When you understand that everything that passes through your mind is a thought or an idea, which is therefore an illusion, you are ready for the ultimate discovery.
The ultimate discovery is that life, the universe, human life is nothing but a dream, a phantom, an illusion, It is like the motion picture – it has no reality in itself. It is just a mental picture passing through your consciousness. The whole world that exists around you has the same value as the dream you dreamt of last night – nothing more. When you awoke you knew it was a dream, but until you awoke, to you it was reality.
It seems so absurd to say that this world which seems so solid, so real, is really dream stuff, and yet that sense of the dream-character of the Universe and of human life is easily proven. Take the whole of your life up until this afternoon. Where is it? Where has it gone? It has gone into memory. It has become a memory.
Those years when you live so intensely and passionately; where are they now? They are just a memory. But what is memory? A memory is a simple thought – an idea in your mind; it is no more than that, a mental picture.
If all your past years have been a passing show of transient thoughts, what of your future years, and the present in which you are living now? Will that not be the same, because the present will become the past and the future the past; so, since the past, present and future constitute the whole of your existence, what is left of your life? It is nothing more than a series of thoughts which come and go; from the highest standpoint, they are illusory.
