All the time, chasing life, a chasm is developing.
It leaves some of us feeling dissatisfied. We ought to be able to do more, we say. This feeling of not being able to do a thing is wretched. So we fight it. We fight the people around us. We say that isn’t so. We tell ourselves that what’s wrong isn’t us, but other people or things, the weather, anything, not realizing that what needs pacifying isn’t the world but our minds.
Slowly, day by day, we realize we are in a dream. Even the constant striving (for more pay, more love, more of this or that) has become unreal, unnecessary, and overdone. It isn’t that you are not flesh and blood. You are. Rather, you disbelieve the many conclusions you casually drew about your existence.
At first, it was like a joke. You sang, “Row, row, row a boat; life is but a dream…” Then you get a little more serious.
You are in a dream you cannot wake up from. A dream you are in a love-hate relationship with. You like it sometimes. You dislike it other times. All the same, you cling to it. It is the only thing you have that you have ever known. You cannot decide if you want to wake up or keep dreaming.
But before getting too gloomy, you should also realize that it is a dream that can set you free. After all, the chains in a dream are like chains in a movie; their ability to bind you depends greatly on the actor’s wish to play along.
Do you know that even while dreaming, one is not entirely compelled? One can still discover breathing space. You must have experienced that too, once or twice. You are deep in a dream, for example, and suddenly realize you are dreaming. The dream you thought was your reality immediately releases you to the extent that you can choose to continue dreaming or wake up.
You may do the same, even in daily life. The stillness that is in you can be the shelter you seek.
I wrote about a lovelorn man who met his wife again in a dream in The Natural Trajectory of Human Consciousness:
“John didn’t want it to end. He knew that even though this was only a dream, his heart was invested in it. Even if the scenery was dreamy, with Jenny impossibly next to him, his emotions were real and unadulterated. It was so hard to feel these emotions when they were filtered through the brain. In here everything was direct, unapologetic. In that other world of wakefulness (daily life) spun by the brain, there was always the endless rationalizing and hairsplitting. The brain was always mitigating, diluting, inserting, and meddling. In the so-called real world, all he and Jenny could do was bicker. He had told her more than once how she needed to change. His brain told him she was sometimes lost. But it failed to register for him how he himself was perpetually lost.”
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