Who are they? I am afraid that they are us. The greatest dream that we can have is to forget that we are dreaming. Lost in our mind’s imagined world of judgments, beliefs, and opinions, we are literally caught in a waking dream. For some it is a nightmare, for others a temporary reprieve in some imagined heaven. For most it is something in between. But no matter what the current status of your dream may be, it will all come to an end someday when you least expect it. Suddenly the plot of your life will change or end altogether, and you will find yourself disoriented and wondering what happened and where it all went. Such abrupt changes in the direction and texture of our lives is one of the few certainties we have in life, and yet we keep believing that what we think about life has anything whatsoever to do with what life actually is. We are so busy and obsessed with our restless thinking about everything and everyone that we have mistaken our thinking about everything and everyone for everything and everyone. This tendency to take our thoughts to be real is what keeps the dream state intact and keeps us trapped within its domain of unconsciousness and strife. To many people the very idea that what is is more real than all of their beliefs and opinions about what is is hard to believe. But that’s how it is when you are caught up in a dream. To you your dream is real because all of your thoughts confirm that it is real. But what is is more real than a thousand thoughts about how things should be. Life will conform neither to the story you tell yourself about it nor your interpretation of it. Believe a single thought that runs contrary to the way things are or have been and you suffer because of it. No exceptions! This does not mean that you should not have any thoughts outside of what is. It only means that what is is the reality of now. If you think that people should be nice to one another, then by all means be nice. But when you project that belief onto the people and the world around you as if it were an objective reality, or worse still, as if it were their job to be nice to you, you put yourself at odds with what is, and suffering will surely follow. Now imagine a world of billions of people. Each one of them has innumerable ideas, beliefs, and opinions that they believe to be true. And each one of those billions of people has different ideas, beliefs, and opinions that they absolutely believe in. They are all walking around seeing the same outside world, but inwardly they each live in a different world, in a different waking dream. Is it any wonder we have trouble getting along? To add complexity to this volatile mixture is the fact that there are also collective dream states where people of similar personal dreams gather together to form collective dream states. These are even harder spells to break out of, because collective dream states exist within a consensus (or agreed-upon) reality. In other words, it must be true because we all believe it to be true. Thus is the state of humanity. And the reality of universal being, your being, all being, remains exiled to the oblivion of unconsciousness. ~ Adyashanti, The Way of Liberation
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 19:17:00 +0000
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