In Advaita Vedanta there are two I’s, the empircal self and the transcendental self or the ego (aham) and the Atman. The former is a modification of antahkarana and appears as a moral and rational agent (karta) due to possessing the reflection of the pure consciousness within Antahkarana. So what is illusory is the apparent identity of the empirical self and the Atman. The nature of this identity is this, the properties of one appear within the other, like red color is taken to be a property of a crystal because the color gets reflected within it. Now for Advaita Vedanta any illusion always contains two parts - a real one and an illusory one. The real one in this case is the Atman, without some reality no illusion can occur because an illusion is not anything else but taking something not-real to be real. When we break it up, it would always contain a real and an unreal component. Coming to the consciousness that sublates the illusion when one realizes the difference between the real a
In Hume the term ‘perception’ replaces Locke’s ‘Ideas’, as the object of understanding: “It has been observ’d, that nothing is ever present to the mind but its perceptions; and that all the actions of seeing, hearing, judging, loving, hating, and thinking, fall under this denomination. The mind can never exert itself in any action, which we may not comprehend under the term of perception; and consequently that term is no less applicable to those judgments, by which we distinguish moral good and evil, than to every other operation of the mind. To approve of one character, to condemn another, are only so many different perceptions.” (All page citations are from D.F. Norton’s edition of Treatise on Human Nature: 293). Perception is whatever is present to the mind (THN: 408), they are objects intimately present to the mind (137), they are our only objects (141,293), they are interrupted and perishing and different at every return (140), like the Heracletean flux. Further ‘Per