Nothing is what it seems. Not a single thought, conception, or experience, high or low, is anything but a modification of dreams, a kind of hallucination, the conjunction of wave patterns in vibratory frequencies, typically appearing very elusive to perception in the denser realms of the ordinary senses, where thought-energy rigidifies momentarily into seemingly solid objects. Nevertheless, there are no enduringly solid objects. This so-called world is a phenomenon of luminous interweaving energetic interactions — a radiant play of light.
It is always an event in Consciousness, in the vastness of which everything that appears is simply a modification. However, when we attach, or cling to, or fixate on any of these endlessly arising objects or conditions or their effects, exclusive of their Source, then we make those objects, states, or conditions “real” by the process of identification and differentiation — we grant them substantiality apart from ourselves, and thus create our own suffering as a result.
By Grace, when that perceptual presumption of duality is recognized as the activity of separation itself and thereby begins to be undermined, these billion upon billion appearances once more become non-binding, fluid, and transparent. The whole adventure they imply – in whatever realm, heaven and earth or hell and high water — is recognized as an expression of the dream, having no defining or ultimate significance, but only as the play of Mystery — the Unknown — Itself.
We do not know what any of this is! We cannot actually differentiate ourselves from a single thing, any more than wetness can separate itself from water. There is no definitive explanation for any of it, nor is there really any need for one, except to the mind of dilemma. This is not a matter of belief or speculation. It can be directly verified when one stops and simply contemplates the mystery of one’s own appearance here, the awareness that we Are, but that “What” is aware is unknowable, since it can never be an object to itself. It just is. Is.
What we know of dreams can serve to illuminate our “position” in the so-called waking state. In either, we are in exactly the same situation – we appear to create our environment in both conditions, as well as our sense of being an independent “I”, but we have no idea how this is happening, except that we Are. Everything else is subject to interpretation, but the simple fact of Awareness is our irreducible inheritance.
By allowing attention to rest in this Awareness of pure being itself, rather than on the objects and events that appear and disappear in the absorbing play of thought-energy, something quite interesting is revealed. Clearly the dream is a creation, a product of our own consciousness — who makes this dream but us? And yet we don’t know what we Are, except that we Are. Our experience here is free from thought and movement, with no judgment or measure of inside/outside – utterly clear and transparent, like space. There is no separation between the experiencer, the experiencing, and the experience.
On the other hand, though dreaming arises in our own consciousness and dissolves “there” just the same, can we even call it “our own”? When we awaken, we realize the dream has no concrete substantiality, except what we might attribute to it in our conditioned and conditional knowing. This activity is itself a kind of humorous pretense that most take quite seriously, nevertheless. So serious, in fact, that when differing dreamings clash, further confusions, contentions, and even wars follow. Who would imagine that world conflicts originate in dreaming?
Just so, this waking realm can be seen as not a place or world, but as an indefinite dimension that is not fixed like any object, but fluidly manifesting as a play of infinite possibility. Then, our limited points of view can begin to be submitted to a conscious process in which we unfold in a truly heart-felt relationship to the wonder of this mystery, without the terrible burden of knowing or identification, or even any humorless concern about the implications of the dream world itself. Paradoxically, we can begin to become responsible for our separative tendencies, which are the real creators of every circumstance of the dream, and the source of our suffering and chronic sense of alienation.
This true responsibility is relative to the force of our own activity, which creates the drama in the same way as if we were to complain about a pain in our arm, only to discover that we have been pinching ourselves in our sleep. The dream itself does not have to be accepted or rejected in terms of any of its content. It resists definition. Where do we dream? Where is a “place”? It is our own habitual activity which is separating, contracting, seeking, suffering, imagining, and calling all of this into form and giving it a kind of reality. When this is seen, felt, and welcomed without recoil, without grasping or turning away, then our inherent freedom “resumes” as the ordinary and natural state of being.
~Bob O'Hearn~
"As We Think"
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