Saturday, August 26, 2006

Life as a Dream -- Poe and Wilber

I found this quote by Edgar Allan Poe on a greeting card at Giant Eagle several weeks ago:

All that we may see or seem, is but a dream within a dream.

This morning I found a great quote by Ken Wilber about life-as-a-dream:

If you are having a dream and you think it's real, it can get very scary. Say you are dreaming you are tightrope walking across Niagara Falls. If you fall off, you plunge to your death. So you are walking very slowly, very carefully. Then suppose you start lucid dreaming, and you realise it's all a dream. What do you do? Become more cautious and careful? No, you start jumping up and down on the tightrope, you do flips, you bounce around, you have a ball - precisely because you know isn't real. When you realise it's a dream you can afford to play.

The same thing happens when you realise that ordinary life is a dream, just a movie, just a play. You don't become more cautious, more timid, more reserved. You start jumping up and down and doing flips, precisely because it's all a dream, it's all pure Emptiness. You don't feel less, you feel more - because you can afford to. You are no longer afraid of dying, and therefore you are not afraid of living. You become radical and wild, intense and vivid, shocking and silly. You let it all come pouring through, because it's all your dream.

Life then assumes its true intensity, its vivid luminosity, its radical effervescence.

-- from One Taste

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous9:23 AM

    have you ever read comfucius?
    i strongly suggest. nice page

    ReplyDelete