Like the horn of a hare in a dream, none of that really exists

The śaśa-śṛṅga — the hare’s horn — is the quintessential Vedāntic example of the nonexistent. But Vasiṣṭha employs it with a subtlety that is often lost. He does not say the world is “like a hare’s horn” — pure fiction — but that it is like the hare’s horn in a dream. In the dream, the horn is experienceable: it is seen, touched, feared. It has phenomenological consistency for as long as the dream state lasts. Its nonexistence is not an absence but a dependence: it depends on the dreaming mind and ceases when that mind awakens. So it is with the world: it is not unreal in a negative sense, but dependent on the consciousness that cognizes it. The Aṣṭāvakra Gītā (II.6) says: “The universe is magically created in the Self, like a city in the sky.” There is no separate creator or creation: it is consciousness itself that appears as the world without ceasing to be consciousness. This stillness does not reveal that “everything is a dream” in a derogatory sense, but rather that the distinction between dream and waking is itself a dualism of thought. In the formless state — what Vasiṣṭha calls upaśama — there is neither waking nor dreaming, but pure luminosity that can appear as anything without identifying with it.