The Yoga Vasistha

The Yoga Vasistha is a vast philosophical dialogue of the Vedanta tradition, attributed to Valmiki and cast as the sage Vasistha's instruction of the young prince Rama. Through a great cascade of interwoven stories, it advances a radical idealism by way of narrative as much as argument, illustrating its claims through tale within tale.

Its central thesis is that the world is of the nature of a dream held in consciousness, that the experienced universe is woven of the mind's own substance. The stories repeatedly show worlds arising within worlds and lifetimes unfolding within moments, dramatising the contention that what appears solid and external is in truth a projection of awareness, no more independent than the contents of a dream.

This makes the text the most explicit ancient ancestor of the conviction that thought creates reality. By holding that the mind alone gives rise to the experienced world, it pushes the analysis of consciousness toward a thoroughgoing idealism, and locates both bondage and liberation in the activity of the mind, which can dream itself into suffering or wake itself into freedom.