Life as we know it is akin to being in a dream or a video game. It is a grand illusion that we are unable to recognize because we’re both the dream and the dreamer. We’re both the video game and the video game character.
Yes, this means you. You rading this right now, you’re simultaneously dreaming that this is happening and you are creating this dream. Wake up!
This is why true spiritual enlightenment is so rare; the very nature of our existence generates questions from within that same existence. We try to analyze the illusion through our mind which is part of the illusion, leading to a labyrinth of paradoxes and misunderstandings. We must realize that trying to fit this understanding into any pre-existing knowledge is futile. This realization doesn’t integrate into your existing patchwork of knowledge or your human experience. It arises outside of human thought and experience so it cannot be put into concepts and words.
This is why you have to figure it out for yourself. Any resource or guru you come across can point to it and talk around it, but never directly state it. Any labels, like comparing it to a dream or a video game, are just attempts to point to it, but even if you logically understand what they mean, you won’t truly get it. At the end of the day, this is all just more noise within the dream.
As David Carse says in his book Perfect Brilliant Stillness: “Once a master has used a ladder to climb to the top of the wall, that ladder is thrown away forever and never used again. Find your own damn ladder. Better yet, know that it will find you; that it already has; that your feet are already on the rungs!”
The very essence of who ‘you’ are doesn’t exist in the way we believe. It’s a misconception, an erroneous perception of consciousness identifying as separate entities. And even as you watch this video, there isn’t a ‘you’ doing it. There is watching, reading, and hearing happening through you, but the ‘you’ you think is doing all this is actually your own creation and doesn’t exist.
Awakening, the supposed enlightenment, is not about changing anything—it’s the realization that Consciousness, Dao, Source, God, or whatever you want to call it is all there is, and that this ‘All There Is’ streams or flows through all things (including you). This Source animates your body and renders it conscious, so conscious in fact that it actually thinks it is an individual autonomous entity, a separate conscious being. This is the illusion.
This separate self we created tells us that our survival depends on pushing and making things happen, so we push and exert our force onto the external world and the world pushes back. The individual self is convinced that if it doesn’t do something, nothing will get done and you won’t be able to survive. Which is true, it won’t survive. But you will.
Self-inquiry brings this fact to our awareness and allows some of the pushing to subside, and so some of the pushing back also subsides. If we could only allow that ego to surrender to the flow of life we’d be able to see that we’re just pushing against ourselves. This is illustrated in the concept of Wei Wu Wei, action that is not willed but spontaneously happening through us.
Remember, the dream itself isn’t the issue—it’s the attachment to certain aspects of the dream that creates problems. When you go to sleep at night and dream that you are flying around town, do you feel like you actually did that when you wake up? No matter how vivid the dream is, or whether you have a scary dream or a happy dream, the second you wake up you realize it was all you creating the dream. Likewise, the realization that you’re dreaming a dream you call ‘you’ is all that’s needed.
Waking up from this dream doesn’t come from looking outside but from delving deep within, beyond the layers of intellect, reason, and emotion. Self-inquiry and stillness prompt us to question who is doing all this pushing and why. It challenges us to transcend our cultural norms and societal conditioning.
Stop trying to integrate this into the knowledge you’ve already accumulated. It doesn’t work like that. The only way this works is if it stops you in your tracks. Immerse yourself in relentless introspection, ask yourself the hard questions that take you out of everything you’ve ever known, and try to be relentlessly honest, authentic, and true. This is the only way to awaken to the truth that has always been there, waiting for you.
The JJ Experiment 