@lobotomite @georgia @NothingToSeeHere advaita vedanta is its own thing, in my opinion. a lot of modern hinduism is influenced by it but the old indo-aryan worldview would have found most of its premises alien.
it is worth reading shankaracharya's work to understand the difference between "there exists objective truth which only ever reveals itself voluntarily" and "there is no point in arguing."
how i'd make sense of it is to talk about māyā, the concept of illusion. everything you consider real exists ultimately only with the permission of capital-T Truth. therefore, it is an illusion, and you and the form you inhabit are no less illusory than a fictional character.
your dharm, your purpose in life if you will, is part of the illusion, like a quest in a video game. you are to play the game, apprehend the true nature of your quest, and fulfill it. only by doing this over and over will you escape the cycle of dying and being reborn into the world, attaining moksh i.e. liberation.
that being said, i find a lot of vedantic cosmology to be somewhat copium. my understanding of the pantheon is that it is an assortment of blood-heroes and cosmic beings, daevas (i use the zoroastrian spelling) and asuras. my understanding of karma is that it is the action axiom. i discount basically everything posterior to and including many parts of the first three vedas; there are parts of shinto and germanic beliefs i hold more firmly than the slop that passes for hinduism today. i don't even tend to use the word "hindu," because it actually isn't a word. it's a persian word for muslim residents of india. "we" (i hate to be associated with these uncultured sorts) somehow "reclaimed" it like niggers reclaiming "nigga". it means nothing and is merely a vector of state subversion. most indians don't even know that "hindu" is a persian word meaning persian-descended muslim resident of the lands east of the river hind (indus in english, sindh in most ia languages). even most of the ones that do know and agree with me that it's a silly word are retarded because they think they can paper over the problem by s/hindu/sanatan/g which is a fucking stupid thing to think. the word sanatan means eternal, and appears exactly once in some late-bramhin slopfest quasisacred text. these idiots want to multiply the importance of a clearly pointless throwaway line in some bullshit uninspired work instead of just calling themselves what they ought to consider themselves: correct, unlike everybody else, who is incorrect.