Narayana lyer’s dedication to and practise of Bhagavan’s teaching and instructions was meticulous and total. | once asked him, “Did you ever have any doubt that Bhagavan erased completely?” He was compassionate enough to narrate the following incident: “I was sitting near Bhagavan’s couch. | felt puzzled by the ancient teaching that everything you see is maya, an illusion. | wondered how Bhagavan sitting on the couch, and the wooden barrier between him and me could be false. | asked Bhagavan whether all of us could be unreal and non-existent. Bhagavan laughed and asked me whether | had had a dream the previous night. | told him that | had had one in which | had seen several people asleep. Bhagavan then said, ‘Suppose | ask you to go and wake all those people up in the dream and tell them they are not real. Will that not be absurd? That is how it is to me now. Be assured that there is nothing but the dreamer. So, where is the question of the people in the dream being real or unreal? Still more, of waking them up and telling them that they are not real! We are all unreal. Why do you doubt it? THAT alone is real.’ After this explanation, | had absolutely no doubts about the unreality of the world. | could constantly feel its unreal nature.” Another day, Bhagavan told Narayana lyer, “Everything is unreal, like dream objects. However, at a certain stage, there exists truth, or reality, and the world of unreality. There, the realized man’s jnanam awakens ‘others’ to the fact that what they see and feel is unreal, and reality is one’s own being. This can be compared to an elephant dreaming of a lion and suddenly waking up to find that the lion is unreal and the elephant alone is real. The elephant is the individual (jiva), the dream is the unreal world, and the lion is the guru or the jnani. The guru is the link between the real and the unreal.” On another occasion, Narayana lyer told me that Bhagavan said, “There is no jnani, no realized person. Wisdom alone is. There is only jnanam.”