Your body slept in bed — yet in the dream you were heading to work. So who was asleep?
Your body slept in bed — yet in the dream you were heading to work. So who was asleep?
Listen to the lecture
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"The body you identified with so strongly lies perfectly still on the bed. Yet you walk, you talk, you hurry somewhere. Did you ever dream that you went to work?"
Right now, awake, you feel it almost instinctively: "I am this body of flesh." But look what happens at night. You're tired, you lie down, you drift off — and now, in the dream, you're walking somewhere, hurrying to work. And that very body you clung to so tightly lies still on the bed. Śrī Prem Prayojan Prabhu asks the hall directly: raise your hand — did you ever dream that you went to work? Here's the point: whatever state we're in, we're completely convinced it's the real one. In the dream you never doubt it's real; awake, you never doubt "I am the body." But if at night your consciousness can take you for someone else so convincingly, its daytime certainty — "I am the body" — is no proof either.
Tonight, falling asleep, ask: who walks in the dream while the body lies still?