Who is the dreamer? June 8, 2008
Posted by bodhidude in : Psychology, Spirituality , trackback
I’ve often engaged in the contemplation that this life is a dream and the enlightenment process is awakening from the dream and realizing it to be a dream thereby ceasing to identify with it as solid and inherently real. So from this perspective what is the dream? The dream is the fluctuating constantly changing world of form in which we live. Just like in a night dream when we don’t realize we are dreaming we are swept up in the content of the dream and so react to that content as if it were solid and real. When we become lucid in the dream we realize that we are dreaming while still in the dream. This realization allows us to cease identifying with the content of the dream and instead identify with the dreamer. We realize we are creating the dream and therefore can choose to end it, change it or engage it. We take back our power from the illusory dream.
If we think of waking life a denser version of dream although equally illusory and lacking inherent existence we can cease to identify with the waking dream of form and instead identify with the dreamer who is aware of it. Recently I was reading from Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth and he brings up the question of just who is the dreamer from this perspective. The dreamer is not me, the “I” or my sense of self because when I wake up from the dream and cease to identify with the world of form my “self” is recognized as equally illusory and part of the dream. But if its not me that awakens from the dream then who is it?
Tolle addresses this in an interesting way. “The dreamer is not the person”…..”The dreamer is the absolute reality in which all forms come and go…..the dreamer is consciousness itself. Awakening from the dream is consciousness freeing itself from form and becoming aware of itself. The universe becoming aware of itself through the channel of us……
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