Looks like anxiety was a timely discussion last week. We received very good feedback about the topic. So today let’s discuss something totally different! Let’s discuss the dreamlike nature of the phenomenon. What does that even mean you are wondering? Well, let’s dig into it.
Have you ever had a vivid dream? I sometimes get these lucid dreams where I am aware of everything that is happening and am actively participating it, making decisions, having fun, feeling sorry whatever the case may be. I wake up and distinctly remember what happened in that dream. It felt so real while it was in the dream state. Where did it go? If it was real, it should not just disappear just like that. But it does.
Buddha gave the example of an elephant in the dream – in ancient India, elephants were commonplace. Say someone dreams of an elephant. It is a big elephant. It has big ears he is flapping around; you could see wrinkles on his skin, a nice long trunk, and so on. All this is real in your dreams. When we wake up, we realize that there is no elephant. Where did it go? How did it come about in the first place? How can it vanish in thin air? It felt very real so what happened? It felt like it would in waking life and existed on its own side. We realize that it was just a dream. We made it up – there was no elephant. A total and complete fabrication of our mind. And when our subtle mind (subtle mind is the one that allows us to dream as we discussed in types of mind session) disappeared, the elephant disappeared with it.
As venerable Geshe Kelsang puts it, when we dream, we may have extremely vivid experiences. We may travel to colorful lands, meet beautiful or terrifying people, engage in various activities, and as a result experience great pleasure or suffering and pain. In our dream a whole world appears to us, functioning in its own way. This world may be similar to the world of our waking state or it may be quite bizarre, but in either case, while we are dreaming it appears to be utterly real. If we check carefully we shall realize that our waking world exists in a way that is similar to the way in which our dream world exists. Like the dream world, our waking world appears vividly to us and seems to have its own existence independent of our mind. Just as in the dream, we believe this appearance to be true and respond with desire, anger, fear, and so on.
Let’s unpack the profoundness of this statement. Let’s get back to our elephant example. We know that elephant is not our mind. I think it is fair to say that all of you will agree it is not independent of our mind. If our mind does not perceive the elephant it will not show up in our dream. And lastly, an elephant ceases to exist when the mind dreaming about it ceases to exist. Hopefully, we all agree on these three points.
But you say in the waking world, I can touch and feel things like my car, my TV, my anger, and so forth. Even in our dreams, we could feel and touch the elephant. We even get angry or happy and physically react sometimes in our dream. So in that regard, it is no different. If we apply the same three tests we used for our dream, maybe it makes sense. Let’s take our car. We know our car is not our mind. We also know that it is not independent of our mind. If it is not in our perception, we will not know there is a car. And we know that when the mind perceiving the car ceases, it will cease as well. Here is some more from Geshe Kelsang: The only difference between them is that the dream world is an appearance to our subtle dreaming mind while the waking world is an appearance to our gross waking mind. The dream world exists only for as long as the dream awareness to which it appears exists, and the waking world exists only for as long as the waking awareness to which it appears exists. Buddha said:
“You should know that all phenomena are like dreams.”
When we die, our gross waking minds dissolve into our very subtle minds, and the world we experienced when we were alive simply disappears. The world as others perceive it will continue, but our personal world will disappear as completely and irrevocably as the world of last night’s dream. And we covered some of this in our three types of mind session earlier.
If we grasp this even at a smaller level, a lot of our delusions such as anger, attachment, jealousy, and so forth will begin to disappear.