Source of inspiration: The Mastery of Love by don Miguel Ruiz
Ruiz writes about the Toltec teaching that life is a dream. This is not new to me as a concept. But today as I was reading about it, I had an experience of it that is new.
I assumed that my waking experience of life was a lucid dream (a conscious dreaming). And my first thought was, “Wow, what an interesting world my mind is creating right now.” On an experiential level, I felt the dreaminess of life. I felt life as a creation of my mind. But only in a reactive sense.
Upon reflection, it seems that there are two distinct parts to this experience of life as a dream, a reactive one and a proactive one. The reactive experience is the wonder and appreciation of what is happening in the dream: “Cool, a bird just flew by.” Or even painful experiences: “Ouch, that person’s insult hurt.” But the awareness of the dream keeps the pain from becoming suffering because I am conscious that it is not real. This reactive part of experiencing life as a dream seems very accessible to me.
The proactive part is a bit more elusive. It’s the perspective of “Okay, if this is a dream, then I can do whatever I want. There is nothing for me to be afraid of.” That seems a step or two further away. Clearly, I can’t step off the roof and fly (though who knows until you try, right?). But what about stepping off that metaphorical roof in social and professional circumstances that I’ve been afraid of up until now? When I imagine that, life seems scary and real, and not a dream at all.
So, although I’ve had an experience of life being a dream, I haven’t fully embraced that perspective. This seems like a fertile area for me to explore.
[...] Yesterday I caught a clip of financial alchemist Morgana Rae discussing how her relationship to money changed. She went from thinking of it as a villain to a handsome suitor. Right away I had the idea of putting that together with the “life is a dream” experience I wrote about yesterday. [...]