Waking up

Weekend contemplation

Photo by Jessica Ruscello on Unsplash

Imagine, for a moment, that you had the power to read other people’s minds. That you knew exactly how they experienced reality from one moment to the next. Even when they were asleep, you could perceive their dreams and emotions.

Now imagine that a person you really care about is having nightmares. They may be lying in a comfortable bed, but in their mind they are in altogether different realms they believe to be real. Perhaps they are in a hurtling car being driven by a reckless madman. Or making some kind of social appearance – only to discover that they’re stark naked. Or being chased through the streets with malevolent adversaries closing in.

Seeing this with perfect clarity, what would you do? Obviously, wake them. Give their shoulder a nudge. Call “Wake up!” or do whatever else it took to bring them back to normal consciousness. At which point they’d realize the horror they’d been living through was nothing more than a dream. A phantasm of their own mind.

In this scenario the clairvoyant being is a Buddha. The one having the nightmares is you or me. It is interesting to engage in a little role-reversal, imagining what it must like to be an enlightened being observing the minds of ordinary ones.

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One of the most commonly-used descriptions of reality, from a Buddha’s perspective, is ‘dream-like.’ Things don’t feel that way to us dreamers, of course. Our world, and everything in it, appears altogether solid. But when Shakyamuni Buddha was asked to explain how he was different, he didn’t say that he had any special, metaphysical powers, nor did he claim divinity. He simply said he was ‘awake’ – which is what the word ‘Buddha’ actually means.

What had he woken up to? The recognition that the world he’d previously been living in wasn’t the real, concretised place he had believed it to be. Like all of us, he had been labouring under the delusion that things were, objectively, just as he personally perceived them, and that all pleasant or unpleasant experiences were coming from “out there.” But he’d come to recognise that there is no such thing as a separate, independent, self-existent reality. To see that what appears outside of ourselves is, more than anything, a product of our own mind.

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We have a hundred reminders of this truth every day and yet somehow we diminish, overlook or completely ignore them. The drama series a friend recommends that we stop watching halfway through the first episode because it’s so terrible. The political views somebody confidently asserts, assuming that we must share them when we disagree fundamentally. The religious convictions of a sincere person that seem to us to be quite mad. These people may shop at the same grocery stores that we do. Wear similar clothes. We may share the street with them. But to varying extents, and in some important ways, we inhabit different realities.

It’s fascinating to observe the kaleidoscopic range of perceptions, thoughts and emotions that arise about anything and everything. Why is it happening? How can such divergent opinions exist about precisely the same scenarios?

Covid has provided us with a cornucopia of examples - arguments about why it came to exist, how much of a problem it is, and what we should do about it continue to send ructions around the world. Marriages have broken up over it – I personally know one couple who seemed so close but were undone by irreconcilable differences about whether to get vaccinated. Why is it that some people take a “live and let live” approach to those who hold different views from them, while others cast the same issues in moralistic terms of good vs evil? Matters over which they may fight to the death. The stuff of nightmares.

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The reason for our differences, of course, is karma. What we are projecting out onto the world arises from our minds, which are propelled by the way we condition them. What’s outside us are merely contributing factors. And even though most of us, most of the time, are completely oblivious to the process, with every movement of our mind we are creating the causes both for the way we will experience reality in the future, and the conditions for previous causes to ripen as effects in the here and now. We are the unwitting directors our own dreams or nightmares. Is it any surprise that no two people perceive their reality in the same way?

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Not even heaven. Most of us encounter the idea of a paradise in our formative years, perhaps when our parents try to soften the blow in explaining why a beloved relative or pet is no longer present. Although we grow up and mature as individuals, a child-like view of an afterlife continues to pervade our culture, sometimes irrespective of people’s religious beliefs or lack of them. There are many who cherish the notion that when they die they will find themselves in a transcendent place of beauty and light where they will be reunited with loved ones and thereafter abide in a state of eternal bliss.

Well, let’s say that there was a heavenly realm we could access, just the way we are. No matter how curmudgeonly, self-loathing, judgemental, or anxious we might be in life, all we need do is die and, in an instant, such is the transcendence of the heavenly state, we will find ourselves experiencing endless contentment.

Most of us have lived long enough to know the impact of changing our environment. When I moved from home to university, for example, I felt massive relief to be liberated from the constraints of my parents and prefects. But for all the freedoms there were also intense sorrows. I also had some of my most miserable times as a student because I was still me, with my problems and hang-ups. If anything, the relative sophistication and maturity of my new peers made me only more acutely aware of them.

We come to discover that there is no realm which has the power to make us feel one thing or another from its side because, more than anything, we are the ones making that realm with our thoughts.  To change our reality, we must first change ourselves.

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We do have the most compelling reason for hope. We may have spent most of our time tossing and turning in our dream state, unaware of what’s happening and why, as we get further and further entangled in the bedsheets. But something truly extraordinary is happening: we have conceived of waking up. The possibility of it. Given that we’re the ones doing the projecting, running the dream/nightmare scenarios, we’re also the ones who have enabled even the idea of an exit strategy to arise. How exceptional is that?

Our lamas like to emphasize this point, encouraging us to celebrate our own virtue. Our minds have somehow produced Buddha, Dharma and Sangha in the way that we conceive of them. If we are very fortunate indeed, we have even conceived of a guru or teacher.

We have reached the point where we have become aware that we may be dreaming, that things are not necessarily as they seem. And every bit we empower that dynamic, we weaken its opponent – the slide back into unconsciousness. We are getting to the stage that we are starting to doubt our own projections. And in the words of the legendary sage Aryadeva:

Those of little merit will not

Have even a suspicion of this Dharma.

For even merely the suspicion

Will shatter cyclic existence.

(Geshe Acharya Thubeten Loden, Path to Enlightenment, Tushita Publications, Melbourne, 1993, p1029)

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We have merit, dear reader, you and me. We are questioning appearances, suspecting that things aren’t as solid and true as we once assumed. And as we withdraw from our habit of compulsively engaging with every hallucination as though it’s real, we are lightening up. Rising to a new state of consciousness. Getting ready to open our eyes.