We are colour-blind, but we do not know it. Neither can we believe it. We speak of matter and force, but science tells us it is one and the same energy. But we cannot believe it. How can a piece of iron be called force? It seems absurd till we learn to understand. How can God be vice and ugliness and disease? It seems absurd till we understand that vice and ugliness and disease are our interpretation of God. In Reality they do not exist. They are connected with the body, with matter. But matter is a dream. Brahman alone is real. The Spirit alone is. All else is a passing delusion.
There was a sage who proclaimed that life was a dream; it had no existence in reality. Once a number of boys got hold of him and dragged him through the streets. Then they sneered at him and laughed at his distressed condition; and one said, ‘Well, sir, it is all a dream. How do you like the dream?’ The sage answered, ‘Yes it is a dream, but a painful dream.’
While a sage was living in one of the monasteries in India, a strange thing happened. One of the monks was a consumptive and the doctor had ordered that he sleep outside. And so he did. He slept on the porch of the second storey of the building. The country there was infested with tigers. We used to hear them at times. One night it happened that the sick monk heard what he thought was a tiger and, nervous at the idea that the tiger might leap on the porch, he went to awaken another monk, intending to take his bed inside. Now the other monk was half awake when the sick monk entered his room. In that semi-conscious condition he imagined that he saw the sick monk’s ghost. He became thoroughly frightened and called out for help at the top of his voice. The sick monk tried to calm him. He approached him gently and spoke to him and wanted to touch him. But all this the frightened monk took to be the ghost. And the nearer the monk approached, the more frightened he became and the louder he screamed. The sick monk tried to convince him that he was not a ghost but his sick brother. But nothing could convince the deluded monk, until at last he was thoroughly awake. As long as he was semi-conscious, the only reasonable explanation of the sick monk’s presence in his room was the ghost. The idea that it was the real monk seemed utterly absurd to him until he awoke.
As long as we are dreaming this life existence, it is a most real existence, and nothing can convince us that it is not what we think it to be. But even then so long as we insist that all these conditions exist, we cannot reasonably separate them from God. If we say that the world is real, that life is real, and so are health and sickness and good and evil, then, when all this is real, it must come from God.