Stop clinging to the unreal. Love what is real.

What do you love the most?

- Your ego. Your separate existence that makes you experience the multifarious world

- The world that presents itself before you. It is what you exist for. It provides everything you need

- Your wife/ husband, children, parents, family members, friends and relatives. You cannot do without them

- Your home, assets, car, and all that you have accumulated and also all that you long for

- Your work and profession because it keeps you occupied and feeds you

- Your bank balance. It provides you security and enables you to acquire more

- Your pet peeves, your hurt, your anger, your fantasies, your internal relationship with the world.

Often you do not love yourself but find delight in all of the above. You are totally engrossed in them. You do not know of anything beyond them.

All of the above are temporary. Birth has enabled you to experience all of them. Death, that is inevitable, will take them away from you.

There are people who will not let go of the world even at the point of death. They will be disturbed that an extra light is on and ask others to switch it off. The majority are so much taken up with the world that they stick on to the world even after death, refusing the portal that opens up for them. These categories are called baddha jiva or entrapped beings. They have eons of birth before them before the yearning for liberation may well up and save them from the cycle of birth and death.

What will remain after you die? Only the awareness and the impressions of past lives that will decide your next. As you again fall to be born again you are gripped with great fear and anxieties. The Buddhist bardos talk of eternal crying among those who have to once again return to the earth and face the unknown.

So remain in the awareness. Even as you live in the world, constantly remind yourself that life is temporary and death may come at any time. It is said that life is like a water drop on a slippery petal of the lotus flower. It can drop off at any moment.

Next contemplate on the illusory nature of things. Everything that you experience through the senses and think to be real is unreal. Yes, you read that right. Everything. Every single thing.

Then what is real? The substratum. The motion picture projected on the screen appears so very real, but is not. What is real is the screen on which it plays out.

You are that screen. Whatever movie is being projected, it does not affect the real you that is permanent and indestructible. It is Brahman. Sat-Chid-Ananda. Always existing, intelligent, and full of bliss. Think of what you lose if you ignore the real you and embrace the illusion. You ignore permanent bliss and fall for permanent pain.

Identify with Brahman for that is your real Self. Identify less and less with your ego, body, and the world you are in. Identify more and more with the ever present substratum.

Die before you die.

There are no two. There is only one. You are that one. Your ignorance makes you feel that you are a separate entity and you are different from all that you see.

In reality the witness, the act of witnessing, and the object being witnessed are one. The light that illumines alone exists. The rest are a play of reflections and shadows.

Why bother when you alone exist? When you are the indestructible substratum. Just stop dreaming. If you seek everything stop looking outside and turn your gaze within.

The fact is you were never born and if you get things right and achieve the correct wisdom, you are not going to be affected by death. In sleep you lose yourself, you dream of another world, and you wake up to find it was a dream. Your present existence is no different. You are dreaming.

Know that you are dreaming. Know that the world is an illusion. Know that you are Brahman. You are already liberated but you do not know it. You have mistaken the rope for a snake, the shadow for a thief. You only need to correct your perception.

Know all of this and remain in this world like a witness. The world will automatically make you do what you have come to do. You cannot escape it. But if you do not identify with what is happening, or take credit for what you do then nothing can trap you and you remain free.

The screen does not react to what is projected on it. It is always free.

Stop clinging to the unreal. Love what is real.