Shankara on the Deeper Levels

The circumstance which prevents man from realizing his own true nature as pure Consciousness is attachment to the forms set up by nescience, and the deeply rooted habit of taking them for real.

The purpose of all religious practices, when viewed in the context of the path to liberation, is to weaken the hold of the illusory forms by developing a counter-awareness of deeper levels of reality hidden beneath the more superficial forms.

These ‘deeper levels’ of reality are themselves ultimately illusory from the very fact of being accessible to the understanding and will of man. They are, according to the rather drastic formula of Śaṅkara’s Commentary on Gauḍapāda’s Kārikā II.4, ‘false because seen’. 

Nevertheless, the contemplation of the Lord as manifest under illusory forms relieves the mind of its burden of attachment to the grosser and more oppressive phases of the world-appearance, in particular to the objects of crude sense-enjoyment. Thus it prepares the soul for the final rejection of all forms as illusory,

~A J Alston from 'Shankara on the Creation', p.82