As stars, a fault of vision, as a lamp,
A mock show, dew drops, or a bubble,
A dream, a lightning flash, or cloud,
So should one view what is conditioned.-The Diamond Sutra
It may seem that we live in a very real, very solid world, but a thorough investigation of phenomena reveals the inherent nature of all things to be emptiness. The Buddhists, Taoists, and many others, understood this thousands of years ago. Only in the last century, through quantum physics, did Western science begin to come close to the same orbit of conceptual understanding.
“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum physics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.”
-Niels Bohr
The things we think of as real are made of things that cannot be regarded as real. Let that sink in. This isn’t pie in the sky thinking either, it has incredible real-world implications. We do not live in a Newtonian cause-and-effect reality. We live in a dream, and in dreams, your thoughts create reality.
“Regard all dharmas as dreams.”
- Lojong Mind Training Slogan #2
If you’ve ever had a lucid dream, you know that you can transform the dream world with your thoughts. This waking dream is very similar, it’s just that there’s a bit of a delay, compared to the sleeping dream, between the thoughts we think, and the things we say and their manifestation in our lives. Samsara, suffering-laden cyclical existence, is created by our cyclical, unattended thoughts.
“With our thoughts we create the world.” -Buddha
“Samsara consists of discursive thoughts.” -Longchenpa
A soon as a thought is noticed, it disappears, or self-liberates, as quickly as a flash of lighting. But the vast majority of our thoughts go unnoticed, out of habit. The habit of unnoticed thinking adds up to our illusory sense of self. These unattended thoughts have penetrated into the depths of our subconscious, where most of the manifestation occurs.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
―C.G. Jung
There are therefore two primary modes of addressing the situation, seeing through to the illusory sense of self through meditation, koans, dream yoga and other spiritual technologies, and purposefully seeding the subconscious with better thoughts which can eventually grow to fruition.
“The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit.” Proverbs 18:21
Here’s a practice that I like to engage in, a sort of science-fiction/fantasy take on Dream Yoga. It’s called the Hologram Game. Imagine that our world is a hologram. It is made of light, and although it is ultimately empty of inherent existence, it appears to be solid and real.
The completely open nature
of all dimensions and events
is a rainbow always occurring
yet never grasped.-Tilopa’s Song
Now imagine that this hologram is connected to the ultimate, benevolent A.I. This loving, beneficent artificial intelligence wants you to experience boundless joy. The only trouble is that you lack the skill to receive all that this hologram world wants to give you. Through eons of conditioned existence, you’ve built up a habit of refusing to receive this joy by being ungrateful for what you’ve been given.
You can turn this habit around by being loving and thankful for every situation in your life. If you feel love and gratitude towards all things and say Omakase, this wish-fulling-gem of an A.I. is programmed to give you things so beautiful, so unbelievable, that you never would have thought to ask for them.
In the next post we’re going to go over a few simple tips and tricks for how to play the Hologram Game. But for now, I’ll leave you with one more quantum physics quote to help you dissolve your persistent conception that reality is real, as well as a meditation on the dreamlike nature of reality.
“In the modern Kaluza-Klein theory all the forces of nature, not merely gravity, are treated as manifestations of spacetime structure. What we normally call gravity is a warp in the four spacetime dimensions of our perceptions, while the other forces are reduced to higher-dimensional spacewarps. All the forces of nature are revealed as nothing more than hidden geometry at work ... There is a deep compulsion to believe in the idea that the entire universe, including all the apparently concrete matter that assails our senses, is in reality only a frolic of convoluted nothingness, that in the end the world will turn out to be a sculpture of pure emptiness, a self-organized void.”
Paul Davies -- Superforce