Brahman — The Sole Reality
Brahma satyam jagan mithya jivo brahmaiva naparah — Brahman alone is real; the world is appearance; the individual self is none other than Brahman.
This mahavakya — great saying — from Adi Shankaracharya's Vivekachudamani is the entire Advaita teaching compressed into one sentence.
The Three Levels of Reality
Advaita describes reality in three tiers:
Paramarthika Satta — Absolute Reality: Brahman alone, changeless, infinite, self-luminous, without second.
Vyavaharika Satta — Empirical Reality: the world of our waking experience, governed by name-and-form, cause-and-effect. This is not unreal in the everyday sense — it is practically real but ultimately dependent on Brahman as its substrate.
Pratibhasika Satta — Apparent Reality: the reality of a dream, a mirage, an illusion. Completely dissolved when its nature is understood.
Maya — the cosmic power of Brahman — is responsible for the appearance of multiplicity from the One.
The Path of Jnana
The path of Advaita is Jnana Yoga — the yoga of discriminative self-inquiry. The primary tool is Neti Neti (not this, not this) — systematically disidentifying from the body, the mind, the senses, and even the witness-consciousness, until what remains is the substratum: Sat-Chit-Ananda — Being-Consciousness-Bliss.
