Chaos and suffering?

A few days ago in my post “What is real” I started to write about the possibility that the world is an illusion projected by the mind. A friend of mine Peter Koval posted the following comment to answer my question “If it is an illusion anyway why do we not imagine who we want to be?”

“Well Carsten, there is the unfortunate possibility that we are changing the world the way we want it to change, and perhaps that’s just how you and I would like it to be. Perhaps the momentum and majority of people are imagining a world of chaos and suffering, and we just happened to be part of that imagining. What you can change is how you perceive this world. Seeing the good things, the love the tenderness when it occurs, and hopefully the compassion will bring more love into the world. However a drop in the ocean it may be.”

I think Peter’s comment is very interesting and I told him that at a certain point I want to use it for a post.

My first question is assuming that the world is an imagination of the mind, who is imagining it to be real? Is it a collective imagination of all minds, of humanity as a whole? Or is every single mind, each one of us imagining our own reality? If that is the case the next question I ask is our imagined reality separate from all other imagined realities or do they cut into each other in certain areas? If there are certain areas that are the same for all of us it means that part of our imagined world is influenced by other imagined worlds.

To me the most interesting and at the same time most mind blowing theory is though that we imagine our own world without any influence from the outside. What would that mean? That would mean that all we see, all we experience, the people we meet and the world around us is a projection of our mind. Everything, the world, the whole universe is created by our minds and nobody else has any influence on what we see, the people we meet and what happens in the world. It makes every single one of us the master of his or her own universe.

Is the world really based on chaos and suffering? Or are we just not able to see the big picture? Let’s assume there is reincarnation. Maybe we have to come back to this plain of existence over and over again until we understand what it is all about, understand that it’s only a projection of the mind. Then we do not have to be reborn because we understand who we are and what the universe is. But until we get to that point we have to go through all these experiences, good ones and bad ones to find the truth, to find out who we are. Maybe we have to have had all the possible experiences on earth to get to that point. We experienced to be a hero, a coward, to be a murderer and to be a saint, to love ant to hate and all the things in between. Until one day we understand that it is not real.

Let’s be honest, how can an illusion a mere dream be terrifying? How can something that is not real scare us? What is really happening in an illusion? Absolutely nothing! I am not saying that to the mind there is not a lot of pain and suffering in the world. But is this really true? Is what happens just a learning experience for some of us to learn the lessons we have to learn?

What happens when we die? If all we see is not real dying must feel like waking up from a dream. We wake up like we will wake up tomorrow morning and realize that life on earth was a dream, nothing but a dream.

Imagination. University Place and Waverly/ Manhattan/ New York City 01-21-08 at 11:25 AM.

 

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