Dreaming of Waking Up

We were talking in his small, almost completely bare, and not too clean cell. There was no furniture, not even a book--only a sleeping-mat on the floor and a primus-booker, on which he boiled his rice himself. When I asked him about the ultimate purpose of spending his life in this fashion, he answered with a single word: 'Self-realization'. I asked him what came afterwards. He answered: "If one dreams that one shall soon wake up, one does not ask oneself what one will do in waking life.'

from Arthur Koestler, The Lotus and the Robot, p.85

The passage from Koestler interests me for several reasons. Throughout Lotus and the Robot, Koestler encounters Indian traditions of yoga, and starts to reflect on the qualities of teacher and student such as the charismatic relationship. Magic often prefigures into these relationships, as the student tends to see the teacher as having god-like powers. The teacher in turn can draw her or his power from the student's awe, and Koestler even reports that the roles in this relationship can often switch or interchange. There is something playful and even somewhat provocative about the descriptions of these kinds of relationships. However, they are never provocative to the point of encouraging unhealthy attachments.

But if, as the speaker in the above quotation suggests, everything is a dream from which one will soon wake up, are these roles we play to be taken so seriously? During the 2 day Living Chan retreat, Fashi had talked about the ability to be "Kinged", that is, the ability to allow myself to yield to someone else, or to make them king. Now why is it so necessary to do this? It's necessary because it allows me to get over the idea that "I" am only in this body, and nowhere else. I think that it's only in light of seeing life as a dream that such a position is tenable. After all, people tend to want to have their way about things, particularly if that way leads to their own comfort and happiness. The person that Koestler describes in the passage is a bit opposite, because he is looking toward a time of awakening when all he sees are just impermanent moments in time.

If people realize that even their roles are impermanent, are they going to make a big deal if their partner decides to take the remote, or take charge of what they will see? I think in this way, power can be seen as not pointing to static relationships or roles. Rather, they are pointing to combinations that allow people to lessen the grip on ego. But the problem is that power as a static concept needs to be transcended. If this doesn't happen, both parties will be deceived by the appearance of separate beings who have these separate powers. In actuality, both beings (me and you, king and subject), are parts of the same dream and are inseparable from the dream itself.

The problem, as Fashi pointed out in both retreats this June, is that people typically attach to their comfort within the dream. As a result, there isn't an opportunity to take risks and allow oneself to challenge the dualistic view of 'this is me, my wants, my tastes, my favorite emotions', and 'that is you: the provider of my comforts or the person who threatens to take away my comforts, or the oblivious 'neither of the two'." This kind of rumination leads to the view that this is not a dream at all but a kind of arena where people fight to get what they want. And in doing so, people never realize that the dream will end (all things are impermanent after all), including all the things one attaches to as one's self: one's likes, one's preferences, and so on.

Koestler, Arthur (1960), The Lotus and the Robot. London: Four Square Books.