Provisional Proposition

The world is unreal.  

Rationale

The nondual teaching states that the world is unreal in order to get you to discover what is truly real.

Definition of the World

The world is the idea, or concept, of a unity (or substratum) that synthesizes all perceptual objects (sights, sounds, touches, tastes, and scents). Hence, the world-concept is a “one-all” (or unity-totality).

Investigations Of The World-Concept

1.) Ramana Maharshi will speak of the mind and world in terms of the seer and the seen. He means that the world, as a concept, can’t appear in the absence of namarupa–name (concepts, labels) and form (perceptible appearances).

Some reflection will show that the world appears. After all, you never find the world except in the waking state. Nor do you ever find the world in the absence of the mind, though you find the mind in the dream state. This goes to show that the world-concept is dependent upon the mind–and not the converse.

Once one accepts the three-fold Vedantic standard of reality (which holds that something is real just in case (a) it’s self-shining, (b) it’s ontologically independent, and (c) it’s permanent), once one sees that the world-concept is just an appearance (and therefore, actually, is unreal in all three senses), then one secures the insight that the world is unreal.

Since the world is unreal, the mind is driven inward. From here, an investigation of the mind is in order. What becomes clear is that the mind, too, is an appearance and, for Ramana Maharshi, at the root of the mind is the I-thought, or the sense of me.

Further investigation will show that this sense of me is also unreal, or non-existent. The question, really, is what remains.

Typically, the literature includes an objection to the effect that there’s only a horrifying void. But this is not true, and direct experience will refute it. Instead, what is revealed is that only consciousness is real.

2.) Sri Atmananda takes a different approach in his version of the direct method. To suggest that “The world is unreal” is to see that (a) it has no independent existence and, concomitantly, that (b) the world is nothing but consciousness.

How do we ‘know the world’? Only through ‘the instrument’ of perception. But this question is inapt, even misleading (it’s misleadingly realist), since all we know of the world is the current perception. See that all we know is the current sight, sound, touch, taste, or smell.

In fact, this isn’t quite right since the current sight is identical with the process or experience of seeing. There’s nothing to seeing other than this sight just as there’s nothing to this sight other than seeing. To paraphrase Greg Goode: when we say or think, “Red,” this is just another name for seeing just as when we speak or think of seeing, all we’re actually experiencing, in this case, is red.

But this is not all because seeing-sight (hereafter, simply “seeing”) cannot appear unless it’s witnessed. By what? By witnessing consciousness, for the latter is that to which all experiences–such as this perception–appear.

Now there’s in place a gestalt according to which background awareness is that to which foreground experience is appearing. But is that the end of the inquiry? No, it’s not.

For a moment, you can superimpose the concept of space onto this background consciousness. Then you can directly experience seeing taking place within this space-like consciousness.

Next, you can feel that seeing is pervaded by consciousness, much in the way that a sponge is pervaded by water. What is this experience like?

Finally, you can ask whether you are actually having two experience at once–or not. That is, are you directly experiencing pervading consciousness and seeing, or are you just having one, seamless, indivisible experience? It’s the latter. In which case, this experience must be made of some substance, and that substance–whatever it is–must be present right now.

Which “things” are present right now but seeing and consciousness? However, whatever a substance is it can’t be subject to rising and setting. Yet seeing, clearly, is subject to rising and setting. Then is consciousness subject to rising and setting? Strikingly, it’s not.

The point, at this point, is to “try to see” or to “try to feel” that seeing is nothing but consciousness, i.e., that the very substance out of which seeing is made is consciousness.

Higher Reason, of the kind set forth here, isn’t meant to be confused with lower reason. What’s at stake is not logic, in the lower sense, and therefore one does well not to think that the universal nature of consciousness is just being inferred. That’s not how it is. Instead, Higher Reason is inviting you to dive into the direct experience here and now: to see very clearly, to know immediately what it actually is.

Direct experience is pure consciousness.

And so, the world is unreal in the sense that it’s not independently existing. The world is real insofar as it’s nothing but consciousness.