The Dream is Collapsing

Just some words of personal reflection

“The dream is collapsing,” from the film Inception, is a line that keeps coming to mind lately.

In the early part of the film, the main characters are using their technology to fabricate a dream world in order to extract information from another character. The process doesn’t go smoothly and the dream world begins crumbling and breaking down all around them. It’s quite a stunning scene and the film is really well done; I recommend it if you haven’t seen it.

This feels so incredibly relatable at the moment. The spiritual awakening process I seem to be going through feels like it tears apart the world and life that I thought were real.

I begin to realize more and more how reality is just a mirror of my concepts. I’m constantly projecting meaning onto people, places and situations that are ultimately neutral, free from any inherent meaning or quality.

All my beliefs and ideas that I thought were so true, so valid, so solid are progressively seen to be nothing more than fleeting thoughts.

I’m so accustom to being grounded in my ideas that when they break down, it feels like “I am breaking down.” When my concepts begin to die, it feels like “I am dying.” Without looking to the mind, can I even find a separate “me” that has autonomy, choice, agency, control?

It’s such an uncomfortable disorienting process to have the world that I thought I knew be turned to dust. The person that I thought I was keeps dissolving. All the things that I thought made “me” who I am are gradually submerged into that unchanging presence that is at the center of all things.

It’s strange because this is exactly what I wanted when I set out on this spiritual journey years ago. But now that I’m going through it, it’s not what I expected; it’s so damn frightening and painful and confusing that I often feel a sense of dread and regret for having pursued this.

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I love this sticker. I think I’d benefit from placing it all over my living space.

Taking some time to breathe, placing my hand over my heart, feeling the chest rise and fall, I am reminded that ultimately all of the worries and stress and turmoil of this process will eventually return to silence, as all things do.

The mind’s dream of reality is indeed collapsing and this is a beautiful thing. These duality belief structures, and the suffering they create, are passing away to make room for a far more profound and loving truth to emerge.

May we remember in times of darkness and anguish, when it appears like everything we love and cherish is being demolished before our eyes, that Love is the guiding force of reality and it’s leading us towards the Light of Truth.