The world is an appearance … You are real. But, you are real as the Absolute.
We do not know ourselves as the immortal existence. We have a desire to live—I must continue living in this body. Why? Because I do not know that I am the immortal … The experiencing Self which we are is immortal. It is not touched by the experience of the world.
The great disadvantage of a God-centered approach, especially in today’s world, is that the God-centered approach starts with—and proceeds with for a long time—faith. Belief. If you start with questioning and skepticism, it’s very difficult to follow the God-centered approach.
I am not a bundle of flesh and thought. I am consciousness to which appears this entire universe … Now, the subtle question is what are these objects which appear to us? Are they distinct, are they exterior to consciousness, or are they in some sense interior to consciousness? … Both the world and the body are experienced in thought, and thoughts are experienced in consciousness. When you pursue this line of thought, then the initial distinction which we made to appreciate ourselves as beings of pure consciousness, we begin to see not only consciousness but whatever consciousness is aware of—the entire external universe, the entire internal universe of thoughts and emotions—all of that is also not distinct from consciousness. It’s true that consciousness is distinct from everything it experiences and illumines, but that which it experiences and illumines is not actually distinct from consciousness because it’s just an abstraction to say that something exists outside consciousness.
When we make this division that whatever you experience is an object, very soon we begin to see that the things we experience in the world ‘out there’ are objects but then our body is an object too … And, even more stunning, mind is an object—thoughts, feelings, emotions. Clearly objects come in two varieties: one is a publicly shared (what you can see around you), and one is the first-person private set of objects (memories, thoughts, pleasure, pain, the very personality itself).
Consciousness alone is the reality and that which we take to be the non-conscious—matter, time, space, bodies, this world—these are appearances in consciousness, not apart from consciousness. Just like a dream when you go to sleep and dream—all the things that you see in the dream have no existence apart from your own mind. In the same way, this entire universe which we experience has no existence apart from consciousness … There is no reasonable, logical answer within the dream for a dream.
There is an absolute reality, this world is an appearance of that reality, and you are that absolute reality.
The Upanishads contain perhaps the most ancient living teachings on spirituality. Spirituality at its most original and fresh … The basic teaching of the Upanishads is that there is an ultimate reality—this world that we experience, and how we experience ourselves, are all manifestations of that reality. We are that reality. If only we would know ourselves truly, we would realize ourselves to be that absolute reality. That absolute reality in the Upanishads is called ‘Brahman.’ Brahman literally means ‘the vast’. That is the closest word you’ve got in Vedanta to God.
Advaita Vedanta is one of the schools of Vedanta, but I would dare say it’s sort of preeminent because of certain reasons which make it peculiarly acceptable to the modern mind. There is little to no theology, and the emphasis is on experience and reason. Advaita Vedanta gives tremendous emphasis and importance to life as we experience it, and then uses reason to come to its conclusions … The conclusion of Advaita Vedanta was that we are, in a sense, profoundly mistaken about our own nature … Advaita’s purpose is to educate us, to shift our paradigm, so that we come to see the world and ourselves in that way.
This entire world, body, mind, this person, and all other persons are all appearances in Me, the one consciousness.
What is the real Self? The waking self was not there in the dream. The self in the dream which experienced so many things is not there in the waking … Yet there is something common: you cannot deny that you experience the waking world, you cannot deny that you experience the dream world.
Once you walk through these doors, and you look back upon the world and see it as your Self shining forth, the work is done.
What is Vedanta? Swami Vivekananda would say two things: the divinity within us, and the oneness of existence … Vivekananda used Advaita Vedanta as a foundation for morality. What Swami Vivekananda said was, because it is one reality, if I hurt somebody else, if I cheat somebody else, if I lie to somebody else, I am hurting myself in the deepest sense … Swami Vivekananda has said that he who runs away from the world to meditate and die in a Himalayan cave searching for God has missed the way. He who plunges headlong into the vanities of the world—he too has missed the way. Then what is the way? The way is to spiritualize your everyday life … We should realize ourselves as pure consciousness—Turiya—and everyone and everything as none other than the same Turiya, and live life in peace and fullness and joy. Realize the divinity within yourself and the spiritual oneness of the whole universe. Manifest that divinity in daily life through peace, love, and service to all beings. That is the spiritualization of everyday life.
The dreamer, and the dreamed world. The dream takes place entirely in our minds. When you fall asleep, and you forget the waking world. You even forget that you are lying on the bed and sleeping, and you generate a dream. It does not feel like a dream at that time; it feels like another waking experience. You only call it a dream after waking up. In the dream, you exist. You have a body in a dream, you meet people in a dream.