There was a Brahmin who was worshipping his idol, and a man came along and said to him, "How foolish! You are a high-caste Brahmin, you have such great culture, and yet you worship a God of stone which you have made with your own hands!" The Brahmin said, "If you have faith this god of stone will become a real god to you, and if you have no faith even the formless God who is in heaven is nothing."
The idea behind this is that we do not know and see the reality of God because we have made real all that is unreal before us. We are impressed by it, we live in longing for it, we pursue it, we live in it; and so from morning till evening we are, so to speak, wrapped up in this world of illusion, in all that is unreal and that covers our eyes from reality.
In order to find goodness one must find wickedness to compare it with. When we have found both, then both become clear; wickedness will show what goodness is. In order to find reality we must gather the knowledge of what is unreal, and this is not difficult. In our ordinary language we use the word false; false is that which is not real. All that is subject to change and destruction may be something in appearance, but it is never that which it pretends to be. All this existence which is before us and which is subject to change and death is not reality; it cannot be reality; but we can only see this when we have acquired some knowledge of reality. If we do not look at it as unreal, we shall not have the desire to find what is real. We must find out what is unreal and acknowledge it as unreal; then alone can we go on to the next step which will be to find reality.
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