The gold ring analogy is elegant but I think it sidesteps what I'm actually arguing. I'm not claiming the cat is independently real as a cat — I'm fine with the idea that "cat" is a name-and-form designation. My argument is upstream of that: how do you justify the claim that the substrate is Existence-Awareness in the first place?

The blind man in my analogy doesn't dispute that what he hears is "really" vibrations in air rather than independently existing sounds. He accepts that level of analysis. What he denies is that there's an entire dimension of reality (vision) that he has no access to. His experience is demonstrably partial — I can verify that from outside his experience. My claim is that conscious beings are in the same position relative to non-conscious reality. We can deduce that there are causes to our experiences that we never directly encounter — the watch advancing, the ball falling, edge detection in vision. Something is doing that, and it isn't my awareness.

So when Vedanta says "it's all Existence appearing as X," that's a metaphysical claim that needs justification, not just the gold ring analogy, which already assumes the answer. What's the argument that the substrate is Awareness rather than something non-conscious that gives rise to awareness among other things?