Bhagavan Sri Ramana

“Whatever we experience in a dream appears to us to be real only so longas we are experiencing that dream. When we wake up and consider what wehad experienced, we understand clearly and without any doubt that it was allunreal, being merely a figment of our imagination.Likewise, all that we experience in this so-called waking state appears tous to be real only so long as we are experiencing this state. When we wakeup into our real waking state, which is the non-dual state of perfectly clearself-consciousness or self-knowledge, we will discover that all the dualitythat we are now experiencing in our present state of self-ignorance is asunreal as all the duality that we experienced in our dream, being nothing buta mere figment of our own imagination.”

“When our mind appears, the world appears along with it. The appearanceof the world depends upon the appearance of our mind. But our mind cannotstand alone without a world. Whenever our mind appears, it does so byattaching itself to a physical body, which it mistakes to be itself. The bodywhich we mistake to be ourself is a part of the world, but due to ouridentification of that one particular body as ‘I’, we create an artificialdistinction between what we imagine to be ourself and what we imagine tobe other than ourself.This false distinction is created by our mind, but without it our mindcannot stand. Though the world is its own imaginary creation, our mindcannot imagine a world without simultaneously imagining itself to be aparticular body in that world.”