Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.
(Old English nursery rhyme)
‘Life is but a dream’.
Anthony De Mello used to say that most people are asleep, ‘they’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep’.
And why would anybody want to wake up from the dream of Life? After all, we, the characters in the dream, have invested so much time and energy on our current dream and maybe ours is one heck of a dream.
Or maybe not.
And wake up to what?
Well, we could wake up within the dream, you know, like lucid dreaming.
Or we could wake up from the dream, which I agree would be a bit hardcore for some, but still, the ultimate awakening. Pretty cool stuff.
Whatever the case, at a certain point in our lives some people feel the need to wake up. Maybe we’re having a nightmare or feel there’s much more to our dream than our share of it.
We thus embark on all kinds of self-help adventures including being more ‘spiritual’ without realizing that we aren’t waking up, only having better dreams. Dreams of being awake.
I once read that spirituality is a disease and waking up is the cure. Funny way to look at it and one that would instantly render a lot of people ‘diseased’.
But what do I know? I’m probably just dreaming all this too.
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.
❊ ❊ ❊
