Ask yourself, "How do I know that I am NOT dreaming now?"
It sounds silly but I'm not joking. Have you ever tried asking it in a serious way?
The manner in which this question is asked is everything. If you ask it with the deep down belief that I am obviously not dreaming, there is no point asking the question. You have already failed.
Everyone enjoys saying that they are open. This might be a good measure of your actual openness. Because if you are really open and ask the question with an innocence of truly not knowing the answer; it can be a very powerful pathway.
Seeking the truth is not about accumulating additional pieces of knowledge. It is the opposite of how we've historically moved through life. We can't progress to Grade 8 math until we have mastered Grade 7 math. This simple example describes how we progress through life from child to adult does it not?
The quest for truth is radically different. It is the opposite approach. We must always strive to stay in the not-knowing. To borrow from Zen; We must always stay in beginners mind.
The longer we are on this journey, the harder it gets to stay in beginners mind. We have been conditioned to go to the mind for answers. Even worse, we have been conditioned to know the answers ahead of time because we learned in school that not-knowing is embarrassing and wrong somehow.
What could the mind possibly know other than what it already knows? Trust me, it is not a place to go for answers to important questions. Particularly existential questions!
More often we find ourselves listening to a sage while at the same time your mind is secretly saying to itself, "You've heard this before, you already know this, no need to participate fully" That mindset never works. We must always strive to keep it fresh as if hearing it for the first time.
So, just stop and ask it again, perhaps with a slightly different twist to keep it fresh, "Am I dreaming?" and just wait for the experiential understanding (that you don't know) come to you.
Consider this about the night-time dream; nothing in the dream can tell us anything about the dreamer's mind. Likewise, no phenomenal experience can tell us anything about the knowing that is knowing your current experience. Nothing.
That said, my experience tells me that the Awareness which is knowing this experience, is the SAME Awareness that knows the night dream. I know this. This is a powerful piece of information. Clearly I made a mistake in the night dream. Awareness was the Reality. The body-mind and the world turned was an illusion.
I mistakenly believed that Awareness was limited and located somewhere inside the head of the dreamed character. In other words, I believed that my Reality was dependent on a non-existent body-mind that turned out to be no more real than the passing of a thought. Am I open to the possibility that I am repeating the exact same mistake?
The human mind is unquestionable limited and yet it is capable of elaborate dreams that completely fool us into believing the events of the dream take place in a reality of time and space. It's pretty incredible is it not? What if our human minds are just a limited version of an infinitely larger mind that has the same ability to dream a world and then place itself inside this imagined outside world, while at same time forgetting that it has done so. We do this every night.
Even hard core materialist scientists confess that all experience (thinking, sensing, perceiving) takes place inside our minds. Is it difficult to imagine that an infinitely more powerful mind could dream this current experience? It's not really much of a leap. I'm not saying definitively either way. I'm only suggesting that you can't possibly know this isn't a dream.
Further, when I explore my actual experience in a very detailed and discriminating way, I discover that my actual experience of the world is not consistent from the perspective of the dreamed character. Instead I find that my experience is 100% consistent from the perspective of the dreamer's mind. This should be an interesting discovery for a truth seeker. (This is where you need to explore your experience and perhaps need a little help to get going)
For some reason I am just now reminded of something I heard my guru Francis Lucille say recently. "The more we investigate the truth, the truer it becomes. Likewise, the more we investigate the lie, the more untrue it becomes" This has definitely been my experience.
The more time you are able to stay in the not-knowing the better. When I don't know what I am, I am naturally at peace with everyone and everything. As an example, you can't suffer unless you leave the place of not-knowing. It is impossible. In order to suffer in ANY way, we must first leaving the place of not-knowing 'what I am' to 'knowing what I am'. So ask yourself next time you are suffering...what new piece of information have I learned?
The experience of not-knowing is really a glimpse into the true nature of reality. The experience of not-knowing and the experience of knowing/awakening, are similar experiences, if not the same experience. This makes perfect sense because Wisdom/Truth is just the removal of ignorance. It is like believing the world is flat until you seen images from outer space. As they say, a glimpse is more powerful than a thousand hours of meditation.
Staying in the not-knowing gives Reality a chance to reveal itself. It was always there. Just like the tv screen. We just don't notice the screen while we are watching the movie...until we do. It is this understanding that enables us to get lost in the apocalyptic movie without actually fearing for our lives. We still want the bad guy Trump to lose badly, but at the same time we know that it really doesn't matter. Why? Because at the end of the dream, everybody wins.
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