What is Purusha, finally — the awareness the layers veil? The non-dual stream of the tradition (the Upanishads, later Vedanta) answers in three movements: not three Divines, but one, seen three ways.
- Transcendental — the Divine containing all. Awareness as the ground that holds every experience without being touched by any of it: the screen on which the film plays, the silence around every sound. Nothing is left out of it, and nothing alters it.
- Universal — the Divine as all. Not only behind things but appearing as them — every form a shape the one awareness is taking. "All this is Brahman." The wave is not separate from the ocean; it is the ocean, waving.
- Individual — the Divine within all. That same awareness, found at the centre of each being as its own innermost self (Atman). The Upanishads put it in three words: tat tvam asi — "that thou art." What you are at your core is not a small private thing; it is that.
Self-realisation is the recognition that these three are one: the awareness within you is the awareness that is all things is the awareness beyond all things. The sense of being a separate self, standing apart from the whole, is the last and subtlest layer to loosen.
(Held honestly: this is the non-dual, devotional reading — a step beyond the strict dualism of Samkhya, where Purusha and Prakriti stay distinct. Buddhism declines the language of a Divine or a permanent Self altogether, and describes the same centre as interbeing and no-self. Different maps of the same still point — the difference is real, and worth holding.)