you are that

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What is Real?

We could define ‘real’ as something which never changes. In order to change, a thing has to cease to be what it is and become something else; i.e. it would have to become what it is not.

Therefore, anything that changes cannot be real, since the act of changing involves non-existence

What is Unreal?

Unreal is the appearance of something in the place/location of its non-existence. Example the snake appears where it does not exist, ie the rope. The snake appears in the location of its own absence. This is the very definition of falsity or unreality.

Where something is not, there it appears.
Then it is false.

Blue color appears in the sky where it does not exist. The blue color appears where there is no blue color. The sky is not blue.

Similarly, the entire universe of experience (waking world, dream world, deep sleep blankness) continuously appears and disappears in the sky of Awareness.

Awareness is the locus or location of the absence of the mind. Awareness is where the mind appears, plays it games and dissapears. Hence, the mind is unreal.

The locus in which something appears and disappears, then in that locus, that thing is an appearance and unreal. The locus only is real.

You are that locus - Awareness.


—Swami Sarvapriyananda
Lectures on Mandukya Karika

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Nature is a temple in which
living columns sometimes
emit confused words.

Man approaches it through
forests of symbols, which
observe him with familiar glances.


—Charles Baudelaire 

(1821 - 1867)

 

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We must ask from the gods things suited to hearts that shall die,

knowing the path we are in, the nature of our doom.

—Pindar

Pythian III

C. M. Bowra version

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