Awakening: The Concept

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 you’re 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.

Every individual here and elsewhere is the same one, ever-indivisible God. I say this because I am responsible°° for the whole creation. If I am not here, then not only will you not be here, but the whole of creation with all its gross, subtle and mental spheres will not be here. In short, everything exists because I exist.

In your case also, the whole of creation exists because you exist. When you sleep soundly, then for you, everything– body, mind, world and the universe vanishes, and is absorbed in your sound sleep state– the most-original, beyond-beyond state of God. Then your consciousness, tired of focusing on the illusion of duality, is at rest within you!

After being refreshed in the most-original beyond-beyond state of God, your consciousness plunges you first into the dreams-in-sleep and then you wake up once again within the dream of creation. This ‘dream of creation’ emanates again and again from you and for you.

This process of repetitive sleeping-dreaming-awakening is a result of your inability to wake up in your sound-sleep state (i.e., conscious union with God). Therefore, alternately you remain asleep or keep dreaming either the dreams in sleep or the dream of creation. 

It is only when you wake up in the true sense (God-realization) that you find that you alone (God) exist, and that all else is nothing. Only after cycles and cycles of time can one attain one’s own ‘conscious state of God’ and find that one’s infinite consciousness is eternally free of all illusion of duality.