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of a fountain, and in your dream you approach the fountain and drink to your heart's content. No need to interrupt your sleep! Not until you wake up in the morning do you discover that the water was no water, the fountain was no fountain, and there was no quenching of your thirst: it was all illusion. But only after waking up do you come to know this. The sleep in the night continued undisturbed; mind found the substitute to keep it so.
Mind creates substitutes in life too, so that our sleep in life itself is not disturbed. If you are to know God, your sleep will be disturbed; it will come to an end. And we have a great vested interest in our sleep, because for lives upon lives we have treasured and cultivated only sleep, that is our only creation. And up to this very day our family, wife, friends, children, money and prestige are all part of our slumber. The moment our sleep ends, all this will disappear too. The whole edifice will disintegrate. If sleep ends, this whole world that we have thought as our world and all we have seen as ours, will disappear. When we wake up in the morning we cannot find the friends who inhabited our dreams. When we wake up in the morning we cannot find the palaces that crowded our dreams. After waking up, there is no way to find the treasures that were ours in the dream; they are gone, gone for ever.
All this we have created in our dream; hence the fear that the dream may be broken, our sleep may be broken. So we live an unconscious life. The name for this unconsciousness is mind. And wherever there is any fear of the sleep being broken, mind immediately creates a substitute. In knowing God our sleep will end, but in knowing the word god, there is no cause for our slumber to end. On the contrary, our sleep deepens and is fortified. If we go to seek God, the world will disappear. By reciting the word God, we make God also a part of the world.
This is why we build mosques and temples and gurudwaras. We construct the churches and temples next to our shops and homes in order to make them a part of the world. Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, Sikhs, Jainas... we add these religious differences to our worldly turbulence
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