Pick a World and Live In It, Part V
Housekeeping Notes:
I would like to welcome Sweden as the newest country to visit Awakening Clarity. In that same geographic area, I see repeat activity from Finland. There has been a flurry of interest from the United Kingdom this week as well. That may be because my teacher has been in England this month. I also see increased viewership from our northern neighbor, Canada. This is truly wonderful. Everylanguage lies ready to reveal truth; every land lies ready to consciously host it. Clarity is contagious and all of us are doing our best to shine it and share it. If you wish, please join our site and let us know who you are. Thank you for literally taking part in awakening Clarity.
We will continue now with our next installment, which takes a look at appearances and the paradox of causality in an uncaused universe. This thing grows and grows, and certainly there will be at least a Part VI to come.
Pick a World and Live In It
Part V
Fred-the-typist is an appearance. So are you. So is everyone else. So is everything else. “What Is” is all an enormous, ethereal, multi-dimensional, movie set-like dream. When Shakespeare said that, “All the world is a stage,” he was pretty much dead on it. That grand play, in which both this body which is typing, and yours which is reading are included, we will term here, the Dream. I capitalize it just to signify that I am not talking about some personal dream, but rather The Whole Damn Thing.
The Dream is, in fact, the Dream of God. And you, my friend, are God. You are the Dreamer of the Dream. You are producing it and directing it, starring in it and staffing it, supplying every set and every detail of every set. You have written the score and assigned the choreography. Your Dream is staggering in size and complexity beyond even the wildest, maddest imagination—short of Yours, of course. Whatever you imagine comes to appear in the Dream. In this article we are less concerned with the metaphysics of the thing than we are the mechanics. We’d simply like to not muck it up, and we’d like to not have to suffer in it. We have the opportunity to awaken to the dream. I am taught and can feel in my heart that there is also the possibility to awaken from the dream, but I know nothing of that personally, so we won’t speak of it here.
If it’s not real, then what does mucking it up matter, some might ask. This is our exact point. Just because the Dream cannot be said to be real, I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. Clearly it does exist; I’m writing from within it to you, who are also within it. We cannot say that it doesn’t count, because on our planet alone there are close to seven billion people who would take offense to that. Plus, we have spent the majority of our lives either sailing through it or suffering from it, have we not? There can be no sailing without suffering, and vice versa.
On a relative level, we are all certainly real. We’re here. Even if we say “We’re not here,” an apparentsomeone is apparently saying it. So there’s something going on. Like any other comedy or drama, there is change: movement, sound and sensory-level special effects all taking place within and against a background of perfect silence and stillness. As Ramana Maharshi suggested—I can’t directly quote it—the movie we call life is a series of flickering images on a still movie screen. Our complete focus is on the images; we notice neither screen, nor projector. Who (or What) we are is the screen. Mind is the projector.
Again, what we get is what we see.
If we look at an image in a mirror, we can’t say it isn’t. We can’t say it’s real, but surely we can’t say itisn’t. It does appear. It may be No-thing showing up as something, but it can’t be said to be nothing.There is quite a lot of difference between No-thing and nothing. It doesn’t make any sense to say our relative world and experience is not “real” on some level. So let us say that it is real on the level ofmind.
That is the nature of appearances. An appearance looks real, feels real, but clearly it has noindependent nature. The image in the mirror cannot decide its next move; that’s one hundred percent dependent upon the image-thrower, not on the thrown. The image has no more independent existence or free will than a shadow does, but it appears to be far more real than a shadow, does it not? In fact, an image in a mirror is far more distinct than a shadow, it has far more detail than a shadow, but it is not one whit more real.
Our relative, human world is to the mirror world what the mirror world is to the world of the shadow. This level of existence seems much more real than that of the mirror. It is more distinct and has more detail (primarily due to the conventions of volume and duration, or space and time as we call them). In this distinct and detailed Dream we take independent existence and free will for granted. They are thought to be true, assumed to be true, and the laws of cause and effect certainly do work here, there’s no denying that.
If I stub my toe, I’m going to holler and jump around. If planes fly into buildings in New York, there is all sorts of karma going on: past karma being played out, new karma on multiple level being created, and individual karmic entanglements being begun and others coming to an end. Karma is a Dream world phenomena. Only.
We use these observable occurrences to back up our beliefs in the trueness of ourselves and our world. But this is like quoting scripture to contradict objections to religion. It’s all just a mite self-referencing, is it not? “Because of A, then B, and because of B, then C.” But who the hell said that ‘A’ was true? We have words for such questioning. In the case of religion, of established socio-religious models, it’s called blasphemy and heresy. In the case of more purely social or philosophical conventions, it’s called simply madness or incorrigibility.
We have ways of dealing with such people. We excommunicate them. We shun them. We put them in jail or mental institutions. We kill them. It’s happened time and again throughout the run of history.
Yet in other circles the same questioning process leading to the same answers might be called penetrating wisdom and the questioner might be revered. It’s all about local conditioning. It’s about timing. And for the so-called individual questioner, it’s all about luck. Pick your poison, so to speak. Pick your world. And then prepare to live in it, because you’ll have to live in the world you pick, because the apparent laws of one world simply do not transfer to another. Relative is as relative does.
Absolute simply Is.
Absolute Is? What does that mean? Let’s go back to the mirror for just a moment.
Simultaneous to all of the apparent events of all these flickering images, there is nothing going on here. Not only is there nothing going astray, but there’s not anything happening at all. It’s a Dream. It’s Your Dream. Now, if you, as a human being have a dream about bombs and death and fires, what do you have to do to straighten all that out when you wake up? Do you have to tend the wounded and clean the floors and repair the roof? Or do you just go have breakfast and maybe tell your spouse you had an eventful dream in the night?
To accentuate the terrific import of such amazing nocturnal happenings, your spouse will likely smile and yawn and then ask you to pass the butter.
To be continued…
