Watching the inner self: as I was waking up after sleep, I remained in “sleep”, eyes shut, watching myself coming out of the sleep state before even a thought had entered the space to bother me about the day ahead. Then it occurred to me, while still in “sleep” that this mind space of mine as I was just coming out of sleep is what it is like in deep meditation, as the mind wanders to the end of its waking state and at times falls over the edge and into the void and of no memory of where one had been when one is out of it. This is just like the “just coming out” of the waking state from sleep and sleep itself is similar to “falling off the edge and into the void” in meditation.
So is coming off the sleep state of mind really this start of the dream of existence which Buddhism talks about. That it is all this illusion of the mind. The 5 senses and the mind-body experience is the one that creates this illusion for us.
Then there is this: When I watched myself coming out of sleep and into the wake but still asleep state and saw this similarity in me between the meditative state and the sleep/awake state and who was watching this phenomenon in me: was it my personality that I had created from my experiences or was it some other me that I don’t know of. Since I was not fully awake as yet and no thought of mine in me to show me this then I assume that it was not my personality watching. There was another entity that is part of me showing me this and one can find this entity when in deep meditation and one has gone through the mind spaces and the end of it when all thought has fallen off the edge and there is only silence in mind and watching that there is this other self that is still watching which one can have a conversation with, with just an intention in mind.
Why wouldn’t the mind in meditation and the sleep/awake state have things in common as they are all part of the same process of going through different mind spaces and in and out of the illusion of the dream of existence and into the void of the darkness of sleep or meditation? Sleep is a process of resting and meditation is a process of exploration and “knowing thyself” and they are both using the same tunnel to explore the true self.
One gets the impression that the dream state of personality if not the true self and yet when the dream stops, there is another still in existence that is our true Self. We need to work off that bigger Self more: the Self which had not inherited all those lies that personality created for itself from experience. The Self that created the Cosmos of which we are a sliver of it here on this planet creating a living space for ourselves and yet we seem to be lost in translation and creating a house of cards instead for ourselves.
So what is at the end of this tunnel of the “dream of existence”. One will know it when one gets there but still wonder if there are limitations in the mind-body that does not allow us to “see” all of it. It all seems to end in darkness, so how can we get to more. So we look for others to tell us:
“This reality is empty of all falsehood, impermanence, ignorance, afflictions, and pain, but filled with enduring happiness, purity, knowingness (jnana), and omni-radiant loving-kindness (maitri).”
Hey, enlightenment is easy: just get rid of the illusion: spend more time in the upper mind and see what it has to offer as a working mind and spend less time in the lower mind of the personality and use it only when it is needed.
A Tathagata has access to both lower and upper minds.
12 December 2019