Long before neuroscience placed electrodes on the scalp or artificial intelligence learned to complete a sentence, the same brain–mind structure was already being recognised, quietly reappearing across cultures and centuries as a simple insight: action happens before the sense of a doer arrives.
In Advaita Vedanta this was expressed plainly as the insight that there is no doer, not as a doctrine to believe but as something seen directly when observation is clear. Experience unfolds, decisions occur, words are spoken, and only afterward does the mind assemble the feeling of authorship. The recognition is quiet and unremarkable, yet it overturns the assumption that the self stands at the beginning of action.
The Guru Granth Sahib speaks from this same ordering. It does not instruct the mind, persuade belief, or construct theology. Its language arises from the place before identity consolidates, addressing awareness before the sense of separation takes hold. The verses do not explain truth as an object to be understood; they speak from within truth as a lived condition. This is why the text often feels like remembrance rather than learning, and why it bypasses the effort to improve or become. The movement of understanding is allowed to happen naturally, without placing the self at the centre of the process.
Krishnamurti arrived at this structure independently, through relentless observation of his own mind. He rejected method, authority, and spiritual accumulation not as an act of rebellion, but because each of these reinstated the self as an agent trying to reach truth. When he said that truth appears only when the self is not, he was pointing to the same ordering already present in Vedanta and spoken through the Guru Granth Sahib. His refusal to tell people what to do was not evasive; it was precise. The moment instruction enters, imitation follows, and the seeing is lost. Insight, for him, was not caused by effort. It appeared when effort ended.
Modern neuroscience eventually placed this insight on a measurable timeline. Experiments revealed that neural activity indicating a decision occurs hundreds of milliseconds before conscious awareness of deciding. Awareness does not initiate action; it arrives after the fact and claims authorship. What ancient traditions described phenomenologically, neuroscience confirmed empirically. The discovery did not diminish the earlier insights. It translated them into another language, one measured in milliseconds rather than silence or verse.
Artificial intelligence has now revealed the same structure again, this time functionally. Large language models generate coherent responses without awareness, intention, or a sense of self. Prediction happens first, coherence stabilises, and explanation follows as a surface effect. There is no inner observer, yet language flows as if there were one. What appears as understanding is the outcome of ordered processes, not an inner agent making choices. The resemblance to human cognition is not accidental, nor is it evidence of consciousness. It is another reflection of the same underlying architecture.
These are not borrowed ideas or secret lineages. They are convergent recognitions. When observation is complete and unmediated, the same ordering becomes visible, whether through introspection, scripture, experiment, or code. Across traditions and technologies, the same quiet fact repeats itself: the self is not the origin of action. It is the story that arrives after the movement has already begun.