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
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