That God is within me in every fibre of my being is far more intimate a feeling than that He is divorced from me as an absolute tyrant testing me through my earthly travail or even that He is abiding in some vegetative heaven while I serve His sentence in penitence of my ancient crime of partaking of the proverbial apple at the behest of my partner. These are lower conceptions and the best way out of this predicament is to once remember that ages ago in India the seers and sages had discovered that God has not created the world of phenomena but has Himself manifested as the multifarious life-forms and is, thus, me as well. Here the great departure takes place from other localised religions which stress on separation between God and man and weave wonderful stories to establish the absent or lost connection between the Creator and the highest of His creation, man. The Vedanta integrates our vision of God and man, and deifies the latter as the terrestrial manifestation of the former, a phenomenal being in appearance only but in essence the Absolute Reality, the substratum of phenomena, the very ground of existence. So long as ignorance persists of one's identity, one remains in the trall of Maya and is captive of one's senses. But when knowledge dawns, the fetters fall and man is released unto the infinitude of freedom which is his true domain and abides in Self-existence. He then becomes the 'monarch of all he surveys' and dissociates himself from relativity. In every sense he senses himself as the God of the universe which he envisions as his pale shadow, rising, persisting and perishing in him. This is the great difference between the dualistic Semitic religions and the Advaita Vedanta of India.
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