This consummation is reached, the Atmic awareness is won through the grace of Brahman. Wherein is the Atma to be sought? Where does the Atma reside? How can one know the Atman? Adoring the apparently consciousness-less things too as manifestations of the Sovereign Consciousness or Atma helps the process. The Atma Principle can be genuinely understood only by seekers who are grounded in the formless, attributeless Brahman. But, even the Saguna embodiment has the Atmic Reality in full measure. There are many examples to illustrate this Truth. Brahma Vidya is another name for understanding and experiencing the Atma as the Brahman, the Individual as the Universal.

Every one has the right to Brahma Vidya. And, every man passes through four stages in this search, every day of his life. They are, according to the Veda the waking stage, the dream stage, the deep sleep stage and the Thuriya or the fourth. These are demarcated as stages or even steps. In the first stage, one is awake to the objective world and is oriented outwards. Objects in the Universe are seen by the eye; sounds are heard; the senses are able to smell and taste and touch. Life is lived to the fullest in contact with society.
The five sense organs of perception, the five organs of action, the five pranas or vital airs. The four internal instruments are:

• The Mind
• The buddhi or faculty of discrimination.
• The level of Consciousness, and
• The ego-sense.

These nineteen means of contact and impact provide man during the waking stage the experience of grief and joy, gain and loss, success and failures in their gross forms. Since one is identified with the gross body complex at this stage, the experiences too are gross.

The region of dream is different. There the self is in-faced, Antharmukha. Reactions, responses and experiences are all self-contained. They do not belong to the area outside of oneself. There may be ten others sleeping in the same room; still, each one has his own dream. One's dream experience has no relation to that of anyone else. Each is disturbed or delighted by his own dream only. The dreamer is unaffected by outer circumstances. In fact, the external world is beyond one's consciousness. During the dream stage, one creates a world out of one's mind and dwells in the experiences it provides. Though the objects perceived are imaginary, the feelings and emotions like joy and grief, love and fear are as real as in the waking stage. The nineteen instruments of contact and impact are present even during the dream. They do not act materially or physically; they operate only through the mind, for the mind has a luminosity that produces the pictures. This is the reason why it is designated as Taijasa (from Tejas, enables one to formulate etc.,). The Tejas enables one to formulate and design any form, the sound, the taste etc., it decides upon. The dream state is the second step or stage in the acquisition by the self of its own awareness.