ALL THIS IS A DREAM

 
Rest assured, I definitely know from my living experience that God is the one and only reality, and that all else is illusion. All that you see and hear at this moment — this hall, our being in each other's presence, these explanations which I give and you hear, and even my incarnation as the Avatar — all this is a dream. Every night you go to sleep and have different kinds of dreams, yet every morning you wake up to experience anew the same old dream that you have been dreaming since your birth into your present life in illusion.

You will say, 'Baba, we are wide awake; we actually see you sitting before us; we can and do follow what you are explaining to us.' But you will admit that you would say the same thing to me if, in a dream, you found that you were near me and heard me telling you that all you felt, saw and heard was a dream.

As long as you do not wake up from a dream, you are dream-bound to feel it to be stark reality. A dream becomes a dream only when you wake up; only then do you tell others that the life you lived in the dream was just a dream. Good or bad, happy or unhappy, in reality the dream is then recognized as having been absolutely nothing.

Therefore I repeat that, although you are now sitting before me and hearing me, you are not really awake. You are actually sleeping and dreaming. I say this because I am simultaneously awake in the real sense and yet dreaming — with one and all — the dreams which all dream.

All your pleasures and difficulties, your feelings of happiness and misery, your presence here and your listening to these explanations, all are nothing but a vacant dream on your part and mine. There is this one difference: I also consciously know the dream to be a dream, while you feel that you are awake.

When you really wake up you will know at once that what you felt to be wakefulness was just dreaming. Then you will realize that you and I are and always have been one in reality. All else will then disappear, just as your ordinary dreams disappear on waking. Then they not only cease to exist, but they are found never to have really existed.

From birth to death you keep on growing. First you are young; then you grow old and die without knowing or caring from whence you came or whither you go. From 'Who am I?' to 'I am God' is just one long, long dream covering ages and ages in time. But this too is found never to have existed in the eternity and infinitude of your own existence, at the moment you realize your real self, or God.