After a nondual recognition, language returns before identity does. Words reappear, grammar resumes, and the pronoun “I” steps back into the conversation—not as proof of separation, but as a functional bridge. Speech requires a subject. Silence does not.
Many misunderstand this moment. Hearing someone say “I experienced awakening,” the listener assumes a reinstalled ego, a self reclaiming authorship. Yet what actually occurs is translation. Experience moves through the narrow gate of language, and language has only a few handles to grab reality with. “I” becomes one of them.
Avoiding the word altogether often creates greater confusion. Saying “nothing happened” suggests absence rather than transcendence. It implies insignificance, when the opposite is true. Something fell away so completely that no object remained to point at. Language struggles most where realization is most total.
A distinction helps here.
Turiya refers to the formless witness; the ever-present awareness that observes waking, dreaming, and deep sleep without entering any of them. It is silent, empty, untouched. This is not an experience in time but the condition in which time appears. Many awakenings stabilize here, and rightly so.
Turiyatitta goes further. Even the stance of witnessing dissolves. No observer remains to stand apart from what is observed. Awareness recognizes itself as the only reality there is. No inside, no outside, no vantage point left. This is nonduality without remainder.
When speech arises from this recognition, “I” no longer refers to a psychological centre. It does not point to a thinker, a chooser, or a personal narrative. It points to the Self; Para Brahman—without division. Atman, ego, witness, world collapse into a single field, not blended, not unified, but revealed as never having been separate.
The same word is used. The referent has changed.
Confusion arises when listeners assume the old meaning still applies. The word “I” sounds familiar, so it is treated as familiar. Yet meaning does not live in the word. Meaning lives in the depth from which the word emerges.
A realized individual does not abandon language. Language is abandoned as identity. What remains is utility. Communication happens. Teaching happens. Relationship happens. None of it reinstates separation.
The paradox resolves itself quietly: the ego can say “I,” and the Absolute can say “I.” Only one of them believes it is something.
Silence knows the difference. Speech borrows it.
Morgan O. Smith
Get Your Free Copy of My Book, Bodhi in the Brain!
Morgan O. Smith 