Thursday 25 April 2019

Life is but a dream...




From Tricycle 

'Enlightenment Rests on the Dream' by C. W. Huntington, Jr.

... From the Buddhist point of view, the dream is real in a sense—it is a real dream—but its true nature is veiled as it masquerades as waking life. When I’m dreaming, I experience myself as an individual moving through a world populated with objects and people separate from me. But the truth is that there is no real difference between the “I” and the objects or other people—it’s all an effect of the imagination, a vivid fantasy. To be lost in a dream means, then, to be unaware that the perceived distinction between “me” and “not me” is an illusion created by the mind.

So it is that when I wake up in the morning I say to myself, It was all just a dream, and I marvel at how profoundly I was deceived while I slept. Then I get out of bed and go about my business. The fact that only hours before I was wholly betrayed by my mind—taking imagination for reality—does not, as a rule, provoke me to question the contours of my waking life and its fundamental distinction between self and other.

This is somewhat curious. Where do I derive this unreflective confidence that I and my world are exactly what they seem to be even though I am routinely misled in my dreams? What would it require to shake my certainty that things are not as they appear..."


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3 comments:

raschau said...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mysteries-consciousness/201907/what-if-consciousness-comes-first Just read this - any thoughts?

seanrobsville said...

Hi Raschau,
Many thanks for the link to this excellent article. I especially like the paragraph:

"The issue is that physical properties are by their nature relational, dispositional properties. That is, they describe the way that something is related to other things and/or has the disposition to affect or be affected by those other things. Most notably, physical properties describe the way that something affects an outside observer of that thing. But there is something going on in conscious experience that goes beyond how that conscious experience affects people looking at it from the outside. For this reason, the “what it’s like” to be a conscious mind can’t be described in the purely relational, dispositional terms accessible to science. There’s just no way to get there from here."

This is consistent with the Kadampa Buddhist view of how thing exist, in threefold dependence upon dynamics, structure and mind. http://seanrobsville.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-things-exist-according-to-buddhism.html

Dynamics and structure are both relational properties, whereas mind is not.

Ingrid Marshall said...

Helloo mate great blog