The way of the bird

Looking back on it, you never believe that the dream that you had last night was true,
even though while that dream was going on, you never imagined that it was not true. You
readily acknowledge that all the events of the dream were going on while you, yourself,
were sleeping in your bed. The whole thing appeared but you were not really involved in
it at all.
This waking state is also a dream and it is not true, for exactly the same reasons.
Dreaming is a spontaneous process that creates a world out of the material springing forth
from the mind. How is this waking dream different from the sleeping dream? It goes on
by itself. The Self never makes any comment about it.
3.7 "I am not doing anything at all."
We are so used to thinking of "I" as the doer, as in "I am reading," "I am sitting," "I am
trying to understand," that a statement such as this one seems to make no sense at all.
However, Maharaj was not speaking from the point of view of an individual "I.," or
person, but from the point of view of the Self; or what he sometimes called "I without I."
That Self is the real subject of the first-person pronoun. Whenever you say "I," you are
referring to that ocean of pure consciousness, whether you know it or not. In the state of
ignorance, however, "I" means the imaginary individual "doer" and you remain asleep to
yourself as reality. In fact, "I" is a sacred word, just as "Self" is a sacred word. The ocean
does not "do" anything to create the waves that appear on its surface, neither does the
dreamer do anything to create the dream that appears.
3.8 "Nothing is true. In a dream, I've seen, but I've not seen."
In a dream, something really quite miraculous occurs; you see with closed eyes! When
you awake, however, the mystery is solved, and you dismiss the whole business-it was
just a dream. Everything that you saw in the dream was only a projection of the mind on
the screen of awareness. Awareness itself did not participate in the dream events but it
provided the background for the images to appear. On awakening from sleep, the images
and objects of the waking state displace those of the dream state. The dream disappears.
What has happened to awareness? Nothing has happened to it. It continues to provide the
same, unchanging background for whatever happens in the waking state. Later, when you
go to sleep at night, the dream world starts up again, displacing the waking state.
Awareness is not affected by this change either but remains as the background. "Seeing"
occurs, both in the dream state and in the waking state, but "I," the awareness, does not
see anything at all.
3.9 "Don't be an ant, be a lion, and say "No death for me!"
Death is really only a concept. It has power because we give power to it. As long as we
take ourselves to be small and insignificant individuals, we are subject to the fear of
death. Our view of life is mistaken. We imagine ourselves to be subject to appearance
and disappearance and we forget that for something to appear and disappear, a changeless
background is necessary. Just as a river flowing to the sea is water when it begins as a