What if when you die you wake up? And what if when you are born you die, that is to say, go to sleep?

If, in fact, you have ever had the experience of waking up while the body is still dreaming, you would no longer be a dreamer (person) but the dreaming itself, that is to say, consciousness itself or totality of being. For everything in the dream would be within you and would be you, there would be no outside, no subject outside of you, the awareness itself. Thus everything would be non-duality, you, being a nonperson. And knowing that you are not the body, there would be no need to be judgmental, or to take credit or blame for anything happening in the dream. Such is offered as a dream analogy to represent enlightenment or nirvana (liberation).

You have died to the attachment to your person or ego and woken up. However, when you identify with your person, remaining ego-centered, born to, and continuing in, a lower or secondary consciousness, you die to the real You or totality of being. You have gone asleep, so to speak, and like the subconscious which rolls in when unconscious, you create a dreamer or split-self (ego), who identifies with a body which sees that self outside everything else in a literal world (mind) often hostile and uncertain. Thus, the universe and life on earth is a mind game, as there is only mind or consciousness itself. What is called matter is an illusion, at its root being insubstantial, incomplete, not lasting…and the same may be said of us as persons.

In truth there is no individual soul, but only the soul or mind itself, the totality of being, the root and source of all that is. But the mind is playful and needs some stimulation to come aware, so the universe, and all that goes with it, is that stimulation. As persons, then, we live in a virtual reality, a matrix, actual but not real. Yet when caught up in the dream, you really believe it is real, that you are going somewhere, doing something, or something is happening to you–but you have not left your bed. Nor have you left your mind. It is all like an hallucination. However, when you wake up, being Wakefulness (enlightenment), you see through your self-deception and are freed from the possessiveness, the stickyness, the holding on and identifying with that selfishness (ego) which is your suffering.

Such is why we are here and Now. That is to say, we can be literally here (connected) with the body…yet be nonliterally Now as the mind itself. Thus, the mystery of life is a paradox, both actual and nonactual, both material and nonmaterial. However, the only way to know this is to be the knowing itself, as Such, being life itself, is beyond concepts, images and forms. In Suchness, then, there are no separate thing-events, no subject outside of Ourself as the Whole Consciousness. What appears outside of us is just like a dream and does not really matter.

But we still need to play the game, the mind game–the game of life. It is like growing up: we develop through various stages and obstacles, and maturing, finally see through the form/image/concept of life–realizing we are life itself. Thus when we are ready to wake up…we will wake up. To say again, We Are Life Itself! And so it is that every seeming thing which happens with us is only part of the game and play of energy. None of it is really solid or absolute. All of it, being relative, plays its part and passes. But fortunately for the secondary us, Life itself, the real Us, does not pass, remaining ever-present or eternal.

Meditate on this article, who knows, you just might wake up…