That the world and everything in it is unreal is a theme of the Upanishads. Here are a few extracts from the third chapter of the Tejo-bindu Upanishad
‘The form of the mind is false. The form of the intellect is false. I am eternal, perpetual and originless…the three bodies are false, the three gunas are false, all scriptures are false, the Vedas are false, all Shastras are false, I the Atman of consciousness am true. The triad of murtis are false, all beings are false, all truth is false. I am Sadashiva, pervading all existing things. The preceptor and pupil are false, the mantra of the preceptor is false.. Whatever is seen is false, what is conceivable is false… all living creatures are false, all enjoyments are false, right and wrong action is false, what is lost and obtained is false, grief and delight are false, good and bad conduct is false. All form, taste, smell, cognition is false, every result of human existence is false, I alone am the absolute Truth.
A passage follows on the mantra ‘I am Brahman’ which supersedes all others and destroys all duality, all diseases of the mind and all bonds. This mantra alone should be used.
Roshen Dalal 
I find this strangely unsettling, though I’m familiar with the concept that we live in an illusory world. Perhaps it’s because “false” is a harsh term in English. Would the original word used have had the same connotations?
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I’ll check the original–perhaps there is a better alternative. Thanks for the suggestion. It is unsettling, but when the world seems to be on the wrong track, the concept of withdrawing from it is sometimes attractive.
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Maybe it unsettles me because I associate falseness with deceit, and “deceit” implies the existence of a Deceiver?
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Translating Sanskrit is difficult–each word or term has many interpretations. In this case the term is ‘asatya’, literally, ‘not true’, or ‘false’ but can also be translated as unreal. As for a deceiver–Maya or illusion, emanating from Brahman, the Absolute, can be seen as the great deceiver–actually many different interpretations of all this, which I will try to summarize in the book I am working on.
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It’s a challenging topic. I’m not familiar with Eastern religions – and from the New Zealand geographical perception they’re Northern rather than Eastern! But I could see some echoes of this in Catharism and other medieval beliefs that were denounced as “heresies”. Nowadays I think it’s accepted that they were influenced by “Eastern” thinking, and cross-cultural influences may have been underestimated.
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Maybe I will write a few brief summaries of some texts and ideas…
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Reading this and even what is in the Vedas, I feel that Hinduism in its current form is so vastly different from what it was conceived as originally, in these books. Do you feel so too? Or was it distorted through the years?
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Hinduism is a product of history. It wasn’t conceived as anything, it grew and developed over the years. But yes, what we see today indicates that people have no knowledge about its texts. Do read the introduction in my book on Hinduism. I think you will be able to read it online without buying the book, which is a kind of A-Z encyclopaedia.
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