The dream of the outside world

Without mincing words: The dominant consensus reality is a hallucination. It’s a mirage, and also a trance. A dream of the outside world.

Anything that resembles a reality or a view of reality imposed from without, from outside of you, any explanation or model of things that tries to tell you what’s ultimately real from the vantage point of an objective, external world that you, as a separate individual, inhabit—in other words, the dominant consensus reality—is a sucker punch. It’s a trick.

The “outside world” isn’t outside at all. It exists inside you as pure consciousness. So does the “you,” the notionally independent self that seems to be located in and confronted by such a world.

The objective perspective, then, is an inverted view of things that’s constantly attempting to undermine the reality of your actual situation. You’re not a separate individual inhabiting a world. Instead, you’re absolute, pure awareness, and the world is a kind of virtual experience arising within you—including your experience or perception of being an individual unit, a separate being within it.

Holding to this understanding in a culture whose consensus view maintains the opposite will make you seem like an outlier to most people. The social consequences may be severe. But then, this perceived social reality, along with the perceived consequences of rejecting it, is likewise unfolding within the field of your own being. It’s you being reflected back to yourself.

Learning to navigate this reflection or projection is like learning to navigate your nocturnal dreams. You only ever encounter your own self, divided into the seemingly separate centers of subjective perceiver and objective perceived.

If you cultivate the habit of recognizing and greeting everything that arises, including your own subjective weather, as a complementary and ultimately harmonious dance of Yourself with Yourself (including when the feeling of it isn’t harmonious at all), everything takes on a rather wondrous aspect. Sometimes thrillingly so, sometimes mysteriously so, and sometimes darkly so.

This is just the way of dreams.