the dream

In not-a-single-thing lies an inexhaustible treasure:
you ll find flowers, the moon and even a pagoda.

Ku zoku ze shiki...

The more expectations you have, the more limited and restricted your universe becomes. It shrinks to fit the goal you have given yourself. Drop expectations in this mushotoku gesture, dropping end gaining and ideas of profit, and suddenly you are met by reality itself. Who gets in the way? Who prevents you for seeing directly and intimately? This real thing you meet, where is it? Where does it come from?

In Japan, the kanji dream, yume 夢, is often used and cherished by Zen teachers. Of course, it refers to the dreamy quality of our existence, to the fleeting and beautifully changing thing we call life, but it also celebrates the fact that you will meet what you have dreamt. The dream gives birth to what comes to you. You, in the dream within the dream, are actively producing what is around you. To wake up is not necessarily to wake up from the dream, far from it, to wake up is to clearly see that dream and reality are not two. Dogen writes deeply about this. And you may start now to experience it deeply.

[attachment=0]4d16094431c98[1].jpg[/attachment]


gassho


Taigu

Attached files .jpg]http://www.treeleaf.org/forums/image...c98[1].jpg

Thank you for this.
Gassho,
Angela

Lego on the floor
As I sleepwalk in the night;
Awake this instant!

-Untei

When dream and reality are seen as not two, are we still dreaming? Or are we just creating our own lives, dancing with the flow of emptiness?

Thanks Taigu,
Pontus

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMhgdZiuGbg[/youtube]

I was reminded of this poem by Edgar Allan Poe, which to me is about dukkha, clinging, impermanence and realization:


A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

This morning I can not 'wake'. Dukkha. No need to elaborate - nothing of great significance - merely dukkha.

It is a beautiful day - if I could grasp 'no-self' my mind would simply be in the sunshine, clear sky, spring flowers blooming.
This feels like a failure - no equanimity - not because I can't banish the blues - but because I'm struggling to hold the blues and the
beautiful day together. My mind is not the mind 'without walls' as expressed in the heart sutra.

I'm thinking is equinimity a process - or a state of mind? Is it a mistake to try and place equinimity in 'time'? I know if I sit I'll be able
to grasp it - for a few fleeting moments. It's like the ground beneath our feet and the sky above our heads, - not consciously thought
about but always there.

Yesterday my little granddaughter bought her teddy with her - I have one exactly the same that my daughter gave me . I said 'Wow - we have twin teddy bears - how will we tell them apart?

Later - she ran in from the garden 'Look grandma - I've found a white feather - I've put it in my teddy's scarf - now we can tell them apart!'

Recalling this has got me thinking about self, no-self. Sometimes they seem the same - so hard to tell them apart. But a subtle difference - the white feather.

Equanimity doesn't really mean to be free of pain - this isn't emptiness. When I feel pain I very soon start to empathize with the pain of others - as long as I don't
get lost in my egoic sense of pain. That's when I think the teddy without the white feather is the same as the one with the feather :roll:

In 'no-self' I also embrace my 'self' (nothing wrong with that - denial of pain is not good) - but also (AND MOST IMPORTANTLY) all the other selves that inhabit this one precious dream. Inter-be.

Because life is precious.

I feel better for writing this - it's a beautiful day out there.

Thankyou Treeleaf.

Gassho

Willow

Dukkha.
So rarely what's there.
So frequently what's added.
Knife of mind trying to cut and parcel flowing water,
Cuts itself instead.

"to wake up is to clearly see that dream and reality are not two"

thanks, Taigu

Thank you for your lovely post Willow!

/Pontus

Thank you!

Quote:

---

Who prevents you for seeing directly and intimately?

---

Who else but!

Thank you Taigu.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-L...ookoutduck.jpg You are what you think. With your thoughts you make the world !!

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-8...s512/dream.jpg ... https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-V...50-c/photo.jpg

Quote:

---

The dream gives birth to what comes to you. You, in the dream within the dream, are actively producing what is around you. To wake up is not necessarily to wake up from the dream, far from it, to wake up is to clearly see that dream and reality are not two.

---

Thank you Taigu 8)

I've been thinking a bit more about 'the dream'.

'the dream gives birth to what comes to you'

the question - 'who gets in the way?'

In this world of inter-be one persons Kanji dream meets another - over and over.
What if one person's dream is another persons nightmare?

Do we always make what comes to us? Is it necessarily the self that gets in the way?

This is where I run into trouble - I can't always accept the assumptions
that are alligned with Buddhist thought. Something feels out of kilter :?

Do we always make what comes to us? ...............I'm not sure that we do, or that we always have free
will over our responses?

.....but I wish it were so.

Gassho

Willow

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shokai

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-8...s512/dream.jpg

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Love this one .. its so "real"
_()_
Myoku

ps.: Is that you ? :-)

Alice asked, "Which dreamed it?" If I recall correctly she meant the Red Queen or the White Queen. It didn't matter...Alice was there, not-separate. Everyone was there, no separate beings to have separate dreams. Every kind of dream has dukkha in it even if it's just that moment when you wake up out of it and it's gone.

This is where it gets too deep for me, so I wander around the edge dipping my toes in gingerly and don't go any further.

Gassho
Julia