“Life is an illusion” or “life is just a dream”: Everyone knows this story: The great Taoist master Chuang Tzu once dreamt that he was a butterfly fluttering here and there. In the dream he had no awareness of his individuality as a person. He was only a butterfly. Suddenly, he awoke and found himself laying there, a person once again. But then he thought to himself, Was I before a man who dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly who dreams about being a man? > If this life is but a dream, a bubble, a flash of lightning in a summer storm as the Buddha said at the conclusion of the Diamond Sutra, why don’t we just wake up to enlightenment just as easily as we awake from a dream? We don’t have to work at waking up from a dream, it happens all by itself. Do we have to work to wake up from the human dream? Just as lucidity enables you to awaken in a dream, so you can awaken to the waking dream. This is nature of The Buddha’s awakening. > All the “dream”-metaphor refers to is the fact that how we perceive the world is fundamentally subjective. The image of the world as we know it is a function of our individual set of conditioned beliefs of good and bad (in time and space). The judgmental (good vs. bad) interpretation of the stream of experiences creates the illusion of an observatory experiencer, an entity separate from the stream. This split is the source of duality: there is a “me” experiencing and evaluating what is happening within and without. Accordingly, non-duality is realizing the “me” as another experience, as another aspect of the stream. It is the awakening to the truth that all there is, is the stream of experience. Thus, by entering the stream, “we”, the subjective “judge” dissolves. And by no longer objecting or trying to control the stream, we flow with it and suffering ends.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 05:32:08 +0000
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