Hi Sundari. I have a question about the Self pretending to be a jiva, I am speaking as the Self pretending to be jiva. My question is: is the dream world considered the astral plane, aka subtle planes, which just appears in me, the self? Sorry for such a dumb question.
Sundari: The transactional reality the jiva lives in, mithya, is all a dream world because it is not real. Real being that which is always present and unchanging, which can only be applied to the Self, the knower of the dream. Anything ‘in’ mithya is just another layer of the dream, including the dream world/dream state, and ‘astral plane’, whatever that is. Vedanta calls the different realms, or planes of existence in mithya ‘lokas’, and there are apparently 14 of them, from the most tamasic to most sattvic. But they are all still in mithya. So yes, the dream world appears in you as an object known to you, as does the waking dream world and the ‘astral plane’. Even my five-year old granddaughter has figured that out. She announced out of the blue to me a little while ago that she has realized that her dream world is the same as her waking world. Why? Because as the Self she knows she is observing both, so neither dream nor waking state is real. They are objects known to the Self.
Om, Sundari
