Ashtavakra Gita

Only to one who thinks of the self as separate from the whole does birth and death, the world and its dissolution, have any reality at all

The verse makes birth, death, and cosmic dissolution conditional on a specific belief, that the self is a separate part of a whole, rather than denying them outright.

This verse, closing chapter 5's argument, does something logically distinct from simply asserting that birth and death are illusions: it makes their reality conditional on a specific prior belief, that the self is a separate part of some larger whole rather than identical with the whole itself. For someone who has not examined or dropped that premise, birth, death, and even the periodic dissolution of the universe described in Indian cosmology are entirely real categories with real consequences, and the Gita does not ask such a person to pretend otherwise. But for one who has recognized the self as the undivided whole rather than a fragment within it, those categories lose their applicability, not because reality changed but because the premise generating their meaning was removed. This is characteristic of the Gita's method throughout, tracing experience, bondage, the world, birth and death, back to whatever the perceiver currently believes about their own boundary or lack of one.

Ashtavakra Gita