I love the first line of the entry below that I wrote thirty years ago… What proof does one have of being awake or lost in a dream, and is it our rightful place to find comfort in either? It’s like are we swimming upstream against the current of our lives or downstream having found the current and are simply in the flow that is meant to carry us effortlessly towards an unknown destination. Once finding the flow of our lives does it matter? We begin to try to stay in the middle of the stream away from the edges along the bank that may slow us down or snag us and keep us from our path or journey. Or perhaps from walking down a new corridor toward fresh beginnings.
Living the dream can sometimes feel like an oxymoron in our lives. Once again, there’s another word to dissect and understand its meaning. Words can often jumble our thoughts as we try to assign meaning and figure out how to respond. Oxymorons are words that contradict the accepted, or usual meaning of a word. I was often amazed while teaching English in a college class in China when students were asked to use newly learned words in a sentence. They would often use words in ways I hadn’t encountered before, without any preconceived notion of what the words “should” mean. Often, their usage wasn’t incorrect but made me see the words from a fresh perspective. It was a wonderful learning experience, both as a teacher and a student of language.
Words can mislead our thinking when we rely on incorrect or incomplete meanings that align with what we think we already know. Many of the writings of Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu were used as tools to explore ideas that needed deeper reflection to uncover their true meaning and to understand what lies beyond both our own motivations and those of others. Our ego, combined with the egos of others, often hinders genuine understanding, making us believe everything has to fit into one perspective or another based on outcomes we’ve subconsciously predetermined. With the way we frame a question frequently shaping the answer we’re looking for.
What I’ve written here may require multiple readings to fully understand its meaning. It ties into the theme of questioning whether we are genuinely awake or simply wandering through a dream. This is a question we’ll explore repeatedly in different ways as the entries here in this chapter we continue to develop over the coming months…
My travels with Lieh Tzu / Interpolations along the Way
Chapter 3 – King Mu of Zhou
40. The awakening spirit
What proof does one have of being awake or lost in a dream, and is it our rightful place to find comfort in either? Is it everyday situations that confirm we are awake?
Should we be forever tied to our life’s events and actions, gain and loss, sorrow, and joy and our birth and death? All simply allowed to occur when we involve ourselves in the here and now. Does not encountering something bring conflict to one’s true spirit?
How can we know if we are dreaming? Can there be a test or are we just searching for something we have yet to find? Are not they but illustrations of normal dreams, dreams due to alarm, thinking, memory, rejoicing, and fear that are allowed to occur when the spirit or one’s inner chi connects with something.
Does not connecting with something direct our attention from the journey that we know we must follow? Is not when we leave ourselves open to the mundane, or outside world, when we are awake that our energies fill and empty and diminish and grow?
Are we not simply becoming acquainted with all that surrounds us? By following this course, are we not allowing our yin and yang energies to become open to all sorts of confusion not true to our life force and our spirit as it travels through time?
Remember what Lieh Tzu has told you: “Our spirit chances on something and we dream and when our body encounters something it happens. Are not everyday occurrences but our imagination and dreams that our spirit and body chance upon along the Way. Should not the purpose and focus of one’s life energies be concentrated on what is known as the Tao?”
Forgetting oneself when awake and knowing no dreams while asleep. In so doing, our spirit becomes one with the immortals as we prepare to fly away. 2/8/95
Number forty of one hundred fifty-eight entries.
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