Sri Humananda
Advaita Vedanta Tantra Yogi
The Dream in the Dream
"As the spider sends forth and draws in its thread, as plants grow on the earth, as hair grows on the head and the body of a living man—so does everything in the universe arise from the Imperishable."
(Mundaka Upanishad)
“What does meditation do for you?”
If you think back, perhaps you've had a dream you remember... a significant one or maybe a scary one, or maybe even a nightmare. Then, for some of us, perhaps for most of us, while you are having this terrifying dream there is another consciousness in you, in your dream, that tells you that this is only a dream and that it is ok, and that you merely have to go through it, but that it is not really real.
I addition to the dreamer there is seemingly an additional "sub-dreamer" inside of the dream, almost like a spectator, but one that delivers commentary to you. So there are seemingly at least two entities here - the dreamer experiencing the nightmare and the the observer-dreamer who is also conscious of it all and seemingly more conscious and more knowledgeable but not really experiencing the nightmare as directly as the dreamer, though observing it all.
Meditation leads to something like that. You become more aware of an “observer-consciousness” existing inside you. This “observer-consciousness” grows over time and becomes part of your daily life in this world as your meditation practice progresses. Your life is experienced more and more as a continuous unfolding rather than as being lived in sections or parts. Every second flows into the next seamlessly.
Just as the extreme terror of the nightmare is tempered by another comforting “observer-consciousness” – even though in the dream – so too is the “reality” of this life and the world somewhat tempered by the development of your own “observer-consciousness”. Of course, both the dreamer and the 'observer' are not different or distinct from you in reality. All are only You.
This does not make you more or less of an active participant in life at all. But one develops more of a tendency to see the world and your life for what it really is - a passing phase at times pleasurable and at times terrifying, but with an underlying, more stable reality that becomes much more valuable to you simply because it is closer to your own Being - your own Self - than the world outside represented by the dream as a thing seperate from you.
But just like the content and detail of the nightmare does not change, so nothing at all changes in your world. This "change" is not outside but in your level of consciousness. You then realise that you have become aware of You, and this You has more value than the world outside seen as a distinct universe. This is not the ego, but the Self awakening. That's all, but that is... Divine.
The effect of this is that you gain more control over affairs in your world from inside of you even though nothing changes in the outside world – all that still remains the same. But it becomes so that instead of “being at the mercy” of what life brings to you, you control your response to it through this insight and understanding even though you are unable to affect things in the world in any material way. On an experiencial level you become attuned to what life offers, but moreover, you understand and experience that it is not so much about what life has or doesn't have to offer that is important, but your connectedness to that, and that being connected forms a whole and you are that whole.
In short, you start living more from in here to out there and not so much from out there to in here. You also increasingly manage your life from in here, and you are increasingly not managed by what comes from outside because the very experiential separation of 'here' and 'there' fades.
The result of meditation is that everything changes for you, and yet, nothing out there changes at all. That is what meditation does for me, and for many others.
