THINK ON THIS:

If you agree with modern science and medicine, we do not directly know either our bodies or our world. The world of objects is external to our bodies, and we only know of it through our senses.

Hearing, taste, touch, sound, smell, and sight are received data through the sensors of tongue, skin, ears, nose, and eyes, which fire neurons which the brain then turns into recognized patterns, objects, people, music, etc., which we call experience.

In this way, we do not know the world, we know of the world, through our senses and how our brains interpret it. The sense world is not the world.

In this way we can say our world is illusory, but convenient for functioning, and also, all that there is is Consciousness, or experience, because we cannot directly know those things outside of us as they are in themselves. It does not even make much sense to say how the world is in itself, as it can only be known through our Consciousness.

Even our bodies are such, the inner senses too are but representations by way of electrical neural patterns interpreted, of what are bodies are from the inside. We only know of it through our Consciousness.

Thus all that we know, from inside to outside directly, is experience, or Consciousness. The universe we inhabit, and even our bodies, are created by it.

All else depends on our prior existence, for its existence IN OUR WORLD.

At this point we have to make an assumption that the other people we experience in our world, are they "real" and separate, or do they just exist as our creation? In either case, we are speculating.

Even the scientific notion that there is a world external to our bodies is a speculation. It is also an assumption to say, Everything is Consciousness.

On the other hand, I cannot say, "I created the world," for I, Ed Muzika, had nothing to do with its creation. Impersonal processes, chemical and neurological, created Consciousness, and in it our representations of the world and our bodies are created (or found) through a further developmental process. It is those same developmental processes within Consciousness that results in the creation of the I sensation and later, the I-thought. Up until then, everything is just impersonal processing, and out of it finally comes the person, the I Am as a feeling localized in Consciousness, when if followed, accepted, and loved, merges back into Consciousness, until we realize, consciously, that Everything is Consciousness, as a spiritual revelation.

All is philosophy, and philosophies are theoretic knowledge that have emotional consequences: they make us feel one way or another, give us peace or give us doubts. Kashmir Shaivism has one philosophy about all this, Advaita Vedanta entirely different, Christianity and Sufism entirely different. They have entirely different "feels," and far different emphases, amd much has do do with their philosophical underpinnings.

A Zen master would ask you a question, such as, "Is the cup real?," and whatever answer you give, he'd cuff you in the head for thinking, fill the cup with tea, and hand it to you, as he has no time for confusion or useless speculation.