I of the Taiga

It was, after all, just a dream. You (and indeed, I) might account for it as the understandable consequence of waking hours reading, studying, dwelling upon second hand thoughts and insights from far greater minds (in other words, philosophy!). That is very likely the truth, prosaic as it might be. Nevertheless, the dream did appear and the experience of it opened up and made palpable what in books and words and even in mental exercises can only be properly pointed at.

So what the heck am I talking about?

Well, I had a vivid dream of a place that in every aspect seemed to pulse with greater life and significance than this state of affairs which constitutes my waking experience. This latter is an experience covered over with a dense cataract, swamped by ingrained assumptions, biases, beliefs, opinions, prejudices, habitual thinking- those, on top of the already conditioned limitations of the human form and senses.

The dreamscape was of a boulder-strewn pine glade, a taiga, with animals- like pumas, bison, and minks (for want of better descriptions – they were not exactly the species named in science!). But the entire scene was vibrant and alive. It was pervasively a living being, appearing in vision, sound, and other indeterminate intertwined sensation. It glittered and throbbed all around. Every thing – rock, tree, beast, ground, air, me- seemed to overflow with presence, or life, or force, spirit, power, what have you. Each was itself, a phenomenon, but all were absolutely, necessarily implicated by each other so that the very thought that one or other could be absent or imagined away seemed so impotently absurd.

And although, like in many dreams, the self – while viscerally sensed- is elusive in it’s delineations- was definitely present, it was even more unfixed and apparent everywhere. It flowed from what appeared into ‘me’ and from me into what appeared as if it were nothing less than the living concert of all phenomena belonging together. Everything belonged. It appeared as Being- as an exhilarating field of experience where any sort of analysis (even calling it experience, or being, or living, or belonging) falls short and falters. The entire scene flowed, and yet was as I say, more real and solid than this world in which I bang the touchscreen to write this. Was this a presentation of how reality is when all the accumulations, delusions, and distortions of egocentric consciousness are cleared off?

Of course, this romantic scene of primordial wilderness isn’t itself other than a specific flavour of a dream representation. And further – I have never in my personal waking history ever been to such a place! But other dreams, set in very familiar environs such as my own neighbourhood, also seem to glow and pulse with the same kind of vitality and interfusion of presences. I’m sure you who read have similar experiences. Could these at least hint at the authentic realising of Being in which we are all rooted and yet which appears only very dimly and derivatively to our clouded, sore, exhausted, besotted, jaded, harsh and imprisoned waking life?

I’d like to think so. But maybe it’s all mere dreaming.

When I woke, I wrote in my notebook -

“The Self of the universe is expressed as and in the belonging together of all things, as Being unconcealing as Phusis”.

Just a thought!