(From Handbook For Humans)
Imagine being asleep at night and having a really interesting dream. In this dream you’ve gone through many adventures and now find yourself somewhere in a distant city, beset by many troubles and challenges.
You desperately want to solve these troubles and return back home, but things seem to have gotten more and more difficult of late. In fact, sometimes it seems that resolving these troubles is getting more remote, perhaps impossible.
Now if you could be a counselor to yourself in this moment, what is the best advice you could give yourself? Of course, simply to wake up. Waking up from the dream solves all the problems simultaneously and automatically. They do not need to be solved any more. They are simply dissolved; they are transcended by coming to consciousness.
It’s hard to believe at first, but our life is very similar to this metaphor. The most radical and fundamental solution to the troubles of our life is to begin to wake up.
Now that can sound a bit silly. How can we wake up when we’re already awake?
Well, there’s the rub. Because those who have woken up tell us that we’re still asleep. And what they mean is that our ordinary waking consciousness, the one we’re using right now, is itself actually a kind of dream.
How can that be?
Let’s look at our ordinary waking consciousness for a moment. Perhaps the most remarkable feature about it is that it doesn’t stay the same. Our beliefs aren’t the same as they were a decade or two ago. Our state of mind can change from one moment to the next. Desire followed by joy followed by boredom followed by fear, and on and on.
If we sit down and really look carefully at our state of mind for a while, we’ll see constant subtle and not-so-subtle fluctuations occurring. A kind of battlefield for cross-currents of emotions, beliefs, attitudes, thoughts, desires, aversions, behavior patterns, etc. Though it seems like we’re awake, these various cross-currents and fluctuations weave a kind of dream or trance, a kind of being asleep while we’re awake.
An example. One time around 1977 I was attending a weekend seminar and had noticed an attractive woman. As the seminar ended, I began talking with her and asked her out. She said no. In reaction I quickly asked somebody else and they said no too. As I drove home a little bit later I was sunk in depression. Feelings of futility swept through me; thoughts of hopelessness permeated my consciousness.
At that moment, even though I was driving a car, it could be said that I was deeply asleep. I was caught up in my story, my drama, engrossed with it, identified with it. My state of mind did not seem like a feeling to me; rather, it seemed like “the truth,” like “this is how it really is,” like reality.
Those feelings and thoughts were like crashing waves on a stormy sea. Because of them, it was impossible to see into the still and silent depths beneath the surface.
Some moments are more extreme than others, but at all moments we’re beset by fluctuations of feelings and thoughts going through our minds. Our minds are continually engaged in evaluating our environment, mulling over problems, reminiscing about the past, reacting to frustrations, deciding what we want, what we’re against, and so on. These ever-changing fluctuations form our waking dream.
In this connection it’s interesting to recall the Buddha’s famous answer when asked what he was:
Are you a god? “No.”
Are you super-human? “No.”
Are you an ordinary man? “No.”
What are you then? “I’m awake.”
© 1997 by James Sloman
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