What you take yourself to be, a body moving through a world and passing through waking, dreaming and deep sleep, is in fact an appearance within awareness. Like a dream that seems to reveal a material world, our waking experience appears external and independent, yet is known only within awareness. When this is recognised, a reversal takes place. Awareness is revealed as the constant reality, and all states and experiences as its temporary modulations. The true awakening is not to wake up as a body in a world, but to recognise yourself as this ever-present awareness, knowing its own infinite, indivisible reality.
This week we begin Chapter 13, ‘There Are No States of Consciousness’, exploring pages 119–122.*
*(The page numbers indicated here each week refer to the original publication of the physical book – they may vary slightly from more recent versions, owing to the publisher’s design modifications.)
The Dream of Matter
Under the materialist paradigm which presently dominates our world culture, reality is believed to exist independently of mind, and therefore independently of consciousness, the essential nature of mind. From this perspective, matter is the material out of which reality is supposedly made.
In our current culture, it is widely assumed that reality exists independently of mind, and that consciousness is something that appears within a pre-existing material universe. Matter is taken to be primary, the substance out of which everything, including the body and mind, is formed. This view seems so obvious that it is rarely questioned. Yet a simple reflection on the nature of dreaming offers a powerful analogy that invites us to reconsider it.
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