Sadhus Reminiscences of Raman Maharshi

Author(s): Arunachal Sadhu
Publisher: Ramanasramam Tiruvannamalai

Page 64

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A Sadhu's Reminiscences of Ramana Maharshi
Bhagavan taught that dreaming and the waking experiences were exactly the same. I always found this hard to understand and would often question him on the subject. He would explain that all my questions about dreams only occurred in my waking state, they never occurred in dream. How, then, could they be valid? Everything is just a projection of the mind. But because you find that dreams are only transitory in relation to the waking state you imagine there is a difference between them. This is only apparent, it is not real. Dream is for the person who thinks that he is awake, but actually both dream and waking are quite unreal from the Absolute standpoint. You do not question your state when you are dreaming, it is only questioned by the one who is awake. Is this fair?
Still, while knowing Bhagavan's teaching, that all is only an appearance and a creation of the mind, I found his teaching on dreams hard to understand. For waking seemed to me continuous, going on from day to day. I awoke into the same world each day whereas my dreams were always different, they were distinct. However, Bhagavan would never accept this distinction and repeated that the criticism only arose in the waking state and never in that of dreams. Then I myself had a dream :
I was having an argument with somebody on the subject of dreams and in the course of this I said, “Whatever you say, Bishop Berkeley was right, things are only in the mind, there is no reality outside of that. Things just don't exist; so dream and waking experience must be