In my last blog we speculated about whether your life was a dream.
And, if it is a dream, whose dream it is.
These are not trivial questions and they are preoccupying some deep thinkers. Here is a serious article from the Scientific American postulating that we could be virtual entities in a computer simulation. In other words, we are all in the Matrix.
So, coming back to my last column – are you living in a dream world?
The answer is Yes!. John, the software engineer with his children and shaky marriage does not exist anymore than the Julius Caesar of your dream. They are both dream creations but you mistakenly believe that one – Julius Caesar – is a dream, and the other – John, the software engineer – is real.
Let us define real as that which always is.
It is your own direct experience that, by this standard, John is not real. Some of the time he exists and grapples with his problems. Some of the time he morphs into Julius Caesar. And some of the times he completely disappears.
Julius Caesar, for the same reasons, is also not real.
So, what is real? What is always there?
The answer is simple and, if you are ready, blindingly obvious.
What is always there is your awareness that you exist.
When you wake up from deep sleep do you have to ask someone for confirmation that you exist and had existed while asleep? You don’t need to. You know.
That awareness is real. That awareness is who you really are.
Julius Caesar is fiction and you recognize this by calling him a dream. John, the software engineer, is also fiction but you do not recognize this and call him ‘real’.
And that is the root cause of all of your problems.
John, the software engineer, is a body-mind-intellect configuration in time and space and will disappear one day. You mistakenly identify with this configuration and are thereby sucked into all of John’s trials and tribulations.
And that is why Ramana Maharshi said the body itself is the disease. More precisely, it is the identification with the body that is the disease.
After his enlightenment experience at age 17, Ramana Maharshi completely disassociated from his body. For him, the body was like a suit of clothes. It gets dirty and torn and will be discarded one day.
Not a big deal.
So how do you free yourself from being bound to this aging cage of deteriorating flesh and soaring into the eternal freedom of awareness?
That will be the subject of many of my future columns.
Peace!
