Of course facts are real! But you live with fancies, not with facts. Facts never clash, while your life and world are full of contradictions. Contradiction is the mark of the false; the real never contradicts itself. For instance, you complain that people are abjectly poor. Yet you do not really share your riches with them. You mind the war and sorrow next door, but you hardly give it a thought when it is in some far off country. The shifting fortunes of your ego determine your values; ‘I think’, ‘I want’, ‘I must’ are made into absolutes.

You give reality to concepts, while concepts are distortions of reality. You are entangled in the web of verbal definitions and formulations. Go beyond your concepts and ideas; in the silence of desire and thought the truth is found. Concern yourself with your mind, remove its distortions and impurities.

Be careful. The moment you start talking you create a verbal universe, a universe of words, ideas, concepts and abstractions, interwoven and inter-dependent, most wonderfully generating, supporting and explaining each other and yet all without essence or substance, mere creations of the mind. Words create words, reality is silent. Words serve their limited purpose of inter-personal communication. Words do not convey facts, they signal them. Once you are beyond the person, you need no words.” ~Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj — I AM THAT