Question: What is the relationship between objective experience and subjective experience?

There’s no relationship! Let’s see what this means.

To begin with, we may draw a provisional distinction between objective experience and subjective experience. The former refers to perceiving, sensing, and thinking while the latter could be another name for awareness or consciousness.

We draw this distinction–again, a provisional one–for two reasons. First, it reveals that awareness has always been disentangled from objective experience: one stands as the awareness that one is, one knows that one is aware of objective experiences, and so suffering, which is brought about by identifying oneself with objective experiences, ends just so long as one abides as witnessing awareness.

Second, this distinction enables one to turn toward oneself and ask, “What is my nature on its own? What is this awareness when it’s understood that it’s not actually mixed up with objective experiences?”

After it’s understood that awareness is without any objective qualities, is continuously present, and is self-effulgent, the awareness that one truly is turns back toward objective experiences in order to see what these are truly made of.

The first discovery, as awareness re-approaches objective experiences, is that all these appear within me, awareness. Further inquiry allows one to see directly that all objective experiences are actually made of me, awareness.

Therefore, the provisional distinction between subjective experience (my experience of myself or my being; that is, my experience of the awareness that I am) and objective experiences (i.e., perceiving, sensing, and thinking) dissolves with the deep, intuitive understanding that, in fact, all experiences are modulations of my very being. (The early teaching has “done its job,” having been replaced by a more accurate, later formulation.)

What does this mean? It means that awareness experiences itself in the modes of perceiving, sensing, and thinking.

When awareness is alone with, by, and as itself (as in deep sleep), awareness is only itself: all one, all alone. And when awareness is experiencing itself, for instance, in the mode of thinking, awareness is only experiencing itself (in this way: that is, as thinking).

Therefore, awareness is only ever experiencing itself. Consequently, there is no relation at all; there can’t be one in the final analysis. Hence, the meaning of advaita: “one without a second.”

Question: And since the objective cannot affect the subjective, is it “real”?  

The first answer is no; the second answer is yes.

Objective experiences are not real in the sense that they have no independent existence; their appearances, which are temporary, always shine by and with the light of another (namely, awareness).

A deeper inquiry demonstrates that only awareness is real; it is the permanent, unchanging unity.

Yet if awareness is the whole (and it is), then all objective experiences must also be real in the sense that they are the expressions of awareness shining in this very mode.

In short, the nondual teaching wants us first to see that “the world” is not real in order to push the inquiry along: “What, then, is really real?” Yet ultimately it must return to disclose that the appearances are always and only appearances of the one reality. In this sense, they can be said to be the many faces of God.