Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

 What do Robert Adams and Nisargadatta mean by the absolute, or by the term ultimate witness?

You cannot understand what they mean until you experience that absolute state for yourself. Before that, both of these teachers are basically saying the world you live in is not real, Robert says it's like an optical illusion. Nisargadatta calls it and all phenomena, happenings and consciousness, and consciousness itself is not real as it is constantly changing. Only the absolute, the ultimate witness is real. It does not change.

The experience is like this: waking up in the morning for the normal human is no big thing. Waking up in the morning for an enlightened individual is nothing at all. There is no change between sleeping and waking other than the appearance of the world and body as objects, which are experienced as not me, not touching me. I am apart from both waking consciousness and sleeping consciousness. It is like turning on a television set and then turning it off;  there is no change for me.

However, I myself as witness cannot be experienced. I do not experience myself but the other, the world and my body, or sleep. I only know about my existence as the observer because I notice that consciousness does not touch me. Sleep does not touch me. Therefore I must be something different from consciousness or sleep or dream. That which has presence, or existence, is consciousness, not the absolute which is apart from it, and is apart from consciousness.

Prior to this realization, when I awakened in the morning, within a second or two after awakening I realized who I was as an individual operating from the position of being a body located somewhere in human space and time with the mundane identity of sex, work, name, desires, emotions, and physical being this. After awakening to the ultimate witness state, you realize you are something beyond physicality, beyond consciousness, beyond experiences. You are the subject of those phenomena, not the object. You are not phenomena like other people are phenomena. Realize that everything else in the world is just a phenomena, like a movie on a screen and as such they have no reality and no autonomy. There like movie characters on the screen. They do not exist as individuals.