Consciousness is all there is. Consciousness is the true self. And the personal self trying to navigate through a dream world of finding meaning and purpose is the primary illusion. It is the limited conscious awareness of the individual who believes there is a separation; I am caught in a material world of objectivity where finding a satisfactory outcome to any activity provides meaning and purpose to living. This will never happen; meaning, purpose, and any completion in the material realm are transitory at best. There is no separation, there never was any, and it only seems to be; it never happened, and it will never unhappen. However, it is the ‘what is’ arising from the perspective of one consciousness that holds to one’s reality. But be sure it is an imaginary experience of separation within a dream world. The I am that seems apart from the other, the environment it perceives wakes up or comes into the realization that it was never really the case. It is more accurate to say that the consciousness wakes up to dream that there ever was a person. It is all consciousness, the whole thing, all of it, and it is expressing itself in varying degrees of energy expansion and contraction, projecting a dream world of perfect illusion.
In the state of contracted awareness, the expectation for the individual is that something needs to be added, gained, or done. And it never ends, as does the seeming reality of being a separate person in an independent environment full of individual others. It never ends means that even after self-realization and further development of consciousness into unity, there will still be a faint feeling that the person intimately connected to the unbounded self is continuing their life seemingly separate from others. Just as it will seem, it is only a feeling that free will and doer-ship are still part of the mind/body complex. The dream world continues as a grand illusion, only now it is seen for what it truly is, and the Self is realized in its rightful glory as one unbounded ocean of consciousness in motion.