“Everything Is An Illusion”

Self Realization Series Book Five

Sri Ramana Maharshi

219. Seen in the light of Self-experience all this phenomenal world is mere appearance, like the sky’s deep blueness. What the deluded, body-bound ego perceives ‘out there’ is mind-created, nothing more.

221. The world, like snake in rope, thief in a stump, mirage in air, has no real existence. Seeming to be, mere appearance, is its nature.

230. What is the Self’s self-transformation as the world? A twist of straw appearing as a  snake? Look hard you see no snake at all. There was no transformation, no creation,  none, no world at all.

237. Know that these countless things are pictures in a dream and none is real apart from the beholder. Shun this phantom world of names and forms and dwell in the pure blissful being of Awareness.

240. One forgets the Self and thinks the body is oneself and goes through innumerable births and in the end remembers and remains the Self. Know this only like awakening from a dream wherein one has wandered all over the world.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

274. However long a life may be, it is but a moment and a dream.

279. Your world is transient, changeful. My world is perfect, changeless.

280. In my world nothing happens.

282. Your mistake lies in your belief that you are born. You were never born nor will you ever die, but you believe that you were born at a certain date and place and that a particular body is your own.

285. In reality nothing ever happens.

286. The only thing that can help is to wake up from the dream.

287. Treating everything as a dream liberates. 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.

292. Truth is permanent. The real is changeless. What changes is not real, what is real does not change.

295. The real does not die, the unreal never lived.

309. It is by your consent that the world exists. Withdraw your belief in its reality and it will dissolve like a dream.

312. Do understand that what you think to be the world is your own mind.

313. Once you have seen that you are dreaming, you shall wake up. But you do not see because you want the dream to continue. A day will come when you will long for the ending of the dream, with all your heart and mind, and be willing to pay any price; the price will be dispassion and detachment, the loss of interest in the dream itself.

Sri Vasistha

Neither freedom from sorrow nor realization of one’s real nature is possible as long as the conviction does not arise in one that the world-appearance is unreal.

319. In this world there is nothing, high or low, that time does not destroy.

322. The materiality of the creation is like the castle in the air, an illusory projection of one’s own mind – imaginary.

327. All this is mere imagination or thought. Even now nothing has ever been created; the pure infinite space alone exists.

329. Even as an unreal nightmare produces real results, this world seems to give rise to a sense of reality in a state of ignorance. When true wisdom arises, this unreality vanishes.

334. There is no universe, no distance, no barriers.

348. Some arrive at this understanding soon, others after a very long time.

353. The seed of this world-appearance is ignorance.

369. It is indeed true to say that there are no waves in the ocean; the ocean alone exists.

381. All this creation takes place only as in a dream. This creation is not real; it merely appears to be so.

388. That alone can be regarded as the truth which has always been and which will always be.

390. Nothing in this world is truly enduring.

415. For your spiritual awakening I declare again and again: this world-appearance is like a long dream. Wake up, wake up. Behold the Self which shines like a sun.

478. Neither in the waking state or in dream is there a real world.