Maharshi's Gospel - 81

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D. Is then the world nothing better than a dream?

 

 

Maharshi:

 

What is wrong with the sense of reality you have while you are dreaming?

You may be dreaming of something quite impossible, for instance, of

having a happy chat with a dead person. Just for a moment you may doubt

in the dream, saying to yourself, "Was he not dead?" But somehow your mind

reconciles itself to the dream vision, and the person is as good as alive

for the purposes of the dream. In other words, the dream as a dream does

not permit you to doubt its reality. Even so, you are unable to doubt the reality

of the world of your wakeful experience. How can the mind which has itself

created the world accept it as unreal? That is the significance of the comparison

made between the world of wakeful experience and the dream world.

Both are but creations of the mind, and so long as the mind is engrossed in either,

it finds itself unable to deny the reality of the dream world while dreaming and

of the waking world while awake. If, on the contrary, you withdraw your mind

completely from the world and turn it within and abide thus, that is, if you keep

awake always to the Self, which is the substratum of all experience, you will

find the world, of which alone you are aware, just as unreal as the as the world

in which you lived your dream.