Still dreaming.

When we all fall asleep, where do we go? Billie asks.

Nisargadatta replies,
No sleep, no waking. We are only dreaming…

We dream that we are awake, we dream that we are asleep. The three states — dreaming, sleeping, waking — are only varieties of the dream state. As long as you give reality to dreams, you are their slave. By imagining that you are born as so-and-so, you become a slave to the so-and-so. In fact, we have no history, we are not a process, we do not develop, nor decay. See all as a dream and stay out of it.

Billie: Basically people just do a lot of the same shit I do, and I’m just like, “Can you not?” I already exist.

Nisarga: Get rid of all ideas about yourself. Discover all that you are not — body, feelings, thoughts, time, space, this or that — nothing, concrete or abstract, which you perceive can be you. The very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive. Fear not, desire not, observe the actual, as and when it happens.

Billie: No desires? I had a dream I got everything I wanted. And I did.

Nisarga: Nothing the mind can visualise and want is of much value.

The real world is beyond the mind; we see it through the net of our desires, divided into pleasure and pain, right and wrong, inner and outer. To see the universe as it is, you must step beyond the net. It is not hard to do so, for the net is full of holes.

Billie: It is! When I was four, I wrote a song about falling into a black hole.

Nisarga: You are confused, because you believe that you are a person in the world, not the world in you. Who came first — you or your parents? You imagine that you were born at a certain time and place, that you have a father and a mother, a body and a name. This is your calamity! When you believe yourself to be a person, you see persons everywhere. In reality there are no persons, only threads of memories and habits.

Billie: People have so much going on in their heads. I'm like, If you could write a song, you’d feel so much better! I had a period in my life where I decided that I would never be bored again and that, if I had any free time at all, I would make plans, and I would always be doing things.

Nisarga: Time, space, causation are mental categories, arising and subsiding with the mind. Whatever is time bound is momentary and has no reality. All you need is to keep quietly alert, enquiring into the real nature of yourself. This is the only way to peace. The world you can perceive is a very small world indeed. And it is entirely private. Take it to be a dream and be done with it.