Have you ever woken up from a dream and thought, Oh my goodness, that was so real? That’s because it is real while you’re in it.
In a dream, you can be anywhere, doing anything. One minute you’re in Hong Kong, the next you’re in Buckingham Palace, having tea with the King! In a split second, you’re shopping in New York, then riding waves at Bondi Beach.
You might even dream you’re falling. And while you’re falling, it feels real. Your heart is racing. Then, suddenly, you wake up. The dream dissolves, and you realise it was just a dream. It was all an illusion.
But it was real while you were in it. This is where the ancient wisdom of Vedanta invites us to consider something extraordinary:
What if the waking world is just like a dream?
In Sanskrit, two beautiful words describe this: Maya, meaning illusion, and Mithya, meaning neither real nor unreal.
The dream is real while we’re dreaming. The waking world is real while we’re awake. But the moment we wake up, we see the dream for what it really is.
Similarly, Vedanta says that there is another state of consciousness we need to realise. The ultimate state of Self-Realisation, God-Consciousness. Then we will see this waking world for what it truly is.
