How To Look at the World from Dream, Sleep-- to Reality

Peter O’Donoghue, Contributor
Waking Times

The moment we wake from dreamless sleep, the world, and us as individuals within it, suddenly come back into existence and a new experience begins.

The reality we perceive around us seems definite and solid, governed by fixed laws. We use our senses to ascertain what appears to be going on and use this information to take actions and carry out tasks, all the while confident in our assumption that the world exists independently of ourselves.

There is the basic idea that the world is out there and we live in it, essentially passive players powerless to change the nature of our experience, content to make the best of the cards we are dealt. If we die it makes no difference to the unresponsive external realm, it goes on regardless, just as it did before we were born. For the majority of us, this is life.

That is, until we begin investigating the nature of matter. Numerous spiritual and philosophical traditions (including Platonic, Sufi and Aboriginal systems) tell us that the reality we take as the external world is merely a dream, a holographic projection and the shadow of a greater reality lying behind it.

What we believe is solid and permanent is nothing of the sort. If you expanded an atom to the size of a cathedral, the amount of supposedly solid material in it would be the size of a small coin. Matter is almost completely empty space, and far from existing in a Newtonian, billiard ball, universe; relativity and quantum physics have proven we live in a matrix of ever morphing energy, constantly flashing in and out of existence in a chaotic foam of frenzied activity.

There are no such things as particles or atoms, merely probability clouds in which we can be more or less certain something rather than nothing exists. Everything is in motion, plastic and bizarre. Wave/particle duality, the Double Slit Experiment, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Schrodinger’s Cat, the list of mind boggling and paradoxical insights into this rabbit hole of a universe goes on.

The deeper we delve, the more incredible and mysterious the subject becomes, confounding and resisting even our most earnest attempts to understand it. The more we probe and find what we think is an answer, the more reality throws up further enigmas, elusively evading our grasp.

Perhaps most intriguingly, the so called ‘Observer Effect’ demonstrates that reality is RESPONSIVE and moulds itself to our expectations, showing itself to be far more interactive than we previously thought. Our role has become that of active creator rather than passive observer, shaping our experience in a conscious universe through our own personal beliefs and filters.

When we ask ‘If a tree falls down in a forest and there’s no one to see it, does it make a sound?’ The correct response, according to the insights of mysticism and physics, seems to be that there isn’t actually a tree or forest in the first place without the observer. The act of observation itself creates the observed.

A Hindu monk in Rishikesh once asked me ‘When you lose awareness of your self during sleep, how can you be sure the entire universe doesn’t also cease to exist?’

Can you entertain the notion that you, and you alone, are responsible for everything you see and experience?

Ponder and get back to me.

Stay aware, like and share…