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What is happening to the vegetation? What changes are coming? The same changes occur within our own body. We are the tree—a movable tree. However, we possess buddhi, the intellect. The dharma of the buddhi is to judge. Judgment means discerning what is satya and what is asatya: reality and non-reality. We can understand unreality as that which is changeable, in constant flux. Like our mind changes, our thoughts change. As you heard Gulabjī speak recently: our attitude changes, our opinion changes, and our expectations change. Most expectations lead to disappointment because the situation changed. Therefore, what is changing is non-reality. What is not changing is the reality, the truth. It will never die; its evidence cannot be altered. This is why in Jñāna Yoga, there are four main principles: Viveka, Vairāgya, Satsampatti, and Mumukṣutva. Viveka is the cream of our intellect, the cream of our buddhi. Buddhi bhrashṭa ho saktā hai, viveka bhrashṭa nahīṁ hotā. This means our intellect can make mistakes; it can become selfish, and we can even become dependent on our feelings. But Viveka is not like that. Viveka will always give you a pure answer, like lemon in milk—it immediately separates the water and the milk. So, the first consideration, the first sādhanā: viveka vichāro. The first practice you should undertake is to develop and think with Viveka. Feel it as the vivekadātā. What will Viveka do? Satya asatya kā alag alag vibhājan. It separates what is truth or reality from what is not reality. After all this, the final judgment is given: "Brahma-satyaṁ, jagat-mithyā." Brahman is the truth—everlasting, immortal, unchangeable, the divine. Jagat, saṁsāra, this world. Now, in some way, this world is also not unreality. We are sitting here now. Is this a reality or an unreality? It could be that it is only a dream. Perhaps we are dreaming. This afternoon, there was a question about dreams. Dreams have many aspects. Firstly, a dream is our reality—meaning our expectations, our desires, our unfulfilled desires. We are bound to our senses: the jñāna-indriya and karma-indriya. There are five jñāna-indriyas through which we receive all kinds of information from this world: through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. From birth until now, whatever we experience through these jñāna-indriyas goes, or has gone, into our subconscious. The subconscious is a storeroom where all impressions from this life are stored. Our subconscious begins from the first day of our life in the mother’s womb, and it is already influenced by, and influences, our being and our future life—the condition the mother or father was in. That is past. Whatever you do in the present immediately becomes past, but it is not lost. It is stored somewhere, and from time to time it emerges as a memory. As you heard yesterday, memory can be our enemy. Our memory is our best friend. When you remember good events from your life, they create happiness and motivation. But if a memory was painful, unpleasant, or horrible, it will create fear in you again, reawakening that fear. That thought is like an enemy for us. It is our thoughts that kill us; it is our thoughts that motivate us. These thoughts, which entered our subconscious, transform there into the form of vāsanā—latent desires. The information received in the present through the jñāna-indriyas, which is transferred from the conscious to the subconscious, is the function of the mind. And when the mind returns from the subconscious to the conscious, it brings with it all the hidden vāsanās and forms of desires from the subconscious to the conscious. Therefore, the mind is not responsible for your thoughts and your problems. You cannot, and you should not, stop or block the mind. You cannot block a river; otherwise, the dam will break and cause more harm, destroying the landscape. But you can give direction to the river. Similarly, you can give direction to your mind. The mind will do its function, its work. Citta vṛtti nirodha—to stop or cleanse the old thoughts from your citta—you cannot achieve this unless you attain nirvīja samādhi, and that will take a long time. Now, the thoughts that come, the desires that rise from the subconscious to the conscious level again... The mind is the moon principle: emotion. And emotion is never constant. The moon rises differently every day, from the dark moon to the full moon, and from the full moon to the dark moon or the half moon. The conscious is the intellect, the sun principle. That intellect is the capacity for judgment; that is what we call the buddhi. Now, suppose I have a bad intention dormant in my subconscious. For me, it is not a bad intention; for me, it is something joyful or nice. But my logic, my intellect, will tell me, "You cannot do this." Even though I want to do it, these feelings will return to the subconscious and be stored. At night, in a dream, this will emerge again. I would like to do what I want, and when the right moment comes, I wake up—so even in the dream I couldn't fulfill my desire. For example, suppose I went walking with someone, saw an ice cream shop, and wanted to eat ice cream. My intellect said no—the doctor told you not to eat ice cream, go home. But still, I had the feeling the ice cream was very nice. That night I dreamt that after one month, I was at the doctor's, and the doctor said, "You are perfectly healthy; you can eat everything." And from the doctor's, before coming home, I went to the ice cream shop to buy ice cream. A very nice bowl of ice cream, the spoon... I took a big spoonful. The ice cream was about one centimeter from my lips, and the alarm rang. No ice cream. Now, what will happen to this desire? It will go back to the subconscious. And it will appear sometimes in actions, sometimes in dreams, and sometimes as a memory. But after a long time, this desire will lose its form, so that your intellect is no longer capable of judging what kind of desire it is. If I have a feeling to eat a mango, immediately on the screen of my consciousness I see the picture of a mango, or an apple, or a cherry. But if I want to eat but don't know what, that becomes a psychic problem—which you don't know, and how should the poor doctor know? So when a doctor doesn't understand something, he tells us it's psychic. And we come home and look in the mirror: "My, I'm psychic." It's psychic, and you are sweating. But what is the definition of the psychic? The best father of psychology, I would say, was Maharṣi Patañjali of the Yoga Sūtra. Read the Yoga Sūtra. I think, until now, no one has explained the human psyche and human consciousness better than Patañjali. So, dreams are our past actions or desires: our relations as father, mother, child, friend, housemates. You had a nice horse; the horse died, but you still dream of that horse sometimes. Or a dog. We have many things in our mind. Or when you heard a story about a ghost, or see nowadays on television some horror films. Many things lie dormant in our subconscious.