Over this lovely cup of coffee this morning, let me present Advaita as I understand it.
Here I am, sitting and enjoying my coffee. What a delightful experience!
Every experience requires an experiencer. This is what I call Atma.
When I experience anything from a sip of coffee, to a beautiful garden view, or the sea breeze and the spectacle of the rising sun, I respond with my life. Atma and life experience are inseparable.
So to describe this life experience as unreal makes no sense as long as I am around as the Atma!
But surely the experience keeps changing. It is also multilayered. For example every sunrise on the beach is in its core experience a thing of beauty. It gives an intimation or bliss. These are components of the experience but subjective to the experiencer. In a way the Atma is projecting these subjective experiences we call life.
However it is easy to see that not only are these moments changing, but my reactions to the experiences are changing. My mind and body respond differently over time. In fact, time,.mind, body, experience are all in a constant flux. That is Prakriti.
Prakriti has both what I like and I dislike. It is also evaporating with time. I react to it from my expectations, past memories, and circumstances. The same great coffee in my favorite eatery on the lovely beach will not taste the same when I realise I am about to miss my train.
But I keep coming back again and again in search of these same experiences. And when I am not busy running to catch my train or finishing off my coffee, there are a few quiet moments when I am asking myself what I am in fact looking for, in all this activity, with all my plans and actions, and good and bad outcomes. I am reaching out to a sense fulfilment that lasts. And a bliss that is not fleeting.
But wait. If you ask me, "Are you sure?", I react, "Yes I know it in my gut". This is something I have as my intuition. In fact this intuition kicks in even before I start thinking about something. In fact I took intuitively to coffee when I was very young. It simply fitted into my Atma, you may say.
The most blissful feeling I ever felt was when I felt loved. Or I loved someone.
Now put it all together. My Atma. My intuition, feeling of love, beauty and bliss. And my experiences, which keep changing but all stemming out of my being there in the first place. This vast creation I interact with - for good and bad experiences, seeking something beyond it always, not knowing what.
The whole drama of life is played out around me and I am a part of it. I don't know who set it up in such an infinitely connected, dynamic, colourful, beautiful, blissful, way. I would like to meet Him or Her or It. I have an intuition that creative being is a larger, infinitely larger, version of me. A Paramatma!
Just as I, the Atma, cannot separate myself from my experience, the Paramatma cannot be separated from Creation and Life. It has a constant inside and an ever-changing outside. That's all.
