Question: Guru, if you tell us something in a dream, how do we know if it is true?

Sri Chinmoy: You will know whether it is true or not just by your meditation. If I tell you to do something in a dream, first of all you have to know whether it is actually I who have said it. Sometimes it happens that mentally you create a figure of me. No hostile force can take my form, but imagination is very strong in my disciples. You create from your own wishful thinking a being with my face, my body. Like a painter, you create me and you make yourself feel that it is I who have said certain things. If you create that kind of Guru with your wishful thinking, it is not really I who am giving you instruction.

But if you have meditated and prayed during the day, and at night I just appeared to you without your expecting me and gave you a message, and if your heart is thrilled, then you will know that it is I. If you are ready to jump out of bed with the capacity and inspiration of a lion, then you will know that I have given the message to you. Even if I scold you in a dream, you will be thrilled, although if I scold you in the outer plane, you may feel sorry or depressed. But the thrill has to be in the heart, not in the mind or the vital. If you can see me in a beautiful or luminous form, it is genuine. But if mentally you create me, like a sculptor or painter, at that time you will doubt the experience. Your own soul will enter into the false dream and warn you about that other person. But when you have a pure dream of the highest order, you do not have the capacity to doubt it.