Q: We see pain in the world. A man is hungry. It is a physical reality, and as such, it is very real to him. Are we to call
it a dream and remain unmoved by his pain?
A: From the point of view of jnana or the reality, the pain you speak of is certainly a dream, as is the world of which
the pain is an infinitesimal part. In the dream also you yourself feel hunger.
You see others suffering hunger. You feed yourself and, moved by pity, feed the others that you find suffering from
hunger. So long as the dream lasts, all those hunger pains are quite as real as you now think the pain you see in the
world to be. It is only when you wake up that you discover that the pain in the dream was unreal. You might have
eaten to the full and gone to sleep. You dream that you work hard and long in the hot sun all day, are tired and hungry
and want to eat a lot.
Then you get up and find your stomach is full and you have not stirred out of your bed. But all this is not to say that
while you are in the dream you can act as if the pain you feel there is not real. The hunger in the dream has to be
assuaged by the food in the dream. The fellow beings you found so hungry in the dream had to be provided with food
in that dream. You can never mix up the two states, the dream and the waking state. Till you reach the state of jnana
and thus wake out of this maya, you must do social service by relieving suffering whenever you see it. But even then
you must do it, as we are told, without ahamkara, that is without the sense ‘I am the doer’, but feeling, ‘I am the
Lord’s tool.’ Similarly one must not be conceited and think, ‘I am helping a man below me. He needs help. I am in a
position to help. I am superior and he inferior.’ You must help the man as a means of worshipping God in that man.
All such service too is for you the Self, not for anybody else. You are not helping anybody else, but only yourself.
Be As You Are
edited by David Godwin
published by Penguin Arkana
1985
pp 212
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