Cosmic Loti

Dream-like emptiness ~ the True Nature of our Reality, pt 3

“Buddha said ‘you should know that all phenomena are like dreams.”

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Modern Buddhism

Everything we see and perceive is no more real than last night’s dream.

Our experiences in this waking world certainly feel more real, and follow a more logical set of rules. If we jaywalk in front of a bus for example, it tends to matter a lot more if we do it when we’re awake, rather than tucked up safely in our beds.

So why would Milarepa, the Tibetan yogi and Saint, come out with:

“Last night’s dream was my teacher.

Is it the same for you?”

Not because he was likely to get run over by a bus in 10th century Tibet, but because he knew we create our reality. Reality doesn’t really exist, we unknowingly create it for ourselves via emptiness, one of the fundamental teachings of Buddhism.
That’s why co-creation can work so well. We’re taking resposibility for the world we create.

Buddha often taught using analogies, and the dream state is a brilliant analogy for how our waking world doesn’t have any inherent, concrete existence. So Buddha explained emptiness using the dream analogy.

As we’re falling asleep, our mind becomes increasingly subtle.
“In that subtle level of mind, a dream world appears.” Chönden
“This world may be similar to the world of our waking state, or it may be quite bizarre, but in either case, while we are dreaming, it appears to be utterly real.”
old Heart of Wisdom, Geshe-la

Check it out! Remember a vivid dream, or, if we only remember fragments from our dreams last night, did they feel real to us at the time, and did we we react as we normally would?
The answer for most of us will be yes. But if we knew we were dreaming, we could change our reactions to something more productive.

“It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? How we get caught up and caught out by our dreams every single night? Yet when we wake up we assume we’re so much more sensible when we’re awake, and we think, “Things appear real when I’m awake, so they must be.” The experience of dreaming night after night for however many years we’ve been dreaming has not managed to convince us that when we fall asleep again we’re just dreaming. We still think it’s real. So why do we trust our waking perceptions to be any more valid?”
Kadampa Life: Am I Dreaming?

Dream lands and the waking world are experientially the same. That’s why they both feel equally real, and why we can influence them far more than we give ourselves credit for.

“Dreams are real as long as they last.

Can we say more of life?”

Havelock Ellis

The dreamscape is inseparable from the mind that’s dreaming it.
Of course it is.
But that is how our waking world exists as well – inseparable from the mind that’s creating it, giving us the opportunity to co-create it.

“Our own dreams show how everything depends upon our mind – if our mind changes, our world changes.”
Kadampa Life: Am I Dreaming?

Everything being merely an appearance to our mind empowers us to change the way things are. We’re not the powerless victims of circumstance.
As David Icke puts it, we’re not the “little me” we’ve always limited ourselves to.

Having gained some understanding of this,

“don’t go back to sleep, don’t go back to ignorance,

move onto a better dream.”

Gen Chönden

• “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”  Dr. Forrest C. Shaklee
• Reality is a dream. If you want a better dream, become a better dreamer.

We each really do create our reality. We are free to create the world we live in,
and to be who we want to be.

¸.•*””*•.¸❤

Continued from:
Cosmic Loti: Dream Like Emptiness ~ the True Nature of our Reality pt 1
and pt 2, Like a Dream

Like this:
Equalising Doctor Who & the Daleks with Emptiness
(avec Clara-Oswin / the Doctor video :~)

Somerset Flood Images. Seeing Beauty in the Devastation

Vide Kadampa: Meditations on emptiness
Cosmic Loti: Collage for Children: Imagine Peace and it will Happen

Credits:
Quotes from Gen Chönden: Je Tsongkhapa empowerment teachings 20th April 2013

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso quotes from Modern Buddhism and an old well thumbed copy of Heart of Wisdom
butterfly: Lee Peiling, Photobotos
Orange Buddha: purplebuddhaproject via Tumblr
Click on images to make biG

dream pe☮ce