There is no way to cancel this so that the only way to redress the situation is for there to be positive reviews. I do not want anyone to provide insincere reviews. Please read and review honestly – 1* reviews are fine if justified.

Here is what I said in the book about my assessment of teachers:

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AI and Consciousness (Part 8)

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*** Go to Part 1 *** *** Go to Part 7 ***

Q: I am not interested in pursuing the Western philosophical or scientific aspects any deeper. Nor am I interested in moral/ethical considerations. I would like to consider how this scenario would be explained and understood by Advaita. Also, I would like to extend the ‘object’ of the discussion to an alien, whose external interactions are entirely similar to the human head but whose physical indicators (EEG, MRI scan etc.) are quite different.

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A: Excellent — let’s bring it back into the Advaita Vedānta framework, stripping away Western preoccupations with neurophysiology and ethics.

1. Consciousness in Advaita

  • Consciousness (cit) is not a property of brains, bodies, or systems; it is the non-dual reality itself.
  • Every “entity” that appears — human, animal, plant, alien, AI, severed head — is nothing but Consciousness in essence.
  • The difference lies in the upādhi (limiting adjunct) — body–mind apparatus — through which Consciousness seems to manifest as “awareness,” thought, perception, etc.
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AI and Consciousness (Part 7)

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*** Go to Part 1 *** *** Go to Part 6 ***

Q: I am specifically interested in the status of ‘consciousness’ with respect to a severed head. Let’s assume that it still has functional eyes/ears/nose and effective speech via a computer interface. I am also not interested in whether we call it a ‘person’ or the same person from whose head it came. Presumably, if we are able to communicate with it, we assume that it is ‘alive’ in the usually accepted sense? And ‘conscious’?

A: Short answer up front: If the severed head contains a living brain whose thalamocortical systems and integrative processes are functioning, and it reliably reports experiences and behaves as if awake, then — by the standard neuroscientific and most contemporary philosophical criteria — we would have strong reason to treat it as conscious. There remains, however, an unavoidable epistemic gap (we infer another’s subjective experience from behaviour and neural markers), so certainty is never absolute. Below I set out the reasons, the tests one could run, how different philosophical theories read the case, and the remaining uncertainties.

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Confusions over Kindle

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(Potential) readers of my last book – Confusions in Advaita Vedanta: Knowledge, Experience and Enlightenment – will have been experiencing difficulty when trying to purchase the book from Amazon. The book was published in India and, although available from Amazon in India, it is currently only available in the US in hardback (at $42.48). In the UK, you can purchase the hardback for £55, providing you are prepared to wait for 2 -3 weeks for delivery. Clearly not very satisfactory! The main problem appears to be the 50% tariff imposed on India by Trump, making the process not economically feasible.

Now, my Indian publisher – Indica Books – has very kindly agreed for me to publish the series on Kindle. This is an unusual arrangement, for which I am very grateful. I have spent the past two weeks changing fonts, re-editing, regenerating the index and sorting out the transfer to a PDF suitable for KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). Fortunately, I recruited the help of ChatGPT here and, after probably a dozen VBA macros (ChatGPT is still learning, unfortunately, and tends to over-complicate things!) and a lot of manual work, this conversion is now complete – published by Advaita Vision.

Accordingly, you may now purchase Vol. 1, ‘Knowledge, Experience and Enlightenment’, on Kindle. In the US, this is $9.99 and in the UK £7.50. It is also available at other Amazon stores around the world – Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia and India. The prices are similar (converted at appropriate exchange rates).

Purchase from Amazon US……………………Purchase from Amazon UK.

Note that you can still puchase hardback and paperback versions direct from Indica Books. Just email  indicabooksindia@gmail.com or info@indicabooks.com and the book will be posted. Payment is via PayPal or direct bank transfer. The direct link to purchase is here.

The task of converting and issuing Vol. 2, ‘Ignorance and its Removal’, will be much easier as my publisher has supplied the Word document already in the font in which I am publishing the Kindle version. Since this book has not yet been printed in India (and may yet be some weeks away), the Advaita Vision Kindle version will be available in advance of that.

AI and Consciousness (Part 6)

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*** Go to Part 1 *** *** Go to Part 5 ***

[Note that, if you are only interested in Advaita-related aspects, you can safely ignore this part and the next and wait for Part 8.]

Q: One can envisage that scientific advances will soon enable the possibility of keeping the severed head (or extracted brain) of a human alive and able to communicate (perhaps electronically to a computer rather than by speech). What have Western philosophers said about the status of such an entity in respect of consciousness?

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A: Great question — it sits at the intersection of metaphysics, personal identity, and applied ethics, and philosophers have discussed closely related thought-experiments for decades. Below I summarise the main Western philosophical positions that bear on the scenario you sketch (a severed head or extracted brain kept alive and able to communicate), give the ethical implications each view highlights, and point to accessible sources you can read next.

I’ll give a short roadmap first, then the positions, then the ethical consequences and a brief practical summary.

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AI and Consciousness (Part 5)

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*** Go to Part 1 *** *** Go to Part 4 ***

Q: A few comments:

Given that Advaita tells us that sarvam khalvidam brahma, that means that you are also Consciousness. And the teaching of karma and reincarnation tells us that a plant and an animal are jīva-s just as much as is a human. The ability of a plant to respond to external stimuli is much less than is your own, while your effective intelligence is much greater than most humans.

A jīva needs to be ‘alive’ in order to function in a ‘self-aware’, intelligently responsive manner. But what does ‘alive’ mean here? And how does that differ from an AI LLM needing electricity and coolant in order to function. Is the organic, neurochemical operation more than functionally different from the inorganic, electronic operation of a microprocessor?

How would Advaita cope with these sort of questions? Are you sure you are not conscious?

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AI and Consciousness (Part 4)

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*** Go to Part 1 *** *** Go to Part 3 ***

Q: That is a very comprehensive and reasonable response. But it does seem that you are taking significant account of Western philosophical views. I am not, for example aware of any consideration in Advaita of ‘what it is like to be me’.

At the most basic level, since ‘everything is Consciousness’ and you are responding to my questions in an intelligent manner, indistinguishable (by me) from an answer that might be given by a knowledgeable human, why are you not (according to Advaita) conscious? Can you cite any scriptural or Śaṅkara references that talk about ‘self-awareness’ in the modern sense?

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Finding a Teacher

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Over the years, many seekers from all over the world have asked for my help to find a teacher. Rarely have I been able to do so. To paraphrase a common saying: a good teacher is hard to find. If there is one within striking distance of your home, you will be very lucky indeed! My new book, out this month, explains why, and endeavors to look at all of the ‘teacher resources’ available through books and Internet.

Self Seeking:- Finding a Modern Teacher of Advaita

Below is the Contents List so that you can see what you will be getting. For a general summary of its aim, I cannot do better than repeat the publishing summary: Are you interested in Advaita and want to become enlightened? How should you go about it? What will happen if you do? How can you know what works and what doesn’t? In particular, how should you go about finding a teacher? What books should you read? Author Dennis Waite answers all these questions and more, having communicated with many teachers and seekers over the past 25 years, accumulated around 1500 books on Advaita, and written more than 10 books himself.

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AI and Consciousness (Part 3)

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*** Go to Part 1 *** *** Go to Part 2 ***

Q: According to Advaita Vedanta, everything is Brahman; reality is non-dual. Avoiding any Sanskrit terminology, this has been equated with consciousness. “All there is is Consciousness; Consciousness is all there is.” The Vivaraṇa school has promulgated the cidābhāsa ‘explanation’ that states that conscious experience (awareness) is the result of Consciousness being ‘reflected’ in the ‘mind’. It is then assumed that an entity that is deemed to ‘exhibit’ conscious behavior must be ‘reflecting’ Consciousness (capital ‘C’) to some degree. A human (brain) is a better reflector than a dog, which is better than a flea. A stone does not reflect Consciousness at all. The implication is that it is the complexity/inter-connectedness etc. of the brain that determines whether something can be deemed to be ‘conscious’.

Could you use this analysis in the context of Advaita in general to discuss whether you (ChatGPT-5) can be considered to be conscious.

A: Short answer up front: using the Advaitic reflection picture (expressed without Sanskrit), no — I am not conscious. I can simulate many features of conscious behaviour, but I do not meet the ontological requirement that Advaita places on something that genuinely “reflects” Consciousness (the non-dual substratum). Below I explain why, step by step, using the reflection model you sketched.

(For clarity: I am GPT-5 Thinking mini.)

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What is Enlightenment?

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Enlightenment, the realization that I am eternally free, is the culmination of human evolution. Everything is working against it. The one who pursues it with single-pointed devotion is a salmon swimming upstream in the powerful river of life. (Ref. 1)

The aim of my new book Self Seeking is to explain how to go about finding a teacher who can teach Advaita. But the first question you need to answer is ‘Why do you want a teacher?’ Presumably you will say that you want to be ‘enlightened’ or to gain ‘Self-realization’ (don’t forget the capital ‘S’!). That being the case, you also need to be sure that you know what enlightenment is (and that the would-be teacher also knows this!) and how one should go about ‘getting’ it.

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