Are we mere figures in a dream and therefore deceiving ourselves, or are we mere puppets on a stage and therefore playing ourselves? If either of these be true then it would seem that the value of choosing right over wrong seems discredited and the freedom to choose good over evil becomes lost. If so, where is the need to carry out the moral precepts of religion and philosophy? Why submit to the disagreeable conditions which the Quest imposes upon us if the very end of the Quest is worth no more than its beginning? The answer is that these are half-truths which, taken alone, dangerously falsify the whole truth. The human being is not the victim of his own illusory living in a world of utter make-believe; he is ultimately and in his true selfhood a ray of the Divine Mind. It is his thoughts about himself that live in their own illusory world of make-believe, but he himself lives in a world of truth and reality.
-- Notebooks Category 9: From Birth to Rebirth > Chapter 4 : Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > # 163
