In David Godman’s presentation of Ramana Maharshi’s teaching, non-duality is shown as the recognition that there is only one reality: the Self, or pure awareness, which is identical with Brahman. What is ordinarily taken to be the individual—body, mind, personality, and the sense of being a separate “I”—is described as a superimposition on this Self, comparable to seeing a snake where there is only a rope. The world of multiplicity, along with the sense of “others” and even a God conceived as separate, is portrayed as a mental projection arising with the ego and the mind. This appearance of duality is attributed to ignorance, or mistaken identification, rather than to any real division in being. From this standpoint, there are not two entities—Self and world, subject and object—but only the Self appearing as many.

The book emphasizes that the ego, the basic “I am this individual” thought, is the root of duality. When this first notion of separateness arises, the entire structure of a world “outside” and others “apart” from oneself comes into being. As long as attention flows outward toward objects, this dualistic outlook persists and seems compelling. When the ego subsides, however, the apparent division between seer, seeing, and seen collapses, revealing that the knower, the act of knowing, and the known are in truth one. In that state, the Self is understood as ever free and unchanged, never truly bound or liberated, while bondage and liberation belong only to the play of ignorance.

Self-enquiry (ātma-vichāra) is presented as the central means by which this non-dual truth is realized. By persistently turning attention back toward the source of the “I”-thought with questions such as “Who am I?” or “From where does this ‘I’ arise?”, the false sense of individuality is gradually weakened. When this enquiry is sustained, the ego dissolves into its source, and what remains is the pure, impersonal “I-I” or Self. In that egoless abidance, non-duality is not a doctrine but a direct, non-conceptual awareness in which there is no experiencer apart from experience. The book repeatedly stresses that such realization is not the acquisition of something new, but the recognition of one’s natural state when all false identifications have fallen away.

From this realized perspective, the world is not denied as an appearance, but its status as an independent, separate reality is denied. All phenomena are seen as transient manifestations within the one consciousness that is the Self. Because no “other” is ultimately separate, qualities such as equanimity and compassion arise naturally, not as imposed moral rules but as spontaneous expressions of this understanding. Non-duality, as portrayed here, is thus both a metaphysical vision—that only the Self truly exists—and a practical orientation, in which life is lived from the clarity that the seeker, the sought, and the path are all appearances in the one undivided awareness.