Thanks for your letter.

Your friend is right. When we close our eyes for the last time, there will be only emptiness. “You” will vanish, your world will vanish, the universe will vanish.

How can one know this? Because there is only emptiness right now. You, as who you think you are, are not real; therefore the world and universe that you perceive are not real. Not any thing which we perceive is existing in the way in which it appears to us that they are.

When you wake up from a sleeping dream, everything in the dream disappears. What is true in the sleeping dream does not cease to be true once we have awoken into our daytime life. This life while we are awake is simply a continuation of the dream while we are asleep.

In other words, the sleeping dream and the daytime dream are both within what I call the Dream with a capital D. You are in both dreams, and you are the “dreamer” of the one continuous Dream. You are not real, nor are the dreams that you are dreaming.

When the big-D Dream ceases for you, you won’t even know that you have ever “existed” (which you haven’t); just as when the sleeping dream ends, you no longer experience the “you” in the sleeping dream as existing.

The moral is, it makes no difference what you do (or don’t do) in this life: not any part of it has any reality.