Awaken; return to yourself. Now, no longer asleep, knowing they were only dreams, clear-headed again, treat everything around you as a dream.
Meditations 6?:31.
Check the reference later. 31 is right, but the 6, I don’t know.
Remember. This is all I remember from a couple of fevered years of Fourth Way. (I tried to revisit Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson and gave up after a couple hundred pages, bemused by it and my former self.) And that’s probably not the main point of that teaching.
Still, the idea came from there, and I carry it with me still.
Saying “Remember!” to myself wakes me up and gives me an eagle’s view of me, in relation to the world. For a moment all is as it should be.
There is a feeling of scale that I get: me in relation to the entire universe. An appreciation for everything around me. Especially trees. I get a special love for trees when I do this around trees, even those planted in urban sidewalks.
That’s the easy part (but it leaves me so quickly). I forget again and become an automaton.
Treating the rest of creation as a dream — that’s the thought-provoking part. Is this the same as simulation theory?
If I treat everything as a dream, an illusion, then it’s malleable and can be changed or stopped at will.
Waking up stops the dream. Having a dream and knowing in the dream that it’s a dream? That also stops the illusion.
Since dream has many meanings, what if I take it to mean “as desired”? “I have always dreamed of sitting on a yacht in the Aegean Sea at sunset.” That sort of dream. Then the world is simply a reflection of what I desire. Change your desires, change your world.
Can thoughts change matter? I’m not going to get into that. What I do know is that my feeble, amateurish, intermittent efforts seem correlated with a good life today, both material and mental.
As an operating hypothesis, then, I treat the universe as malleable, as open to exploration and gaming like a computer game.
The important thing is to not look at the humans around me as NPCs. Probability = nil that I am the only sentient, self-aware player in this game. 🙂 In fact, it’s probably useful to question whether I am a player or NPC myself.
In any event, all around me is dreamlike in one sense. Every morning I wake up, and there are no more dreams. One day I will die, and this dream will disappear. (Funny how awakening from sleep to start a new day has the same consequence as dying.)