 From the standpoint of individual experience, witnessing consciousness is the locus of one’s subjective being, the basic sense of self-existence, and the foundation of self-identity. It is the glue that unifies disparate forms of experience like waking, dreaming, and different modes of perception, and it accounts for memory and diachronic personal identity (BrSūBh 2.3.31; BṛUBh 4.3.7). This consciousness is distinct from an autobiographical sense of self constructed through recollective memory traces. Śaṅkara distinguishes witnessing consciousness from the mind, mental qualities, and cognitive modes. Consciousness is not composed of physical materials, structures, or processes, whereas the mind is composed of inert subtle matter. Consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain and body, which are composed of inert coarse matter, because that which is inert cannot give rise to sentiency. (See Ram-Prasad 2001a on Advaita’s consciousness and contemporary physicalism).