Acharya Prashant: What's the relationship between immortality, deathlessness, and knowing the Ātmā as the container of the material and the mental world? Not that they are really distinct, still. So, what's the relation between knowing Ātmā as the container of the world and keeping all other thoughts aside, and immortality? Everything is within that container. Actually, containment is not the right concept here, because containment denotes a boundary within which stuff is happening. Even better than containment is the concept of 'the sky'. Everything is happening within the sky, but the sky is not the boundary. The sky is also the substance that is enabling everything to happen. Sky is not merely a boundary.
What is a container? A container is merely a boundary, and within the container, there is no container. Within the container is stuff distinct from the container. The sky is different from the container because, within the sky, all that you have is sky itself. There is nothing except the sky. Even the stuff that is there, that stuff has skyness in every atom of its existence. There is sky within the stuff; there is sky outside the stuff; there is sky to the left, right, everywhere. Even when we are talking of the atom, if you go to Niels Bohr's experiment, more than 99% of space within the atoms is just sky, empty space; no material there.
The subatomic particles are just so minuscule. Most of the space there is just space, empty; skyness is there. And then, when you move ahead of Bohr, then you realize something even more surprising that the one person part that appeared to be particulate or material, even that is just sky, just sky.
Material really does not exist. It is just the sky, and within the sky you have fields. But field is not material as such. The field does not stand in an absence of the sky. You come to realize that field is rather a function of the sky. So, all that you have is the sky and the function of the sky. All that you have is sky and skyness. All that you have is either the sky or skyness.
