If I do not see the world as an elaboration of all the neutral laws of īśvara, I live in a secluded fantasy, private world. I create my own world, as it were. This is therefore also called jīva sṛṣṭi.

Dream is thus pure prātibhāsika satya, but for almost all people the waking state is also a kind of subjective daydream. In both the dream state and the daydream state I live in a kind of private creation with preferences, aversions, biases, judgments and projections. What is dreaming? Attention is only focused on an individual subtle body, in which all impressions play out. What is daydreaming? Despite the fact that the senses are open, attention is focused on ahaṅkāra (also in the subtle body), ego/I-experience and thoughts and feelings will revolve around it, and my behavior will be ego-motivated accordingly.

With all the problems that entails. Desires, fears, likes, dislikes, and values are projected onto the world and others. Furthermore, all sensory information is ‘colored and distorted’ by my mind. Thus, I will live in strong emotional dependence on objects. I will judge situations with likes or dislikes.

In order to grow into a mature personality, I will have to tune in to the neutral empirical or trans-actional reality of īśvara (vyāvahārika satya). Īśvara is nothing more and less than a set of beautiful impartial laws and their effects. That level of reality is also called īśvara’s creation (īśvara sṛṣṭi). As a human being, I am no more than a cog in the whole, meant to contribute dharmically to the whole, which is like the dharma itself.

Then I experience the meaning of the objects purely on their function in the story. Only then can I see īśvara’s brilliance, and appreciate all laws and phenomena. Only then can I recognize ignorance, especially in my own mind. Only when my thinking is objective, I am fully suitable for the knowledge tool vedānta. We already sense that ahaṅkāra (ego, the misplaced I-experience) plays a much more dominant role in prātibhāsika satya than in vyāvahārika satya. Living in the objectivity of vyāvahārika, the latter it has exactly a function, delimited enough to survive.

A problem for assimilation of vedānta is that, from a state of mind of prātibhāsika satya, I project all kinds of ideas onto the teaching, deny parts of them, or use them to fit into my existing complex of strategies. Of course, knowledge cannot do its work purely on my ignorance.

This is another way of describing that we cannot skip īśvara. We must first align ourselves with the neutrality of empirical reality.

In the famous rajju sarpa nyāya example of a rope or snake, the ‘seen’ snake is a subjective misconception and misinterpretation of a (poorly lit) rope, based on a chronic distrust in my mind. The experience of rope is vyāvahārika satya, the experience of a snake that is actually rope is prātibhāsika satya. As a metaphor, the rope stands for pāramārthika-satya, existence-awareness, and the serpent is an expression of ignorance. This is beautifully put together in the last line of Śaṅkara’s morning prayer (prātaḥ smaranam):

Yasminnidaṃ jagadaśeṣam aśeṣamūrtau

rajjvāṃ bhujaṅgama iva pratibhāsitaṃ vai

(For the ignorant) the world remains, in that which has no remnant, like a snake in a rope is fantasized about.

Happiness stands or falls with a healthy, down-to-earth self-image. Whether that is the real self or the relative self. In prātibhāsika this self-image will be distorted. For example, it contains general subjective interpretations such as “I am smart/stupid”, “She is nice/terrible”, “This dúúrt long”. In extremis: “The world is against me” is really a thought that people have. Or the other way around: “I am a blessing to the world”, which is also nonsense.

As soon as we project values onto the world, we will be in constant trouble of conscience. There is only one value to project onto the world, namely īśvara. And this is because the value of values is god or the self. In this way, everything can only be appreciated as existence-consciousness.

Objects such as the prātibhāsikī experienced are formally called viṣaya (binding objects, usually lovers around us). Objects as the vyāvahārikī name them are formally called padārtha (non-binding objects).

This brings us to the third level of reality. The status of both prātibhāsika satya and vyāvahārika satya are understood by the sage who truly understands that and how mithyā (dependent) is actually satya (independent). This unobjectifiable truth (consciousness) is ātman, the self, and in this system of three pāramārthika is called satya. This literally means beyond (pāram) of goals and objects (ārthāḥ). Pāramārthika satya expresses the reality of the one who knows that she or he is a brahman, free from prātibhāsika jīva and vyāvahārika īśvara.