“When you realize and know that your body is a dream, nothing will ever bother you again. Nothing can ever hurt you again. … Just by knowing this, the knowingness goes deeper and deeper and deeper inside of you, until everything is transcended totally and completely and absolutely. And even though you still appear to be walking around in a body, there’s nobody home! Nothing can ever happen to you again!

Do you see what I’m trying to say? If somebody shoots you, hits you over the head, tears your eyes out, and all these other good things, it will not be happening to you! This sounds strange, I know, to some of you, but it’s the absolute truth. All of these things can only happen to a human being.

As long as you believe you’re a human being you’ll experience these things over and over again like all good human beings do. But as soon as you give up the body, I don’t mean dying, I mean giving up the body and you will say, ‘This is not me. This was never me. I am not a being that gets older and older and older and dies. That’s not me at all! I am pure consciousness. I am Brahman.’

Then something very interesting will happen to you. You will see through the dream to reality. The world will never fool you again. The world to you will be like water in the mirage. It will be a hallucination. The world will never hurt you again.”

~ Robert Adams (20th century American Advaita mystic)