Shri Nathji postulated with irrefutable logic that the world was a dream. This is how he explained it:
“We live in time. There are three parts into which time can be divided. The Past, the Present and the Future. Do we exist in the Past? No. The Past has gone. It is like a dream.
“Do we exist in the Future? No it has not come. We can only dream about it. Therefore, the Future, too, is a dream.
“What is the Present? The Present is that moment of time in which the Future is converting itself into the Past. Thus the Present is made of the Future and the Past.
“So, if the Future is a dream, and the Past is a dream, that, which they give rise to–the Present– must also be a dream! Therefore this world is no more than dream.
“What we call the real world could be a dream, and what we call death, could be an awakening from this dream of life.
“Shri Babaji Maharaj had frequently said:
Khaab kaa kaasaa gadaayi taajeshaahi ek hai
Ye tannazul, ye tarraki dil teraa baihlaaye kyon
The crown and the begging bowl of thy dream are the same
Let this rise and fall not affect thy heart in any way
“If we were to go on sleeping and never wake up, the dream world would become the only reality we would know.
“When we are dreaming, the mountains and rivers and people of the dream appear to be very real to us. We run with fear when a tiger runs after us and do not say, ‘Why should I run? This is merely the tiger of a dream!’
“Thus, a dream is very real for as long as it lasts. As a matter of a fact, a dream world is so real that it makes us forget the fact that we are sleeping in our beds at that time.
“No sleeping man ever says, ‘O This is a dream, I am asleep in bed’. Thus the dream world appears so real that it makes us forget the world of the wakeful state.
“When does the dream world become unreal? Only when we wake up. The moment we wake up, the dream world vanishes. So why is a dream a dream? Because it vanishes in the wakeful state.
“However we can also say that the world of the wakeful state is also a dream because it vanishes in sleep!
“In a sense, the dream world is more real than the world of the wakeful state. This is so because in a dream world we are not aware of the world of the wakeful state. The dream world makes us forget the fact that we are actually sleeping in our beds in the real world. The recollection of the world of the wakeful state does not exist.
“But in the wakeful state the recollection of the dream world still lingers on!
“What we describe as the world of solid matter around us vanishes completely in sleep. And the dream world comes before us with rivers and mountains and people which all appear to be made of a solid matter of their own.
“If a person were to sleep for twelve hours every day, and experience a dream that continues day after day, then the dream would become a reality to him every time that he slept. He would then not be able to say which is real – the twelve hours of his dream or the twelve hours of his wakeful state. The dream world and the world of the wakeful state would both become equally real and it would be difficult to say which was the real world and which was the dream world.
“In deep sleep, both the worlds – that of the wakeful state and that of dreams– vanish. We are not aware of anything, but we are there, because when we awaken from the deep sleep we say: ‘We slept soundly!’ Thus we exist outside of the world of the wakeful state as well as the world of dreams.
What we call death may just be the soul waking up from these states into a new world. Death is an awakening from the dreams of life.