Lucid dreaming tells us that we are actually awake.
Lucid waking tells us that we are actually beyond experience.
There's an ancient story about a man who dreams night after night that he's a talking peacock. He starts to wonder whether he is dreaming the bird or whether the Peacock is dreaming him in his waking life. This story hints at a core teaching of the philosophy of non-dualism -- Consciousness AND its objects are all in the dream. Though distinct, they are not separate from one another. They arise in complete interdependence, appearing unto a prior awareness that beholds both appearing objects and the pseudo-subject that is subconsciously identified with its perceivables through reaction, attachment, aversion, preference, prejudice, desire, sensation and etc. You know, all those things the Buddha described as sources of suffering.
We assume the reality of a separate consciousness which oversees our entangled engagement in object relations without realizing that all reactive modalities of consciousness manifest, as it were, in the dynamic hyphen that both joins and separates the subject-object dichotomy.
Prior awareness, so called to distinguish it from object related consciousness, transcends experience, requiring nothing in order to be aware. It is the only true subjectivity to be found and it's never not here, to put it awkwardly. We tend to ignore prior awareness for the reason that it can never be found. Only objects can be found, attached, always, to an observer who disappears into the activity of observing upon close inquiry into where exactly he/she/it might be found all on its own.
Thoughts and feelings, in this context, are objects, every bit as much as super novas and pumpkins. They just FEEL more subjective because they take place inside this living, breathing, self-involved thought and memory animatron I call "me". I might think that all the stuff that goes on inside my head is subjective only, but how can it be so if it appears UNTO my present awareness? Dogs never have such problems. They're just, ecstatically much of the time, one with whatever's going on.
Consider the possibility that each and every 'thing' we term an object is an expression of a quality of awareness. Yes, rock fans, even hardness is an expression of a quality of awareness. (For a brilliant exposition of this subject (pardon the pun) see: Peter Wilberg's, 'The Qualia Revolution: From Quantum Physics To Cosmic Qualia Science - 2nd Edition').
We think we are our conditioned image of ourselves, which includes this aging object called 'body'. We almost never develop any serious interest in getting to know the always present, unchanging, aware presence which alone notices the coming and going of absolutely everything, including ourselves and our assumptions about subjectivity. When this embodied life goes, only that presence remains. It never went anywhere in the first place, so how could it go? It has never arisen as anything that could come or go. It simply always IS. If you wish to get a felt sense of it, try Rupert Spira's marvelous little exercise. Standing all alone in a room, step towards the nearest piece of furniture. When you've completed that, stand again in the center of the room and step towards yourself. Almost immediately, you will discover that all effort to accomplish that is pointless and just drops away. You ARE the destination. Do you see the point of the exercise?
As Heidegger envisioned the matter, awareness grants to us our very beingness. It is the space, the light and the source. It is the 'awareness principle' (Peter Wilberg's term) that alone makes perception and life itself possible. Awakening at this threshold where being itself is bequeathed, we find no one to thank for this ultimate gift. In Heidegger's words, "It is enough to be able to give thanks."
"The being of all things that are recognized in awareness in turn depends on awareness."
-- Abhinavagupta (10th Century), cited by Peter Wilberg in 'The Science Delusion'.
We assume the reality of a separate consciousness which oversees our entangled engagement in object relations without realizing that all reactive modalities of consciousness manifest, as it were, in the dynamic hyphen that both joins and separates the subject-object dichotomy.
Prior awareness, so called to distinguish it from object related consciousness, transcends experience, requiring nothing in order to be aware. It is the only true subjectivity to be found and it's never not here, to put it awkwardly. We tend to ignore prior awareness for the reason that it can never be found. Only objects can be found, attached, always, to an observer who disappears into the activity of observing upon close inquiry into where exactly he/she/it might be found all on its own.
Thoughts and feelings, in this context, are objects, every bit as much as super novas and pumpkins. They just FEEL more subjective because they take place inside this living, breathing, self-involved thought and memory animatron I call "me". I might think that all the stuff that goes on inside my head is subjective only, but how can it be so if it appears UNTO my present awareness? Dogs never have such problems. They're just, ecstatically much of the time, one with whatever's going on.
Consider the possibility that each and every 'thing' we term an object is an expression of a quality of awareness. Yes, rock fans, even hardness is an expression of a quality of awareness. (For a brilliant exposition of this subject (pardon the pun) see: Peter Wilberg's, 'The Qualia Revolution: From Quantum Physics To Cosmic Qualia Science - 2nd Edition').
We think we are our conditioned image of ourselves, which includes this aging object called 'body'. We almost never develop any serious interest in getting to know the always present, unchanging, aware presence which alone notices the coming and going of absolutely everything, including ourselves and our assumptions about subjectivity. When this embodied life goes, only that presence remains. It never went anywhere in the first place, so how could it go? It has never arisen as anything that could come or go. It simply always IS. If you wish to get a felt sense of it, try Rupert Spira's marvelous little exercise. Standing all alone in a room, step towards the nearest piece of furniture. When you've completed that, stand again in the center of the room and step towards yourself. Almost immediately, you will discover that all effort to accomplish that is pointless and just drops away. You ARE the destination. Do you see the point of the exercise?
As Heidegger envisioned the matter, awareness grants to us our very beingness. It is the space, the light and the source. It is the 'awareness principle' (Peter Wilberg's term) that alone makes perception and life itself possible. Awakening at this threshold where being itself is bequeathed, we find no one to thank for this ultimate gift. In Heidegger's words, "It is enough to be able to give thanks."
"The being of all things that are recognized in awareness in turn depends on awareness."
-- Abhinavagupta (10th Century), cited by Peter Wilberg in 'The Science Delusion'.
'... are you trying to catch a glimpse of the Dreamer before you wake up?'
-- Wei Wu Wei
Ah, I'm lucid dreaming. Flushed with confidence, I can do anything I want without fear of consequences: Ravish a nubile woman whom I successfully conjure into view; walk naked in the dream public, impose my will, gleefully ransack the environs for anything I can get away with. Am I a power mad psycho? Nah, it's all just a dream. For a few exhilarating moments I am a god of the dream domain, in it and beyond it. No one gets hurt. In the company of illusions, I am free to be a self indulgent asshole with no karmic price to pay.
But then, once upon a daylight dreary while I pondered weak and weary, I met a meditation teacher, a Siddha guru, and for the first time felt the impact of one lucidly dreaming this waking life. His presence pierced at right angles every inadequate concept I held concerning life, liberty and the avoidance of annihilation. The connection with him was more charged and intimate than my relationship with who I thought I was. This fact alone, to my campaigning ego, proved extremely disconcerting.
Imagine that you are having a lucid dream, aware that you're dreaming. A dream character approaches and, in desperate tones, pleads, "I know this is all happening only from your point of view! But, please! Don't let me vanish here. Take me with you. I'll do anything you ask. I beg you. Show me the way to the real world!" Hanging out with the Siddha was much like this, with me doing the pleading. What could he possibly say to me? How console someone convinced that his illusory self-hood is who he truly, substantively, is?
The Siddha's response to my pleadings was to point his right index finger up into the air. Huh? What? But I got it. He was pointing out the obvious. He was saying, "Understand your ontological status, buffoon. Relax into uncontrived devotion towards that which is living you. It's not a god up in the sky somewhere. It's an absolute miracle upstream of all your concepts and beliefs. It's so close you cannot even see it."
One simple, true thing shone through all confusions of dreaming vs awakening that got stirred up in his presence. It was a matter of the heart and it went like this: If I were a dream figment to him, why should he care at all whether I awaken or disappear? Yet he did. He cared with all his heart. Sometimes, when my wife of many years smiles at me for no reason; when our son tells us he loves us; when our dog's tail still wags despite his being old and infirm, intimacy dissolves distinctions between deluded and lucid, dreaming and being.
My beloved's embrace, our son's regard, the Siddha's glance -- gentle breezes that part the ancient curtains of the dream.
But then, once upon a daylight dreary while I pondered weak and weary, I met a meditation teacher, a Siddha guru, and for the first time felt the impact of one lucidly dreaming this waking life. His presence pierced at right angles every inadequate concept I held concerning life, liberty and the avoidance of annihilation. The connection with him was more charged and intimate than my relationship with who I thought I was. This fact alone, to my campaigning ego, proved extremely disconcerting.
Imagine that you are having a lucid dream, aware that you're dreaming. A dream character approaches and, in desperate tones, pleads, "I know this is all happening only from your point of view! But, please! Don't let me vanish here. Take me with you. I'll do anything you ask. I beg you. Show me the way to the real world!" Hanging out with the Siddha was much like this, with me doing the pleading. What could he possibly say to me? How console someone convinced that his illusory self-hood is who he truly, substantively, is?
The Siddha's response to my pleadings was to point his right index finger up into the air. Huh? What? But I got it. He was pointing out the obvious. He was saying, "Understand your ontological status, buffoon. Relax into uncontrived devotion towards that which is living you. It's not a god up in the sky somewhere. It's an absolute miracle upstream of all your concepts and beliefs. It's so close you cannot even see it."
One simple, true thing shone through all confusions of dreaming vs awakening that got stirred up in his presence. It was a matter of the heart and it went like this: If I were a dream figment to him, why should he care at all whether I awaken or disappear? Yet he did. He cared with all his heart. Sometimes, when my wife of many years smiles at me for no reason; when our son tells us he loves us; when our dog's tail still wags despite his being old and infirm, intimacy dissolves distinctions between deluded and lucid, dreaming and being.
My beloved's embrace, our son's regard, the Siddha's glance -- gentle breezes that part the ancient curtains of the dream.
Dreamocracy is coming to the USA... with apologies to L. Cohen
Every night when you dream, a Big Bang happens. An entire dream world is created out of nothing, or, if you will, out of dense, snoozing cranial meat, which notion makes the whole dream display even more improbable. While the dream is on, it may seem totally real. You identify with dream events, dream characters and especially with yourself in the dream, particularly in dreams where, say, you're having great sex or finally passing that high school math exam.
But then the dream ends, you wake up and, without a second thought, get on about your business with real life; you know, the life that doesn't seem to care whether or not you believe in it and which seems much more real than the dream because the same unpaid bills still sit on the kitchen counter, as though personally placed by the implacable Goddess of Necessity.
Every dreamer lives in a private world; awake, we all share a common world, as Heraclitus noted a couple millennia ago.
Countless sages have patiently tried to point out to us that there actually is no dreamer, large or small, doing the dreaming of either our nightly dream world or our daily waking dream world. In truth, there is only the spontaneous dreaming function at work, a function that allows us to imagine anything we want to about how it is occurring. In truth, say the sages, we have no idea how it is occurring. It is spontaneously unfolding in the NOW and no one consulted us about any of it. This, it turns out, is actually a very good thing. The sheer joy, freshness and openness available in living from a not-knowing, beginner's mind is beyond all description, all conceptualization. Such a disposition lightens the burdens of conditioning and presupposition, awake in the post-logical harmonies of the actual.
Is the actual a dream? Is manifestation altogether necessarily a dream? As Buddhist author, Mathieu Ricard, points out, a dream that lasts a hundred years is no less a dream than one that lasts a few minutes. As cited elsewhere in Free Range Egos, the poet Wallace Stevens' profound insight is helpful here, "The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”
The Buddhist might say... "accept it willingly." -- without attachment, of course, which is the bugbear of belief. The sheer beauty of these lines by Stevens must have the last word (if such a thing ever existed)...
"Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.”
But then the dream ends, you wake up and, without a second thought, get on about your business with real life; you know, the life that doesn't seem to care whether or not you believe in it and which seems much more real than the dream because the same unpaid bills still sit on the kitchen counter, as though personally placed by the implacable Goddess of Necessity.
Every dreamer lives in a private world; awake, we all share a common world, as Heraclitus noted a couple millennia ago.
Countless sages have patiently tried to point out to us that there actually is no dreamer, large or small, doing the dreaming of either our nightly dream world or our daily waking dream world. In truth, there is only the spontaneous dreaming function at work, a function that allows us to imagine anything we want to about how it is occurring. In truth, say the sages, we have no idea how it is occurring. It is spontaneously unfolding in the NOW and no one consulted us about any of it. This, it turns out, is actually a very good thing. The sheer joy, freshness and openness available in living from a not-knowing, beginner's mind is beyond all description, all conceptualization. Such a disposition lightens the burdens of conditioning and presupposition, awake in the post-logical harmonies of the actual.
Is the actual a dream? Is manifestation altogether necessarily a dream? As Buddhist author, Mathieu Ricard, points out, a dream that lasts a hundred years is no less a dream than one that lasts a few minutes. As cited elsewhere in Free Range Egos, the poet Wallace Stevens' profound insight is helpful here, "The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”
The Buddhist might say... "accept it willingly." -- without attachment, of course, which is the bugbear of belief. The sheer beauty of these lines by Stevens must have the last word (if such a thing ever existed)...
"Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.”
Passing Muster
Last night I had a strange dream. I interacted with dream characters but it's as though I were watching myself interact. It wasn't really me being volitional and in
charge. It wasn't lucid, you know what I'm saying.
Then I must've had some hours of deep sleep. I say must've because there was zero
consciousness, ok? I had absolutely no idea I was deep sleeping at the time. Yet, I must've still been there, because I woke up in the morning and a part of me realized that I had been
conscious of nothing. From my subjective POV, no time had passed during cessation of consciousness, which makes the notion of POV irrelevant, but that's another story.
Conscious of nothing seems to equal no time. One day, some future Einstein may figure out what that means. A Buddhist mandala called "The Six Realms of Deluded Existence"' has been around for about a thousand years. It depicts the God Realm, the Titan Realm, the Human Realm, the Animal, Hungry Ghost and Hell Realms. These 'realms' are understood to be states of consciousness. When you step back to take in the whole picture of the mandala, you notice that all six realms reside inside the gaping mouth of an enormous cosmic scale demon. This demon, mandala scholars note, is time.
Meanwhile, the clock on my night table tells me that several real world tick-tock hours have passed. Not having experienced those hours, they didn't pass for me, but, once awake and reconnoitering, they must've passed. I mean, they must've.
About this time I started to get real interested in what MUST means. To my delight,
horror and excitement, a Google dictionary gives:
must
Verb: Be obliged to; "you must show your ID card".
Noun:
1 Something that should not be missed: "This video is a must for parents".
2 Grape juice before or during fermentation.
3 Mustiness, dampness, or mold.
4 The frenzied state of certain male animals, esp. elephants or camels, that is
associated with the rutting season.
Wow! Must is an imperative. Something that HAS TO BE DONE, ATTENDED TO, etc.
Like getting pissed on fermented grape juice or getting so aroused that you have to rut! But beware! For these pursuits also carry the equal and opposite Newtonian law connotation of molding and rotting.
Dreams Within Dreams vs Awake Beyond Dreams
Ramana Maharshi, revered by seekers and scholars East and West as one of the greatest sages of the twentieth century, was often asked by visitors to comment on the four classic modes of Consciousness identified in Yoga Sutras: the waking state, the dream state, the deep sleep state and the Turiya or transcendent state. Ramana didn't say much about the first three since we all know them so well. It's the Turiya state that is the humdinger, to put it philosophically. Turiya is the fully awakened state of the Self with a capital S. This Self has a lot in common with the Buddhist No-Self. It is nonlocal, non locatable, unfathomable and beyond being and non-being. No wonder most of us don't even know it's there... er, here.
I say 'here' because Ramana points out that of the four states, Turiya is the only one that neither comes nor goes. It is always present. It is the ISness of Present Awareness (even saying that is like trying to bite own's own teeth). Waking, dreaming and deep sleep come and go, or, at least, they APPEAR to come and go in relation to Turiya which is simply aware of them all and, without which, they could have no possible existence.
The brilliant Buddhist scholar, Morris Berman. once shared a fascinating metaphorical way of understanding this prior Awareness, a.k.a., Buddha Nature.
Think of a radio, said Berman, and imagine that each of the stations we can tune in along the radio band represents a different level of conciousness. Down low on the band, we might tune in the simple non-reflexive awareness of plants. Further up, at higher frequencies, we tune in higher animals... and further up still, human ego-centered comnsciousness... yet higher, cosmic transpersonal states, Buddhism's Big Mind states. Now, here comes the fun part, says Berman: Fully awake Buddha Nature is not limited to or identical with any of those states (stations) on the band.
Buddha Nature is the fact that the radio is ON.
.
I say 'here' because Ramana points out that of the four states, Turiya is the only one that neither comes nor goes. It is always present. It is the ISness of Present Awareness (even saying that is like trying to bite own's own teeth). Waking, dreaming and deep sleep come and go, or, at least, they APPEAR to come and go in relation to Turiya which is simply aware of them all and, without which, they could have no possible existence.
The brilliant Buddhist scholar, Morris Berman. once shared a fascinating metaphorical way of understanding this prior Awareness, a.k.a., Buddha Nature.
Think of a radio, said Berman, and imagine that each of the stations we can tune in along the radio band represents a different level of conciousness. Down low on the band, we might tune in the simple non-reflexive awareness of plants. Further up, at higher frequencies, we tune in higher animals... and further up still, human ego-centered comnsciousness... yet higher, cosmic transpersonal states, Buddhism's Big Mind states. Now, here comes the fun part, says Berman: Fully awake Buddha Nature is not limited to or identical with any of those states (stations) on the band.
Buddha Nature is the fact that the radio is ON.
.
That is precisely how Ramana explained the relationship of Turiya to the states of waking, dreaming and deep sleep. Turiya is not another or fourth state, added on to the other three or to be compared with them. It is, rather, the foundational, timeless Awareness-Presence that makes the other three states possible altogether.
Ganooshji's questions provoked by the radio metaphor...
Is the radio affected by any of the stations playing at any one time?
Does the radio prefer one station over another?
Does the radio judge any of the content it blasts out?
Does the radio grieve when any station is tuned out?
Is the silence between stations any less alive than the tuned in noise?
Does the radio disappear when it is turned off?
Does the radio power itself? If not, what might it mean that the power source is always beyond the unit?
Does the radio prefer one station over another?
Does the radio judge any of the content it blasts out?
Does the radio grieve when any station is tuned out?
Is the silence between stations any less alive than the tuned in noise?
Does the radio disappear when it is turned off?
Does the radio power itself? If not, what might it mean that the power source is always beyond the unit?
Photo by Phil Lanyon
images are the primary data of the psyche -- Jung
Images carry the meaning of dreams in powerful ways. Our daylight language and conceptualizing can unravel the dream's import, but the primary, upstream significance of the dream is always right there IN THE IMAGE. Recently, I dreamt that I was arguing with a friend over the Israel-Palestine issue. In waking life, we two had debated this issue many times over the years and it always provoked passionate involvement for both of us. In the dream, I got the best of him in the argument by doggedly pushing my point in his face until he relented. I consider it significant that, not only could I not remember the point I was making when I awoke, I could not even keep track of it while I was soap boxing in the dream. As soon as I had made my all important vanishing point, my friend left the room where we were staying, along with his wife and my wife. I realized then that we were in a foreign country, far from home and that I had best catch up to them, since they knew the way to the train. However, I first had to deal with a vacuum cleaner that suddenly needed tending to as a kind of visual punctuation to the argument which I had just, in my own mind, won.
As a result of tending to the vacuum cleaner, I fell behind the others. Leaving the room, I made my way down a long dusty trail in sunny Mediterranean surroundings. I would catch up to them. However, when I entered a busy town full of pedestrians, I realized I'd gotten turned around and could no longer tell whether I was following the others to the train station or heading back the way I had come. The sheer frustration and panic of getting lost and never finding the way home, woke me up.
Out of long practiced habit, my mind went back over the images of the dream which all seemed to cohere around the notion that my fierce need to win an argument had resulted in me losing my way 'home'... at which point, the vacuum cleaner from the dream appeared solidly in front of me with an inner voice announcing, "having to be right SUCKS."
Unraveling the Knitted Sleeve of Dreams
Do you ever remember in your dreams? That is, do you actually use memory in your dreams? Ever? If not, why not? What could that possibly mean about the nature of the dream world?
When you wake up from a dream, do you wonder what happened to the other people and/or animals in your dream? They were all part of you; part of your dream world. What about the Dream-You? Is it essentially any different than the others who disappear when you wake up?
If you were identical with your consciousness, would you have any knowledge at all of having been unconscious during deep, dreamless sleep? Subjectively speaking, does time exist if you are not conscious to experience it?
When you have a lucid dream and know you are dreaming, do you continue to let the dream unfold or do you bend it to your conscious will, desires, agenda, etc.? What happens when you try to consciously direct or control the dream? What does all this have to do with the Greek myth of Hercules in the Underworld?
Is the dream world a less relative reality than the waking world? Might it not make more sense to interpret our waking world in terms of our dream world, rather than the other way around? Which seems more real to you, a reality that is always new and spontaneous or one that presents you with endless recurring patterns of habit, necessity and unpaid karmic debt? Exception: recurring dreams.
Samsara Cinerama
First there is a movie , then there is no movie, then there is...
... a sequel
Like our lives, movies have a beginning, middle and end. Movies present this temporal arc in ways that few other art forms can match. They offer visual, aural and cognitive engagement in real time, or, at least, real movie time. Everything is involved but the senses of smell and touch. Movies are currently the best simulacra of our beginning-middle-and-end existential situation altogether.
Every movie starts with a clean slate. Like our lives, we insist that films start out of the clean slate of oblivion. Screen and theater go dark. But that darkness is full of the light of lights in the form of the collective Awareness of an audience. Note that in real real time, only the audience is alive. All other components of the movie – projector, film or digital delivery system, Dolby sound, screen, padded seats, popcorn – are neither alive nor conscious. Neither is anything of which you are conscious in so called real life, except that everything that occurs unto your awareness is not separate from the aliveness that awareness imparts. This sounds vague and New Agey, but it's just how things are, if we look directly without surmising anything based on what authorities, high priests or certified wise guys have told us.
The raison d’etre of film is to serve the interests of the passive awarenesses sitting in the dark, which aren’t so passive. To cite a psychedelic era minstrel bard, ‘if there ain’t no audience, there ain’t no show.’
Music and opening titles announce the big bang of a whole new movie world. If it’s a great film, the audience is pulled right in, living the stories of the characters, forgetting themselves in the process; totally involved, yet, in a real way, unaffected by, say, if it's an American film, the gunshots that kill off half the movie’s cast. Fundamentally, the audience remain witnesses only, but fully engaged witnesses who love the great movie and will search eagerly for another as gripping, engaging and entertaining. Why do movies in which we forget ourselves prove so rewarding and exalting?
Your eyes open in the morning, announcing the big bang of a brand new beginning-middle-and-end adventure compliments of waking state consciousness. All the components of your waking world are objects of your awareness only. None of those objects are directly experienceable as being conscious. Other people may appear to be conscious, but you have no direct experience of that. From your point of view, they are all objects in, or of, your consciousness, you movie watcher you.
If you look with real interest, you’ll intuit the presence of that part of you that just notices everything. It even notices your own thoughts as just more objects. Your thoughts are not conscious. If they were, they’d be conscious of you. They can no more be conscious of you than can these words you’re reading on the page.
That aspect of You which notices everything never goes anywhere. It is always here, hidden, in the dark, just like the theater goer for whom the whole rampaging, multi-billion dollar movie business exists. You can never see that One. Try it some time. Try to see That in You which is Doing the Looking. The closer you get to it, the less it appears that it is in you, but rather that it IS only here and now, eternally. And it’s a very different kind of eternity than endless duration in time, for the simple reason that here-and-now is always NEW. Just take a look.
This borderless, omnipresent Awareness watches your waking and sleeping life the same way it watches movies through your eyes and through your reactive, thinking mind – totally present and aware while unaffected by what comes and goes. Unlike your (and my) knee-jerk, habit formed thoughts that judge everything and are constantly all hot and bothered by what comes and goes, awareness never judges.
It’s just Aware.
Meanwhile, in a small room in Mumbai
Visitor: What is the point of consciousness and everything of which consciousness is
aware?
Sri Ganoosh: It’s all entertainment.
Visitor: No, but underneath the entertainment, what is the real meaning and import
of everything that appears and That which notices everything that appears?
Sri Ganoosh: You’re not listening. Go away and come back after the third act.
Visitor: Are you suggesting that I am beyond Consciousness?
Ganoosh hits a gong. Pigeons flutter aloft from the window ledge.
... a sequel
Like our lives, movies have a beginning, middle and end. Movies present this temporal arc in ways that few other art forms can match. They offer visual, aural and cognitive engagement in real time, or, at least, real movie time. Everything is involved but the senses of smell and touch. Movies are currently the best simulacra of our beginning-middle-and-end existential situation altogether.
Every movie starts with a clean slate. Like our lives, we insist that films start out of the clean slate of oblivion. Screen and theater go dark. But that darkness is full of the light of lights in the form of the collective Awareness of an audience. Note that in real real time, only the audience is alive. All other components of the movie – projector, film or digital delivery system, Dolby sound, screen, padded seats, popcorn – are neither alive nor conscious. Neither is anything of which you are conscious in so called real life, except that everything that occurs unto your awareness is not separate from the aliveness that awareness imparts. This sounds vague and New Agey, but it's just how things are, if we look directly without surmising anything based on what authorities, high priests or certified wise guys have told us.
The raison d’etre of film is to serve the interests of the passive awarenesses sitting in the dark, which aren’t so passive. To cite a psychedelic era minstrel bard, ‘if there ain’t no audience, there ain’t no show.’
Music and opening titles announce the big bang of a whole new movie world. If it’s a great film, the audience is pulled right in, living the stories of the characters, forgetting themselves in the process; totally involved, yet, in a real way, unaffected by, say, if it's an American film, the gunshots that kill off half the movie’s cast. Fundamentally, the audience remain witnesses only, but fully engaged witnesses who love the great movie and will search eagerly for another as gripping, engaging and entertaining. Why do movies in which we forget ourselves prove so rewarding and exalting?
Your eyes open in the morning, announcing the big bang of a brand new beginning-middle-and-end adventure compliments of waking state consciousness. All the components of your waking world are objects of your awareness only. None of those objects are directly experienceable as being conscious. Other people may appear to be conscious, but you have no direct experience of that. From your point of view, they are all objects in, or of, your consciousness, you movie watcher you.
If you look with real interest, you’ll intuit the presence of that part of you that just notices everything. It even notices your own thoughts as just more objects. Your thoughts are not conscious. If they were, they’d be conscious of you. They can no more be conscious of you than can these words you’re reading on the page.
That aspect of You which notices everything never goes anywhere. It is always here, hidden, in the dark, just like the theater goer for whom the whole rampaging, multi-billion dollar movie business exists. You can never see that One. Try it some time. Try to see That in You which is Doing the Looking. The closer you get to it, the less it appears that it is in you, but rather that it IS only here and now, eternally. And it’s a very different kind of eternity than endless duration in time, for the simple reason that here-and-now is always NEW. Just take a look.
This borderless, omnipresent Awareness watches your waking and sleeping life the same way it watches movies through your eyes and through your reactive, thinking mind – totally present and aware while unaffected by what comes and goes. Unlike your (and my) knee-jerk, habit formed thoughts that judge everything and are constantly all hot and bothered by what comes and goes, awareness never judges.
It’s just Aware.
Meanwhile, in a small room in Mumbai
Visitor: What is the point of consciousness and everything of which consciousness is
aware?
Sri Ganoosh: It’s all entertainment.
Visitor: No, but underneath the entertainment, what is the real meaning and import
of everything that appears and That which notices everything that appears?
Sri Ganoosh: You’re not listening. Go away and come back after the third act.
Visitor: Are you suggesting that I am beyond Consciousness?
Ganoosh hits a gong. Pigeons flutter aloft from the window ledge.
Dreams Indicative of Having Entered a Bardo State
You, either alone or in the company of a significant other, are in a terminal. It could be a bus terminal, a ferry terminal, a train terminal or an airport. You are heading home, but there are complications. Your partner heads off to buy a ticket, use the washroom, buy a book or something to eat and doesn't return. You go looking for him/her then realize you've left your luggage unattended. The plane/train/bus is now leaving from a different gate/platform and you did not hear the announcement clearly over the PA. You look for a ticket/information booth. How can you buy a ticket? You have no money. A sinking feeling comes over you that you may never get home.
Walking outdoors, the terrain suddenly becomes vertical. You climb. There is no clear idea of where or what you are climbing to, it just seems very important to keep climbing and to get over the top of the ridge. The struggle of getting up and over the last few feet is so intense that it wakes you up. Your heart may be pounding.
You find yourself inside a large futuristic travel terminal that appears to be suspended in zero gravity space. The universe without is not dark but very bright and alive. There may be enormous multicolored star clusters and gas clouds. Inside, the terminal is very busy. Beings of all kinds are coming and going, not unlike the headquarters of 'Men In Black'. You arrive at the central reception desk, either alone or with another who seems to be a waking state companion or a familiar soul companion. An extraordinary, numinous being in human form hands out your instructions as to what's up for your next phase of the journey or 'the work'. You are exhilarated. The energy is very high. As you wake from the dream, you realize you have forgotten or not comprehended the instructions.
Specific details, settings and circumstances may vary all over the map, but there are basic themes and patterns in these special dreams that point to issues far beyond what Freud called "residues of the day."
Specific details, settings and circumstances may vary all over the map, but there are basic themes and patterns in these special dreams that point to issues far beyond what Freud called "residues of the day."
Lucille comments: All states are Bardo states. Their ground is the Stateless State of Free Awareness, the sole aspect of us that is truly alive. Besides, you didn't mention one of the most important ones:
You're naked in front of other people. You can't find your pants/skirt. How can you be seen like this? And why does this kind of dream keep recurring? Is there a part of you that's getting off on being exposed to view? What does nakedness before others really mean? Is it naughty? Is it a repressed spiritual desire?
The Dream Is Real... the Dreamer Alone is True and Is Nowhere But Here and Now, Ever.
The dreamworld from time to time reveals images that are very, very ancient and some times not of this world. Somehow, what I call "my" consciousness seems capable of conjuring up strange new places I've never been; fabulous animals I've never seen before and all kinds of dream people who are nothing like me at all. I don't consciously or knowingly do this conjuring. It just happens spontaneously.
Take waking life, please. Other than heaps of necessity, repetition and binding rules, how is waking life essentially any different from the dream world? It's all just happening spontaneously. Neither your ego nor mine ordered any of this, nor do we exercise anything but the most provisional control over what really matters in the waking dream -- sex, love, success, pain, death, to name a few.
Other people in the waking dream seem so real. Like me, they appear to be autonomous, self-directed beings. Like me, they seem unaware that the only aspect of them that can truly be said to be conscious, is an absolute Alive-Open-Intelligent Singularity without which, we and our far downstream waking-dream egos, would be aware of precisely nothing. Don't look for that Alive Awareness. It is doing the looking. Always. Through all eyes. It's not just a big super-conscious God type Dude, either. That would just be another thing. It is absolutely unfathomable and it is nothing less than that which makes perception possible. You don't have to be smart or pure to get this. It is already our natural state, even while we're distracting ourselves from it and surfing the waking dream, convinced that we and all others couldn't possibly wake up from this and find that it, too, is just a dream.
Dreams Without A Dreamer
As the Buddha saw it, there is no autonomous, self-sustaining, separate self anywhere, and this in spite of monumental energies expended by countless millions of humans who take themselves dead seriously as autonomous, precious selves and their perceived enemies to be demonized, subhuman yet actual entities that must be blown up post haste.
If the Buddha is right, we were not created in God's image and magically sent off as little autonomous units separate from the whole. We are parts of a seamless manifestation that spontaneously arises from beginningless time, and I put that in the present tense because there's no actual proof that any of it is going anywhere other than this NOW that we always seem to be occupying. Our geocentric, linear, historical view of our own existence is embarrassingly narrow band.
Jumping, without apology, from the Buddha to Kashmir Shaivism, let's look at SPANDA. That's the name Shaivism gives to an unfathomable cosmos-generating impulse that irresistibly Big Bangs stuff into existence out of some inconceivably vast Pleroma that yogins talk about in the context of Bhava Samadhi, which we might translate as "a great unspeakable matter."
SPANDA... Say it with gusto. It even sounds like something blasting out of the void. In the initial blasting forth into existence phase, this great Creative Function goes through Involutionary Phases. Taking a holiday from the Unspeakable Prior Absolute, Consciousness plays hide and seek with itself to the point of producing, among other freaky anomalies, dense, meaty physical forms that take themselves very seriously as arbiters of a reality beyond their ken. In fact, yogins and sages note, the degree of delusion suffered by carbon based humanoid life units seems directly proportional to the seriousness with which they assume the mantle of Pre-eminent Knowledge of What Is.
In Spanda's Evolutionary Phases, consciousness expands and it becomes tacitly obvious to evolving entities that they are neither separate from the whole, nor, even entities, really, other than conditionally, phenomenally and for the sake of, you know, keeping up appearances. When consciousness does finally expand, it always seems to do so in a direction opposite to ego inflation.
If the Buddha is right, we were not created in God's image and magically sent off as little autonomous units separate from the whole. We are parts of a seamless manifestation that spontaneously arises from beginningless time, and I put that in the present tense because there's no actual proof that any of it is going anywhere other than this NOW that we always seem to be occupying. Our geocentric, linear, historical view of our own existence is embarrassingly narrow band.
Jumping, without apology, from the Buddha to Kashmir Shaivism, let's look at SPANDA. That's the name Shaivism gives to an unfathomable cosmos-generating impulse that irresistibly Big Bangs stuff into existence out of some inconceivably vast Pleroma that yogins talk about in the context of Bhava Samadhi, which we might translate as "a great unspeakable matter."
SPANDA... Say it with gusto. It even sounds like something blasting out of the void. In the initial blasting forth into existence phase, this great Creative Function goes through Involutionary Phases. Taking a holiday from the Unspeakable Prior Absolute, Consciousness plays hide and seek with itself to the point of producing, among other freaky anomalies, dense, meaty physical forms that take themselves very seriously as arbiters of a reality beyond their ken. In fact, yogins and sages note, the degree of delusion suffered by carbon based humanoid life units seems directly proportional to the seriousness with which they assume the mantle of Pre-eminent Knowledge of What Is.
In Spanda's Evolutionary Phases, consciousness expands and it becomes tacitly obvious to evolving entities that they are neither separate from the whole, nor, even entities, really, other than conditionally, phenomenally and for the sake of, you know, keeping up appearances. When consciousness does finally expand, it always seems to do so in a direction opposite to ego inflation.
