Is life a dream? Vedanta, Maya, and the Illusion of Reality

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

—Shakespeare, The Tempest (IV.i.148-158)

There are many aspects to life that make it feel dream-like. Primary among them is the passing of time, which seems to accelerate as we get older, leaving in its wake fading memories and the stories we tell ourselves. Looking back at old photographs, we may no longer fully recognize the people and places we once knew. Sometimes we wonder if any of it ever really happened—so transitory is our existence. The Ashtavakra Gita reminds us not to depend on the longevity of objects and relations when it says:

Look upon friends, lands, wealth, houses, wives, presents, and other such objects of fortune as a dream, or as a magician’s show, lasting only a few days—just three or five.

We all intuit the ephemeral quality of life. We cling desperately to the objects and people close to us, hopelessly like rafts made of sand in the great ocean of samsara. We question our brief role in what appears to be a kind of cosmic tragicomedy written by an unseen hand. We don’t know how we got here, or even, really, what we’re supposed to do. It’s all so mysterious, and just a tad unsettling.

Having come across Vedanta, we might be shocked to learn that the world isn’t real. To any rational person, such a statement sounds suspicious. But in Vedanta, “real” is defined as that which never changes and is always present—by that standard, no object qualifies. This is why Vedanta places all objects under the category of mithya (“apparently real”) and reserves the category of satya (“real”) for only one thing: consciousness, which is unchanging, ever-present, and never negated.

Understanding this is an important part of spiritual development. When we see the world as mithya, we need no longer get caught up in the world’s drama or suffer from events over which we have little control. After all, this isn’t our show. We didn’t write the script, have no idea where central casting is, and the props appear to have been here long before anyone arrived on the scene.

Mithya is inscrutable. Why anything exists at all is a mystery. It cannot be said to be truly existent because it has no existence of its own—it depends on consciousness. Nor can it be said to be non-existent because it is experienced. This paradox is at the heart of Vedanta’s teaching.

The unreality of the world is taught in two main ways: through analysis of the three states of experience (waking, dreaming, sleeping) and through examination of the nature of objects. In both cases, nothing in these states or objects is permanent; all are here one moment and gone the next. As the Mandukya Upanishad with Karika says:

That which does not exist in the beginning and in the end, is not so in the middle. (2.6)

And yet, while immersed in them, both waking and dreaming feel real. It’s only upon waking from a dream that we say, “It was a dream.” Gaudapada’s conclusion is that both waking and dream are simply thoughts playing on the screen of awareness. Life is like a stage on which thoughts appear as actors, enter and exit, but the stage itself—pure consciousness—never changes.

Gaudapada illustrates this with the firebrand example: in darkness, a stick with its end lit, when moved rapidly, appears to create many shapes. The shapes seem real, but in truth there is only one point of light. Similarly, consciousness set in apparent motion by maya manifests as the world’s plurality. Picasso’s 1949 light drawings, captured by LIFE photographer Gjon Mili, make the same point—while the camera records centaurs and Greek profiles traced in light, there is in fact only a single moving light source.

Pablo Picasso drawing a centaur with light, 1949. Gjon Mili.

As Swami Paramarthananda explains:

The seeming motion of consciousness is caused by the rise and fall of thoughts. The thoughts come from the mind, and the mind comes from maya. Therefore maya alone, through the thought movement, is producing all.

In the midst of this movement, consciousness is still. “Thoughts move and experiences flow and you get a virtual reality, which is like a hologram that appears very tangible. Thus the thought motion creates the appearance of the world.”

If it seems far-fetched that an entire world could arise from thoughts, consider how willingly we give ourselves to illusions. At the movies, we know it’s only sound and light, yet we cry when Fantine in Les Misérables descends into prostitution, and we jump when Freddy Krueger strikes. Virtual reality will soon deepen this immersion by engaging not just sight and sound, but touch and smell. And in dreams, we are the script, the actors, the props, and the set—both the material and the intelligent cause.

A natural question arises: “If the world is mithya, why not walk into traffic or jump off a bridge?” The answer: because, mithya or not, life is beautiful. It might not always appear so, but seen as a whole, it most certainly is. Thus, we play our part in the tragicomedy as long as karma permits.

Swami Paramarthananda tells the story of a student who, while discussing mithya with his teacher, was chased by a rabid street dog. Later, the student asked, “If it’s all just mithya, why did we run from the dog?” The teacher replied, “Our running is mithya too. I was running to save my mithya body from the mithya dog!”

So—is life a dream? From the perspective of pure consciousness, yes. From the standpoint of the individual, the time–space framework gives life a relative consistency and rules we cannot break at will. I must still run from the mithya dog to avoid mithya pain. But ultimately, the world is an insubstantial pageant, soon to dissolve into the stillness from which it came.

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.