You may have heard this line from Chandogya Upanishad: “May I be many, may I grow forth.” Hearing it, you may have fallen to wondering: “How did the many actually come from the One?”

What if manifestation never really happened?

In this connection, let’s consider just one doctrine: vivarta vada. This teaching draws upon the metaphor of a dream, urging that “creation” is like a dream. Accordingly, “creation” is not really real.

How are we to make sense of this doctrine?

1. When we consider the world, the first thing to grasp is that it’s an appearance, not an object. The world rises and sets.

2. How are we to account for the world’s rising and setting? Here, it’s said that whatever rises and sets must be subject to “names and forms.” The former refers to conceptualizing, the latter to the shape taken. For example, “robin” is the name, and “orange-colored pear shape” is the form.

3. Now, what is it that projects these names and forms? Answer: the mind. Therefore, the world is nothing but an appearance projected by the mind. Since the world is merely an appearance, it is like a dream that’s spun out of the mind.

4. We need to ask, “What is the nature of the mind?” And here we come to a surprising insight: the mind is also just an appearance. It rises and sets in one state (dream) and then rises and sets in another (waking). It subsides or disappears in the state of deep sleep.

5. Therefore, the mind, too, is unreal in the specific sense that it’s a mere appearance. In sum, a mere appearance known as “the mind” projects another mere appearance referred to as “the world” or as “the waking state.”

6. Vivarta, you see, is inviting us to take the inward turn, for at this point we want to know what it is that makes possible the rising of the mind. Before then, however, we should ask, “What is the essence (to fudge the word a bit) of the mind?” Here, we discover that “the essence” of the mind is I-ness, the sense of “being me,” or the sense I have of myself.

7. Since the world can be traced back to the mind and since at the heart of the mind is I-ness, we then need to ask, “Is I-ness real?” Or we can ask, “Is I-ness truly limited (as is suspected), or could it be limitless?” Either way, we are coming to, are led neatly to Self-inquiry. We could also ask, “What is that which doesn’t appear and yet makes all of these appearances–the world, the mind, the I-sense–possible?”

8. Regardless of the specific way in which we ask the ultimate question, we can’t help but arrive at that which is truly real. Since that which is truly real cannot be an object, it is absolute. Being absolute, it is omnipresent. And “you” are that.

9. Ergo, the point of vivarta is to take us beyond vivarta. Of course, in so taking us, the inquiry reveals that there never was such a thing as vivarta–or, for that matter, an inquirer.