Tue, 20 Jul 2010
Caught In a Dream
I saw the movie Inception last weekend. It's a science fiction film about a new technology that allows people to enter each others dreams and is used to steal secret information. Since it involves dreams versus waking reality, it's natural to compare it with Buddhism. In one scene two characters are sitting in a hotel bar and one tries to convince the other that they are dreaming. He asks, how did you get here in the hotel? Do you remember being anywhere before? This scene struck me as being similar to a meditation practiced in dzogchen and mahamudra, where the practitioner asks himself where thoughts arise, dwell, and go when they cease. The mahamudra text Eliminating the Darkness of Ignorance says:
Look at the nature of the cognition that has been emanated. ... Is there a place it arose from, a place it endured in, a place it ceased into? ... Just how does it endure and how is it emanated? Investigate this.
The point of this exercise is not that you will be able to catch a thought as it is born, any more than a person in a dream will be able to recall the genesis of their current situation. In both cases one uses the exercise to see the unreality of how one currently views things. One looks for the origin of thoughts in order to see that the dualism of a mind that perceives and a thought that is perceived is false. Thoughts do not exist in the manner that we think they exist. We are caught in a dream about reality when we are awake, just as much as when we sleep.
