When You Realize That Ordinary Life Is Just a Dream...

"If you are having a dream, and you think it's real, it can be very scary. say you are dreaming that 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 realize that it's just 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 it isn't real. When you realize it's a dream, you can afford to play.

The same thing happens when you realize that ordinary life is just 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."

-- p.71, One Taste, Ken Wilber

What is Enlightenment?

“The you that you think of as you (and that thinks of you as you, and so on) is not you, it’s just the character that the underlying truth of you is dreaming into brief existence. Enlightenment isn’t in the character, it’s in the underlying truth. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being a dream character, of course, unless it’s your goal to wake up, in which case the dream character must be ruthlessly annihilated. If your desire is to experience transcendental bliss or supreme love or altered states of consciousness or awakened kundalini, or to quality for heaven, or to liberate all sentient beings, or simply to become the best dang person you can be, then rejoice!, you’re in the right place: the dream state, the dualistic universe. However, if your interest is to cut the crap and figure out what’s true, then you’re in the wrong place and you’ve got a very messy fight ahead and there’s no point in pretending otherwise.”

-- Spiritual Enlightenment, Jed McKenna

Meatballs - It Just Doesn't Matter

Transcript:

“Sure, Mohawk has beaten us 12 years in a row. Sure, they’re terrific athletes. They’ve got the best equipment that money can buy. Hell, every team they’re sending over here has their own personal masseuse. Not masseur. Masseuse. But it doesn’t matter.

“Do you know that every Mohawk competitor has electrocardiogram, blood, and urine tests every 48 hours to see if there’s any change in his physical condition? Do you know that they use the most sophisticated training methods from the Soviet Union, East and West Germany, and the newest Olympic power, Trinidad Tobago? But it doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter! It just doesn’t matter! I tell you it just doesn’t matter!”

[The entire camp -- kids and counselors -- take up the chant: “It just doesn’t matter! It just doesn’t matter!”]

   

“And even…and even if we win…if we win… Hah! Even if we win, even if we play so far above our heads that our noses bleed for a week to 10 days, even if God in Heaven above comes down and points His hand at our side of the field, even if every man, woman, and child held hands together and prayed for us to win, it just wouldn’t matter, because all the really good looking girls would still go out with the guys from Mohawk, ’cause they’ve got all the money!

“It just doesn’t matter if we win or we lose. It just doesn’t matter! It just doesn’t matter! It just doesn’t matter!”

Fear Nothing

"Fear nothing. Another easy-to-say and impossible piece of advice. Tough luck, chum. Life's a bitch and then you die. Get used to it. It isn't going to change anytime soon.

What is there to fear? Everything and nothing. Try looking at it through my eyes. I am an insignificant little worm on an insignificant planet which circles an insignificant star in a big bad universe. A universe I will never comprehend, nor can ever hope to comprehend.

Just like everything that walks, breaths, grows, flies, crawls or swims, I am going to die. One day, my planet will die. Long, long after, the sun it still circles as a dead rock will die. Then there will be darkness on the face of the earth. That is, there would be darkness if there was any creature alive to view it.

Armies and governments fear men or women who know they are going to die soon; and they have good reason to. Such people have nothing to lose. They will commit any atrocity and take as many others with them as they can, if they are driven to it. You must now become that doomed man or woman. You are going to die. Nothing can alter the fact. It is immutable. Incomprehensible. Unfair. All those things.

But it set you free, don't you see? It sets you free.

What does anything matter if you are going to die? Nothing matters. Nothing at all. "

--p.262, How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis