Mahamantra - Humming meditation that energizes the anahata chakra and taught as part of Nithyananda's Life Bliss Programs. Koans - Riddles given as techniques in Zen to aid Self Realization. Upanishad – Literally means, sitting at the feet of the master. Reality as dream You may wonder, How is it that every day when I come back to the waking state, I see the same world but every night when I go back to the dream state, I don't see the same world? So, can this be used as a scale? With this can we say that this waking-state world is real? Let us analyze one night's dream. For example, let us say that you go to sleep on the night of the fourteenth, and on the morning of the fifteenth, you wake up.

You sleep for around ten hours. I am sure many of you have had experiences of having lived around ten to twenty years of your life in one night's dream, in just ten hours time. Perhaps the dream starts in your college days and moves slowly, step by step, up to your marriage, your having a son, your son's marriage, etc. In this way, you live even twenty years of your life in just one night's dream, am I right? If you have experienced this at least once, you can follow very closely what I am going to present now. You see, while sleeping, we go through the dream state and the deep sleep state. Maybe for half an hour, you fall into the deep sleep state.

Then you go to the dream state and have some dreams. Again you fall back into the deep sleep state for perhaps twenty minutes, and then once again, you come back to the dream state. In this way you keep moving from the dream state to the deep sleep state and back. Understand: in one night, you dream that you have lived twenty years of your life. In the first episode of your dream, you are in college. In the second episode, when you come back to the dream state after a gap of deep sleep, you are getting married. In the third dream episode, you have a son. Maybe in the fourth episode, you see your son getting married. An important thing you need to understand: when you fall into the deep sleep state and then come back to the dream state, and then repeat this process, in these different episodes, you do see the same world even in your dream state.

Am I right? Sometimes you do see the same world even in the dream state. Understand, it is a very subtle point, a very subtle understanding. If you can catch this, it will lead to very great clarity, which can really revolutionize the way in which you think about your life, the way in which you try to solve the problems of your life. Imagine a man is dreaming. In the dream he sees a tiger chasing him and he starts shouting, Oh, a tiger is chasing me! Save me, save me! His wife is sleeping next to him. She wakes up and sees the husband shouting! The wife is confused, What am I supposed to do? She just needs to tell him, Hey, wake up! Instead of that, if she tries to supply some weapon to kill the tiger in the dream, what will happen? He may kill himself or he may kill her! Any other solution she may try to find will only lead to more problems, more difficulties.

All the husband needs to do is wake up. If you understand these basic things, suddenly you will see that your very decision-making is revolutionized. The cognitive shift happens in you. The way in which you think and the way in which you make decisions, the way in which you find solutions for your problems, will be entirely different. You will start working towards the right solutions. When you are dreaming, in a span of ten hours, you can easily live twenty years. You fall into deep sleep and come back to the dream state many times. Whenever you come back to the dream state from deep sleep, even though there was a break from the last dream, you see the same world. So, you have to understand clearly that just seeing the same world after the break in the dream state cannot be the quality to define it as reality.

Only when you wake up from sleep, do you realize you have lived twenty years of your life in a mere ten hours. In the same way, only when you wake up from this waking dream in which you are living now, suddenly you will realize you have dreamt maybe ninety years of your life in a few hours! This life in the waking state may be another long dream! When you are in a dream, you think the dream is reality. Where you are, that is reality for that moment. There is no other scale. In the dream you can never imagine, It is a dream. In the reality, you can never think, It is one more dream. When you come out of the dream, the dream looks like a dream.

But when you are in the dream itself, it will not look like a dream.