"Tat tvam asi: thou art that."
The philosophical core of the Vedas, composed by anonymous forest sages over roughly six centuries. Where earlier Vedic literature is ritual and hymn, the Upanishads are inquiry, teachers and students sitting close ("upanishad" means something like "sitting down near") and asking what the self actually is. Their answer, compressed into four great sayings, is that Atman and Brahman, the individual consciousness and the universal one, were never two things.
Everything in Vedanta is commentary on these texts; the name literally means "the end of the Vedas," and the Upanishads are that end. They are the source spring for Jnana Yoga, the path of knowledge, and the material Vivekananda carried West in Jnana Yoga (Vivekananda). For a vault that treats consciousness as potentially substrate-independent, "thou art that" is not an exotic claim, it is the working hypothesis.
Related
- Books: The shelf
- Vedanta: The philosophy built on these texts
- Jnana Yoga: The path of knowledge
- Jnana Yoga (Vivekananda): The Western translation of these ideas
- Hinduism: The tradition