The work presents a sustained exploration of consciousness, asserting that reality in its deepest sense is a single, infinite awareness, often described as Brahman or pure consciousness. What appears as the vast multiplicity of the world, including body, mind, and personal identity, is portrayed as an illusory projection, comparable to a dream or mirage. This illusoriness is not mere denial of experience, but a way of indicating that the phenomenal world lacks independent, enduring reality apart from consciousness. The individual self, or ego, is treated as a mental construct that arises within this field of awareness and mistakenly takes itself to be separate and limited.

Within this vision, bondage and suffering are traced to ignorance of one’s true nature and to attachment to what is ultimately unreal. When consciousness identifies with the transient play of mind and world, it experiences fear, desire, and dissatisfaction. The text repeatedly emphasizes that the mind, through its projections, creates both the sense of limitation and the experience of bondage. Yet the same mind, when guided by insight and discrimination between the real and the unreal, becomes the instrument of freedom.

Liberation, or moksha, is therefore presented as a matter of self-knowledge rather than external action or ritual. It consists in the direct realization that the individual self (Atman) is not different from the ultimate reality, Brahman, and that one’s essential nature is pure, unattached awareness. When this non-dual identity is recognized, the illusion of separateness falls away, and the world is seen as a mere appearance within consciousness rather than something binding or threatening. The cessation of suffering follows naturally from this recognition, as the basis for fear and craving has been removed.

The dialogues between sage and prince serve as a pedagogical journey from confusion and despair to clarity and inner freedom. Through stories, reasoning, and subtle analysis of mind and experience, they guide the seeker to see that what was taken as solid reality is in fact a mental construction, and that the only enduring reality is the changeless consciousness in which all appearances arise and subside. The central thrust of the teaching is that by understanding the mind’s role in creating illusion and by recognizing one’s identity with pure consciousness, one abides in natural peace, free from the compulsions of the phenomenal world.