So it is never the situation that is the experience, it is how I relate to it and how I react to it. What that releases in me, of course, depends entirely on my conditioning (vāsanas, dislikes, likes, desires, fears) and knowledge.

What my view is on the situation is crucial. That is why knowledge in many aspects of life is so important for a person. People knowledge, self-knowledge, professional knowledge, you name it.

This can therefore also be true general self-knowledge. This then produces the immediate state of fullness. Compare the famous aparokṣānubhūti, immediate self-experience. The word anubhava is used more often in ordinary relative experiences, the word anubhūti as well, but in vedānta it is also reserved for the full experience of being settled in brahman. This is of course not a discrete experience, but the disappearance of experiences is also a kind of experience of being without otherness, being without difference. This results in the following:

śravaṇa → manana → nididhyāsana → anubhava → anubhūti

hearing the truth → contemplating → internalizing → direct realization (‘I am all that is’) → established realization (‘the experience of standing alone as the full truth’).

The phased nature of these schemes should not be taken chronologically.

Note: This must be fully understood, because experience in this scheme is not a discrete, concrete sensual experience. The experience is that all experiences are exposed as ‘not real’. The experience that experiences such as fear, otherness, limitation, limitation fall away is indescribable because it is not an experience. It is the experience of not being an experience. It is experiential fullness because of self-knowledge.

“Experience can lead to knowledge, but the impression of experience does not have to be knowledge. Experience must be assimilated in terms of knowledge. Experience does not have to include or be knowledge. Experiences can be contradictory. Knowledge includes experience. Knowledge can contradict experience. can also resolve the contradictions in the experience. (True) knowledge cannot be contradicted,” said Swami Dayānanda.

Some mistakenly believe that an ātma anubhava, an experience of the self at a certain moment, is necessary for mokṣa. This, however, would make the boundless reality that is ātmā into a limited object, which is impossible: draṣṭā hi dṛśyātmatayā na dṛṣṭaḥ – the seer can never be seen in the form of the seen (Vivekacūḍāmaṇi v183).

Moreover, since truth or reality is always present, hoped-for experience can never come – it is already present in and through every experience as its reality. This should be an eye-opener. When I see that and how I am ok, I experience everything as ok.

Because truth or reality is always present, knowledge that dispells misconceptions is sufficient. Ignorance is only removed by knowledge, not practical experience. You can have as much life experience as you want, but it’s not enough for freedom.

All in all, vedānta states that truth must always be examined in one’s own experience. Truth comes about when there is agreement between śruti (presentation of truth in scriptures), smṛti (the remembered teaching), nyāya (infallible logic of it) and anubhava (analysis of it in one’s own experience).

Sometimes the term anubhava appears as its synonym anubhūti.