I just finished listening to this
Buddhist Geeks Podcast interview with Sally Kempton about the relation between Buddhist and Hindu Tantra. The last part (about 20min in) sheds some interesting light on this debate. The way she puts it is, that there is always a question of whether to regard that pure awareness as "emptiness" or "fullness" as no-self or as an ultimate divine self. This has been the difference between Buddhism and Vedanta since the beginning, and I suppose we are unlikely to resolve the question any time soon. I, as you may have gathered lean strongly toward the "fullness" side, although having had insight experiences, I can understand the other way of describing it as well. There is a sense in which progress of insight makes things seem less and less substantial. Yet, on the other hand, if one is open to such things, there is also a tremendous down-flow or manifestation of new realities out of the void. Of course, one could choose to ignore all such phenomena or say that they don't prove anything about the fundamental nature of awareness since this can't be experienced directly. They'd be right, yet there are lot's of things we believe based on inference and indirect evidence. Scientists believe in dark matter based on the way gravity seems to behave even though it's never been directly observed. It's not necessarily a simpler theory to believe that there is nothing but bare transient phenomena, as this requires positing everything that happens as arising completely ex nihilo without any ordering principle. That sort of view definitely doesn't withstand Occam's Razor.
However, this is getting away form my basic point. My basic point wasn't to argue in favour of the True Self/God view over the no-self view. That's probably a hopeless debate as thousands of years of history have failed to resolve it. I was simply trying to say that it's not plausible to think that the
experience of non-dual consciousness/enlightenment can only be straightforwardly interpreted in one way. Clearly, different mystics in different traditions do experience enlightenment in different ways, some of which involve the idea of pure awareness/God. In other words, once achieving 4th path, it's not like there are then no options for how to understand the fundamental nature of reality, and the no-self view becomes the only possible coherent position.
Now, of course, it's always hard to argue about these things when one hasn't yet experienced them oneself. Daniel has and I haven't, or at least not as fully as him. Us not-yet-fully-enlightened folk can only rely on the testimony of those who we believe have plausibly experienced the state. Daniel's testimony is that awareness is "just nothing but bare transient phenomena themselves," and I simply was trying to balance that by pointing out that other people who plausibly have reached the same or higher levels of attainment vis-a-vis non-dual consciousness claim that awareness is something that is indescribable yet definitely real and non-redundant.