In the beginning the sadhaka feels as follows:
I am imperfect – incomplete like a fraction. I have a subject-object polarity. God is perfect. He is the partless whole. He, or rather ‘It’, is beyond all polarity, beyond all split. Such a God or Brahman is my Atman. Unless I realize It fully in my being, in my consciousness, and in my life, I can never be at peace.
God, who is sat-chit-ananda, is all-pervading. The ‘all’ as such is the continually changing, evanescent realm of forms. This includes all the parts and phases of my personality. The feeling of something real, something continuous is only due to His all-pervasiveness. How can I realize this God, who is my own reality and also the one Reality of the entire ever-changing universe?
All the problems of my life will be automatically solved when I realize God, who is my Self and also the Reality of all phenomena, and who is ever beyond all manifoldness or differences, beyond any subject-object split.
I do not want anything of this world; I do not want to be attached to any part or phase of my so-called personality. I want my Reality; only the Reality, the One without a second.
For such a sadhaka, hindrances due to maya in the form of hidden wrong attitudes and the like, are removed by the love for the Absolute Reality – whose real nature is revealed in the rishi-vakyas (scriptures) and which Itself is God, ishta, and guru – because that is much more powerful (by virtue of the power of Truth) than the combined power of all forms of maya, internal or as objects of the world.
The true sadhaka is taught to think and feel thus: ‘This body, mind, and the rest, are not mine, the experiencer in me is not ‘I’, but everything belongs to the Reality, the Reality is the experiencer, the experienced and also the fact of experience.’
In the light of the Vedantic truth as revealed by the rishis described above, it is abundantly clear that It is the Absolute Reality itself which is appearing as the sadhaka in one of the illusory forms. As the form is illusory and as the Reality is covered, the sadhaka feels all parts and phases of his personality to be real and belonging to himself, and also the objects of the world of innumerable types - animate, inanimate, men, women, and the like – all to be separately real, and the subject-object dichotomy created by the mind also to be real. But by the mysterious ‘lila’ of the Reality, the sadhaka comes across a person (or persons) in actual life whom he at once recognizes as representing the Truth, their life as the true perfect life, and feels drawn to them. He feels ‘He or It is my only support, I am supported by It alone and so is the whole world’; or ‘I belong to Him and so does the world, and He belongs to me’; or ‘There is neither world nor ‘I’, it is all He and He alone.’ This starts a process of transcendental illumination of all parts and phases of the personality, transcendental illumination of the entire phenomenon called the world, and transcendental illumination of the illusory subject- object duality. But the sadhaka is still a sadhaka; the Reality is not yet manifested in him. The covering or hiding power called maya functions in him in different ways. (One of the ways of this functioning of maya is the Sankhya tendency to perpetuate individualism and dependence on buddhi. There are various other ways in which maya shows itself in the sadhaka’s mind.)
But in the true sadhaka’s life the ultimate authorities are the rishi-vakyas (as explained by the great acharyas), the incarnations, and the guru. Through love for these authorities and detachment from everything else, including all objects and persons and all parts and phases of his own personality – with the knowledge that they are all illusory appearances of the Reality – the sadhaka rises higher and higher, crossing all hindrances in his mind and outside. Depending on the power of these authorities which is constantly pulling him higher and higher, and on their words of advice, the sadhaka goes on revising his own thinking, feeling and willing. He keeps on absorbing the illumination playing in the form of these authorities till he himself finally comes to the full realization of Brahman, the One without a second.