The Dream And Waking State

The waking state is becoming more dreamlike and the dream state is becoming more vivid. In the Bhagwad Gita it says that 'What is daytime for the ignorant is nighttime for the sage and what is daytime for the sage is nighttime for the ignorant.' What is meant by that is what is daytime or the waking state, from the conventional point of view, the waking state consists mainly of objects made out of matter. And objects are considered from the conventional point of view in the waking state to be the most real aspect of experience. When in fact the very word real or reality comes from the Latin word meaning the 'realis' meaning a thing. Betraying our belief that it is the extent to which something is a thing that it is real. And the extent to which it something departs from being a thing it becomes correspondingly less real. So when somebody says to you, "Oh come on, get real", they mean come out of your thoughts and feelings and come down to earth. Deal with things that are really real, which means objects made of matter. They're considered to be more real than thoughts and feelings. And thoughts and feelings are in turn considered to be more real than consciousness. Which if it's considered at all is considered to be the most effervescent trivial unimportant aspect of experience. That's the conventional point of view. 

However, if we explore our experience, consciousness is the most important element of experience. It is the only element of experience that we cannot do without. It is the most substantial element of experience because it it's the only element of experience that never disappears and that can't be destroyed. So from this point of view, from the point of view of consciousness, the waking state is, as Gita said, a kind of ignorance. That's what he meant, knowledge of the world is a kind of ignorance. He's not rejecting experience, but he's rejecting experience as it is conceived by the waking state mind, as a multiplicity and diversity of objects made out of dead inert stuff called matter. That kind of a world is ignorance or is an illusion. But experience itself, made of consciousness, is absolutely real. So in that sense  what we once considered to be real, objects made of matter, become less and less and less real. And correspondingly, what we once considered to be completely unreal, to the extent that we didn't even think about it at all consciousness, is now realized to be the sole reality of experience. So consciousness and matter change place. We should say phrases like, "It doesn't really matter". Matter here means what's important. So the conjunction of what's important with the word matter again betrays our belief that things or reality is made out of matter. We should say, "It doesn't really consciousness". Or instead of saying, "What's the matter?", when your child is crying, you should say, "What's the consciousness?"

How do we know now that we're not in a kind of dream state? We don't know. Because as we're dreaming the dream, from the point of view of the dream, has exactly the same quality of reality as does the waking state from the point of view of the waking state. And it's true that both the waking state and the dream state are equally real. But the reality of the waking state is not made out of matter. And the reality of the dream state is not made out of mind. The reality of both states are made out of consciousness. It is consciousness that gives the dream and the waking states their reality. They are real! This experience is absolutely real. What would an unreal experience be? Has anyone ever had an experience that was unreal? It's not possible. All experience is absolutely real. Even the the wildest hallucination is as real as this concrete experience. But the reality of both those experiences, the wild hallucination and this ordinary experience, is the same consciousness. It is consciousness that gives experience its reality. 

There is a difference in the dream state and the waking state. The dream state is only experienced by one mind. Whereas this reality, that we're experiencing now, is shared by many minds. So although the reality of those two experiences is identical, they're not exactly the same experience. In other words this, what we're having now, is a shared dream. Our dreams at night are not shared, they are private. [Dream characters are minds in a shared dream.] They are both equally dreams in consciousness, made only of consciousness.

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