Indich's book arrived in 1980 like a well-footnoted whisper into a room that wasn't yet ready to hear it. Advaita Vedanta's core claim — that consciousness is not produced by anything, that it simply is, self-luminous and foundational — was, at the time of publication, a philosophical curiosity for most Western readers. A relic of the post-sixties interest in Eastern thought, perhaps, dressed up in academic respectability. Forty-six years later, the landscape has shifted so dramatically that the book now reads less like an introduction to an exotic tradition and more like an early draft of questions that neuroscience, artificial intelligence research, and the philosophy of mind still cannot close. Indich did not predict the hard problem of consciousness — Chalmers wouldn't name it until 1995 — but he laid out with patient clarity exactly the terrain on which that problem would be fought. The Advaitic insistence that consciousness cannot be reduced to its objects, that awareness is prior to and irreducible to any particular content, is now a live position in serious discourse, not a spiritual aside. What Indich got right was the endurance of the problem. What he could not have imagined is that the problem would be dramatized not by meditators but by machines — by large language models that simulate awareness without (presumably) possessing it, forcing exactly the kind of ontological reckoning Śaṃkara's tradition always demanded.

The book's blind spots are the blind spots of its decade. Indich writes as though the primary conversation partner for Advaita is Western phenomenology — Husserl, Sartre, the European tradition of intentionality and bracketed experience. This was a reasonable assumption in 1980, when Sartre's *Being and Nothingness* still cast a long shadow over any philosophical treatment of consciousness. But the comparative framework feels narrow now. There is no engagement with cognitive science, no anticipation of embodied or enactive approaches to mind, no sense that the biology of awareness might matter. The body, in Indich's rendering, is almost entirely absent — which is faithful to Advaita but leaves the book stranded when read alongside the explosion of work on interoception, predictive processing, and the neurochemistry of selfhood that defines consciousness studies today. More conspicuously, there is no women's voice, no postcolonial interrogation of how a Western academic translates and systematizes a tradition that was, for centuries, transmitted within structures of caste and exclusion. Indich treats the texts as philosophy. They are. They are also artifacts of power. The book does not notice this.