Introducing the concept
You are being chased by a fierce tiger. It is right on your heels; you can hear its snarl. Your heart is pounding uncontrollably. You have been running for many minutes, and your legs are starting to give in. But you are pushing yourself forward by sheer will. You reach a steep flight of stairs that leads to a large hall. If you can get into the hall and shut the door before the tiger makes it up the stairs, you have a chance at survival. Come on, you tell yourself, let’s do this. You take the first few steps up. To your dismay, though, your legs suddenly feel like they are weighed down a block of lead; you just don’t seem to be able to get your legs to move fast enough. You look behind your shoulder in despair; the tiger is getting closer, it is just one leap away. You give up; your legs simply are not listening to you. Your life briefly flashes before your eyes. You brace yourself for the claws of the tiger. And then you wake up.
It was just a dream. You smile to yourself in relief, marveling at how ‘real’ it seemed to you. While you were trying to escape the grasp of the man-eating tiger, you were certainly convinced that it was a ‘real’ tiger that was seeking to sink its ‘real’ claws into your flesh, and you were scared for your life.
But whatever happened in the dream would not have affected you - the waking ‘you’ - in the least. Even if you had been eaten in the dream, you would have woken up to find yourself to be just fine in the waking world.
Now think of a time when you were day-dreaming. You are awake, but your mind has drifted away. You are in a cricket field, facing the last ball of the match. The stadium is packed full with tense fans. Your team needs four runs to win. The bowler charges in as a crowd roars. It is a bouncer, but you - of course - have plenty of time. You rock backwards, stand tall, and hook the ball out of the stadium. The crowd erupts. And then the loud voice of your friend jerks you back into the ‘real’ world.
You see the ‘sleep’ dream and the day-dream as lower levels of reality - compared with the waking world, the world around you right now - do you not? This is an important insight that Vedanta asks you to pay a lot of attention to, for it points to the way in which you can understand and approach the Absolute. It is a powerful method of inquiry.
Very often, in Vedantic literature, you will find references to ‘levels of reality’. It is important that we understand the distinction - and be able to comfortably move between - these levels of reality.
Going deeper
Here are two guidelines to help with our navigation through the rest of this page -
- Lower levels of reality are dependent on higher levels.
- Lower levels of reality can be negated or canceled to reveal higher levels of reality.
You will see that these are just two different ways of saying the same thing. We will explain these guidelines; for now, just keep these in mind as we dive into the 3 levels of reality described in Vedanta -
Pratibhasika Sat
This is the level of reality at which dreams, imaginations, fictions operate. Pratibhasika cannot simply be dismissed as non-existent, because, while we were in the dream, the world of the dream did appear to us and our dream selves did indeed respond to this world. During the dream we got scared, we laughed in joy, we felt pain. While we are in a dream, the dream world is real to us.
Once we shake out of it - once we wake up - we no more see the world of our dreams as real. This is a retrospective realization; after we wake up, we tell ourselves that what we earlier thought was real was a fiction; it was a world ‘made up’ by our minds.
Now let us look at the Pratibhasika world with the help of the two guidelines we laid out. Firstly, the entirety of the dream world is dependent on the dreamer. Without the dreamer conjuring up the dream in her mind, there would be no dream. Take away the dreamer and the dream comes crashing down. Thus the dream is at a lower level of reality than the world inhabited by the dreamer.
Also, when you wake up, you realize that everything in the dream was unreal. You cancel everything that happened in the dream. If you won the lottery in the dream, the money you earned got canceled the moment you wake up (or the moment you realize, while still dreaming, that ‘this is all a dream’). Thus the dream is at a lower level of reality than the waking world, because the entirety of the dream world can be canceled - or ‘sublated’, to use the technical term - to reveal the waking world.
Vyavaharika Sat
In the very same way, let us examine the waking world. Now this is what we consider ‘real’ without a doubt in our minds. The physical world around us, the world you are in right now as you read this, is where most philosophical and scientific inquiries end in their search for Reality. This world we inhabit is called the Vyavaharika level of reality, or Vyavaharika Sat.
Simply put, Vyavaharika Sat refers to the transactional world or the phenomenal world; the world in which we live our waking lives. The question is - are you sure the world you are inhabiting right now cannot be canceled or sublated, to reveal a deeper level of reality?
Let us approach this question from two directions. Firstly, how sure are you that - right now - not dreaming? How sure are you that you will not wake up in a few moments and realize that all this was just a dream? ‘I’m sure!’ you might say. Alright, but when you were in the dream, the ‘dream you’ was convinced that it was in the ‘real’ world too. While in the dream, you laughed and cried, you felt joy and pain and anxiety. It is only later, after you woke up, that you realized it was not ‘real’. Similarly, is it not possible that you will wake up from this dream too?
We’ll let you reflect on this. Read our page on the topic Maya.
Here’s another approach. Take anything in the objective material world, in other words consider any object from the waking world around you. Is the object permanent, or does it keep changing? The wind keeps throwing things from one place to another; our bodies are in constant flux, with cells dying and new ones replacing them; the sun rises and sets; the seasons come and go and come again; our lives zip through; people come into our lives, fill it with meaning and memories, and fade away. Everything is impermanent.
If everything is impermanent, it means that everything can be canceled to reveal something permanent underneath, it means that everything can be probed to identify a changeless substance that grounds it. If everything in the Vyavaharika world is impermanent, it means that the Vyavaharika level of reality sits on or is dependent on a deeper level of reality; Vyavaharika Sat can be canceled or sublated to reveal a deeper Truth.
Pick up a clay pot in your hands. The pot seems ‘real’. It is an object in the Vyavaharika world. Now break it down (don’t actually start breaking pots; do this as a thought experiment!) into pieces. Then crush the pieces into dust and blow the dust away. The pot is entirely gone.
The pot seemed to exist, but now it is non-existent. The pot’s existence was temporary; it was cancelable. Or we can say that it borrowed existence from something permanent, and then returned its borrowed existence back to this permanent substance.
Paramarthika Sat
The entirety of the Vyavaharika world is like that pot. It appears to exist, but it is impermanent, it can be canceled. This means that the Vyavaharika world sits on - is dependent on - something else that is permanent. What is That?
That unchanging substance is called the Paramarthika Sat, the Ultimate, Unborn, Undying, Permanent Reality. How can we understand this Paramarthika Sat? How can we approach It? How can we wake up from the Vyavaharika world to the Paramarthika Sat? We will not go into these questions in this page, but the entirety of this learning portal is designed toward helping you answer these questions.
Tying the threads together
While, technically, Vedanta divides reality into 3 levels as we just saw - Pratibhasika, Vyavaharika, and Paramarthika - what we also saw is that the distinction between Pratibhasika and Vyavaharika is loose; one can never say for certain that one is at the Vyavaharika realm and not the Pratibhasika realm. Thus Acharyas often simply make the distinction between Vyavaharika and Paramarthika, or transient reality and permanent Reality. In this formulation Vyavaharika includes the waking as well as the dream states, in other words anything that appears. And Paramarthika Sat is That to which everything appears.
We go into a lot more detail on this in our other pages. The important thing to take away from this page is that Advaita Vedanta constantly pushes us to look for the permanent amidst the impermanent, for the substance or substratum of things that appear to us. It asks us to go into deeper and deeper levels of permanence, until we get to That which cannot be sublated.
Reflect on this
Let us take the example commonly found in Vedantic teachings - the rope and the snake. Assume that you are walking down a poorly lit street past dusk. As you take a turn around the corner, you see a snake curled up in the road in front of you. You jump up in fear and take a few quick steps back. Right then the power comes back on, and the snake is now lit by the street light. You realize that it was just a curled up rope! You smile at yourself and walk on, perhaps even moving the rope out of the way, while your heart-rate takes a minute or two to come down to normal.
Now can you fit the above example to the framework we learnt? While you thought you were seeing the snake, you felt fear and you started to run away. But when the light was turned on, you realized that what you thought was a snake was nothing but a rope. The light revealed a deeper level of reality - it canceled the snake to reveal the rope. Also the snake is dependent on the rope - if there was no rope, there would have been no ‘snake’ either.
Can you apply this snape-rope example to your dreams? Doesn’t the snake correspond to a dream? While you are in the dream (i.e. while you were looking at what you believed was a snake), it was real to you, and you responded just the way you would to a threat in your waking life. But then you woke up to realize it was just a dream (i.e. you realize that the snake is actually a rope).
Now, can you apply the snake-rope example to the waking world too? Is this entire universe not like the snake?