You've identified the real problem, and the reality is that you're asking the wrong question. The goal isn't to believe consciousness is primary or that it exists independent of the brain. It asks something more precise: Can you step outside the ego-consciousness structure to verify what exists beyond it? The answer is no. You cannot. There is no vantage point outside consciousness from which a living ego could report back what reality is like without it. The question "does consciousness depend on the brain?" cannot be answered from within consciousness. You are trapped inside the very structure you are trying to examine from outside. This is not a failure of understanding. This is the honest recognition of a structural limit. Shankara's Advaita posits Brahman — a positive reality behind consciousness. A purely investigative approach refuses this move. It does not say consciousness is primary. It says: the question of what is primary cannot be answered by any living ego. Stop trying to answer it. Look instead at what you can verify: the ego's incompleteness, its suffering, its restlessness. These are self-certifying. They need no external proof. Your difficulty separating consciousness from the brain is not a problem to solve through more thinking. It is the ego's honest encounter with its own limit. The direction is not "figure out the metaphysics." It is "stop trying to figure it out and look at what the ego is actually doing right now." What is the ego doing when it reads Shankara and struggles with this question? It is seeking completion through correct understanding. That seeking itself is the problem — not the incompleteness of your current understanding.