Waking Life.
BY URVIL JAMES VILLARUEL
Jan. 25, 2016, Toronto, ON - Anyone who has ever experienced meditation will know the feeling of closing off all of the senses to the external world; helping one to find that bit of clarity and quiet in the internal world. By similar descriptive, this can also be seen as the same thing as the experience of deep sleep. The difference being that in one state, you are conscious; while in the other, you are not.
What gets really interesting is our concept of reality in both our waking and dreaming states at this point. While in deep sleep, the mind is not yet fully wakeful enough to allow its presence to be felt. Though, if one becomes wakeful just enough, the ego appears; creating separation and differentiation within our unconscious world. We call this dreaming. This same phenomenon can also be found in our waking life, as well. When not in a state of meditation, when not simply just being, the mind becomes present and creates with it a sense of separation and differentiation for what we can see and identify with.
Taking this further, when we dream, there is but one creator: us. The separation that our mind creates within its dreaming state is seen as real, and yet, when we wake, we know that it is not. Similarly, in waking life, we know that there is also but one creator for our existence, the universe; our plane of interactivity for 'life', held together by the five-elements (earth, water, fire, air and space). What then becomes the difference between waking life and dreaming, when in both realities it is the mind that creates this sense of separation and identification for us in each space? If we are the ones who create our dreams, but the universe has created us, then are our dreams not also just a bi-product of the universe; resulting in there being no real ‘us’ to be ‘doing’ anything? What would this mean to us if we knew that all life was merely some materialized form of collective dreaming? Like the lucid dreaming had in our unconscious, perhaps we could eventually enact that same sense of lucid dreaming in our waking life; allowing us to do the things that we want to in this life.
Like the samurai of old, they say that ‘all life is but a dream’. We have already died, and therefore, we should not fear what has already come. For, if this moment is all that we have, then this moment has already came and left - both past and future being merely another creation of separation and identification for the mind.
In the end, what is this theory but just another tool for the mind to help you to enjoy the most out of your life. Through the practice of understanding the mind through the mind, we can come to realize that from this moment and into the next, loving life is the key to creating your most favourable future; right here, in the present moment. No matter which path you take to help get you there, mind, ultimately, is the real trip.