“Ajata means ‘non-creation,’” David Godman has written. It is a philosophical or experiential standpoint that declares or knows that neither the physical world nor the person in it have ever been created.

“Questions about the liberation or bondage of persons are therefore inadmissible and hypothetical since the persons themselves do not really exist. They are all a complete fiction brought about by the power of defective imagination.”

Godman adds: “When one…knows the truth of ajata by direct experience…such a one is sahaja nishta [experiencing sahaja].”

Godman: “This particular standpoint…known as ajata or non-becoming…was the only teaching that Ramana taught from his own experience.”

As Muruganar, one of Ramana’s most faithful disciples has said, “We have heard him say that his true teaching, firmly based on his experience, is ajata.”

Regarding such teachings, Godman has written, “Almost all his ideas were radical refutations of the concepts of physical reality that most people cherish.”

Ramana has said:

That alone is real…which is eternal and unchanging. Was (the world) ever seen without the aid of the mind? In deep sleep, there is neither mind nor world. When awake, there is the mind and there is the world. What does this invariable concomitance mean? You are familiar with the principles of inductive logic, which are considered the very basis of scientific investigation. Why do you not decide this question of the reality of the world in the light of those accepted principles of logic?

He adds:

There is no alternative for you but to accept the world as unreal if you are seeking the truth and the truth alone.

Ramana notes:

A dream as a dream does not permit you to doubt its reality. It is the same in the waking state, for you are unable to doubt the reality of the world which you see while you are awake. How can the mind, which has itself created the world, accept it as unreal? That is the significance of the comparison made between the world of the waking state and the dream world. Both are creations of the mind and, so long as the mind is engrossed in either, it finds itself unable to deny their reality. It cannot deny the reality of the dream world while it is dreaming and it cannot deny the reality of the waking world while it is awake.

Adding:

If, on the contrary, you completely withdraw your mind from the world…you will find the world of which you are now aware is just as unreal as the world in which you lived in your dream… While you are dreaming, the dream was a perfectly integrated whole. That is to say, if you felt thirsty in a dream, the illusory drinking of illusory water quenched your illusory thirst. But all this was real and not illusory to you so long as you did not know that the dream itself was illusory. Similarly with the waking world…

Only if there is creation do we have to explain how it came about… Whatever you see happening in the waking state happens only to the knower, and since the knower is unreal, nothing in fact ever happens.