Advaita Vedānta presents reality as fundamentally non-dual, centered on Brahman as the sole, absolute reality. Brahman is characterized as pure existence, consciousness, and bliss (sat–cit–ānanda), without attributes, form, or internal division, and serves as the unchanging ground of all that appears. This absolute standpoint is called the paramārthika level of reality, at which nothing other than Brahman truly is. From this perspective, plurality, change, and limitation do not ultimately pertain to what is real in itself.

The individual self, or ātman, is held to be identical with this Brahman. The famous mahāvākya “tat tvam asi” (“That thou art”) expresses this identity: the innermost witnessing consciousness is not a fragment or part of Brahman, but Brahman itself. The apparent distinction between an individual knower and a universal ground arises only through ignorance (avidyā), which veils this non-dual nature. When the limiting adjuncts of body, mind, and ego are set aside in right understanding, the self is recognized as none other than the absolute.

The manifold world (jagat) is explained as an appearance grounded in māyā, the power by which the one Brahman seems to become many. Māyā does not render the world sheer non-existence; rather, it grants the world a dependent, empirical validity, comparable to a dream or mirage that functions experientially yet is later sublated. Advaita distinguishes several levels of reality to clarify this: at the vyavahārika level, the world, individual beings, and even Īśvara as creator and sustainer are taken as real for all practical purposes; at the prātibhāsika level, dream objects and illusions possess an even more tenuous status. Each lower level can be negated by a higher, but Brahman at the paramārthika level is never cancelled or overcome.

Liberation (mokṣa) consists in the direct knowledge (jñāna) that one’s true nature is Brahman, expressed in the realization “aham brahmāsmi” (“I am Brahman”). This knowledge does not create a new state but removes avidyā, the root ignorance that generates the experience of bondage, separation, and suffering. When this ignorance is dispelled, the duality of subject and object, knower and known, is recognized as a superimposed appearance within non-dual consciousness. What remains is the recognition that all this is indeed Brahman, and that the nature of that reality is ever free, self-luminous, and complete.