The image begins from immediate location and expands outward from room and street to country, planet, galaxy, and universe.
At every scale, the point is the same: whatever is known, perceived, or thought of is what we call “the world.”
The world is available only through the chain of sensation, perception, mental processing, and understanding.
Outer experience, dreams, memory, and imagination are all known only as appearances in the mind.
Vedanta does not deny the world, but it refuses to treat it as something independently available outside awareness.
The world is understood as an appearance in consciousness, dependent on mind for its experienced form and inseparable from the knower to whom it appears.