In this episode I explore the idea that our cosmos is a dream that we can wake up from. I look at this concept from both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions.
In this episode I explore the idea that our cosmos is a dream that we can wake up from. I look at this concept from both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions.
I had a dream the other night, and I would like to start this episode by sharing it. I know that dreams tend to be boring to everyone except the one who has the dream. At least that is how I feel about others’ dreams. My wife can tell you how my eyes glaze over when she begins to share her latest nocturnal adventure. So please forgive me in advance if I bore you.
For the one doing the dreaming, the dream is captivating. Especially at the moment and immediately after you wake up and it is fresh in your mind, before you start thinking about it and realizing it doesn’t make sense in lots of ways. At the time dreams feel as real as what we tend to call “real life.”
I have a recurring dream. I have had it for years. In the dream I am in college, and I am struggling to graduate. I keep forgetting I am registered for certain classes until it is too late. I forget to attend class, forget to take exams, and forget to hand in assignments. So I fail. Over and over again.
I never have enough credits to graduate. I am an eternal student, always studying but never graduating. I think it is my version of hell or purgatory or reincarnation. In the most recent version of the dream I am a seventy years old and still in college! That sounds like hell. Please do not shrink me, or send me your theories about what my dream means. I have psychoanalyzed myself enough times.
I had the dream again the other night, but this time it was different. This time I woke up within the dream. While in the dream I realized it was a dream. In the dream I went to my faculty advisor and told him that we were living in a dream. He asked me to share my theory with his class. So I went to his class and I told the students that college was a dream. I urgently told them to “Wake up!”
As I was telling the students this, I knew I was dreaming, and that they were dream people. Some people call this lucid dreaming. It means you can guide the dream to a certain extent. So I did. I told the class I was going to prove to them that this was a dream. Then I woke up, and they disappeared. I awoke in my bed.
And I lay in bed pondering the dream. And of course my mind immediately went to the idea that I was still in a dream. I am well aware of the spiritual concept that our waking world is itself a dream. This is a theme found in the religions of the world. In Hindu mythology Vishnu dreams the universe into reality. They call this world maya, meaning illusion. The Buddha is said to have awakened from this dream. Buddha means “the Awakened One.”
So while this dream was fresh in my mind, I lay there half asleep pondering the idea of maya, that this world is an illusion, more like a dream than reality. I thought of the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu musing whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. One of the best recent explorations of the subject is the film Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
Edgar Allan Poe has a poem entitled “A Dream Within a Dream.” which ends: “Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?” So this idea is not new. It certainly is not original with me. Probably every college sophomore discusses such “deep thoughts” with his or her buddies late into the night. If students still do that sort of thing like I did back when I was I college 50 years ago.
That morning when I lay in bed thinking after waking up from a dream within a dream, I asked myself in what sense our world is a dream. The world does not seem to be a dream in the same sense as my lucid dream. When you are in a dream everything makes sense, but when you wake up it doesn’t. You realize how irrational things were. This conscious waking world seems different. It can be explored rationally by science and reason. So it is not an exact parallel. We are not now in a dream in the same way that I was in a dream, dreaming I was I college while knowing I was dreaming.
Yet in another sense this world can be said to be a dream. It is obvious to me that the world as we see it is a product of our brains informed by our five senses. It is real only insofar as our five senses can accurately access reality and our brain can process it accurately. And it seems clear to me that these perceptions and interpretations of the universe are imperfect at best. Think of all that we are missing with only five senses. And even the limits of the senses that we do have! What could other senses pick up possible that we cannot even conceive? How would those senses change our perception of what is real and what is not? What other dimensions are there that we cannot access.
It does not take too much speculation to realize that what we call the real world is a product of our limited and imperfect senses interpreted by a very imperfect brain that is rational only when it is trained to be so, and even then is only partially so. So it is obvious to me that this reality has many of the characteristics of a dream. So, as the song says, we row, row, row our boat gently down the stream merrily. For life is but a dream.
In the Bible this world is not described as a dream and it is not called illusion. In the Hebrew Bible, God is not sleeping and dreaming the world like Vishnu. In the Biblical creation story God is awake and thinks the world into being. That is the description of creation in Genesis. God speaks, and the universe pops into existence. Every part of the cosmos is seen as a word spoken by the Creator. The physical world is the Word of God. Every part of it are words, and words are simply ideas expressed. That is what the universe is.
The cosmos is an idea in the Mind of God. That is how the Bible pictures it. That means that we are in the Mind of God. So in a sense it is not real, but in a sense it is. The Mind of God is real. You can’t get any realer than God! God is the definition of real. For that reason Christians insist the world is real, while at the same time saying it is all in the Mind of God. So it is both. It is real, but only real as an expression of the imagination of God.
In essence we are figments of God’s imagination. Which means that insofar as we are real, we are the Mind of God. Our outward nature – our bodies and brains – are expressions of the mind of God. We are works of art. That is the way Genesis pictures creation in the second creation story. God is pictured as a potter – a craftsman – fashioning us out of this imagination.
To wake up to this reality is what the apostle Paul means when he says, “We have the mind of Christ.” Spiritual awakening is connecting to the mind of God who creates this reality. It is realizing that there is only one mind and that is the Mind of God. We share the Divine Mind. Jesus knew this Mind. We have the mind of Christ. Human and divine meet and are seen to be one.
Back to my dream. Life is like my dream. We keep on trying to get it right, and we keep failing. Always learning but never graduating – perhaps one lifetime or many lifetimes - until one day we wake up. That is life. You see, I have been interpreting and psychoanalyzing my dream!
So are we in a dream? In a sense yes, but not in a sci-fi sort of way. Not like Leonardo in Inception or Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. When we spiritually wake up we do not find ourselves in a pod of goo connected to wires. This is a helpful metaphor, but we must not make the mistake of taking this metaphor literally.
Yet in a sense we are deceived by our senses and our minds, and we live in a world formed by our senses and minds, thinking it is the totality of reality. It is not. You could say we start dreaming as soon as we are born, and that dream becomes more convincing as we get older. We awake fully to our pre-birth nature fully when we die. But we can awake now within the dream. We realize that this world is not what we thought it was and we are not what we thought we were. We see through this dream while being in it. That shift in perspective changes everything.
We know that everything proceeds from God, which means that everything is God. There is nothing apart from God. There is no separate existence. No birth and death. There is just God who is this, which makes it all beautiful. Ecclesiastes says that God makes all things beautiful in their time.
Our thoughts are God’s thoughts. God’s thoughts are our thoughts. God is living in and through us. Life is a saga written by the Author of Creation – God. And directed and produced and played by the Author. Life is a work of art by the Divine Artist. In our deepest nature that is what we are. To see this while being in this is spiritual awakening. It I salvation. It is liberation. It is eternal life now.