"As you review the world with your perfect intelligence and compassion, it must seem to you like a dream of which it cannot be said: it is permanent or it is destructible, for the being and non-being do not apply to it." Gautama, Buddha. THE LANKAVATARA SUTRA (p. 3). Independent. Kindle Edition.
If we want to know the quality of our life, we might begin with the question: What are our dreams like?
It's hard to believe that we create our own dreams and then live in them, similar to the expression, "lie in the bed you've made". If one's mentality is one of blame or anger, then one creates a world where no one is to be trusted. Conversely, a world where nobody seems to be trustworthy fosters the belief that I must rely completely on my own devices in order to get along in the world. But if we loosen our ideas of what constitutes reality, we will find that there is a lot of wiggle room in which to breathe.
If we take the emotion of anger, for instance, we will find that an angry dream is a contracted one. But there are many complexes where anger thrives. One of them is the belief that if I am sufficiently upset, I can influence the way others behave toward me. Many of my old teachers in grade school and middle school projected an aura of anger in order to intimidate their students. Only on the last day of school might these teachers relent and even have a smile or two! The point is that an angry demeanor often generates a sense of fear, authority and respect. On the other hand, it's clear that anger often separates people. When a person says unkind or angry words without thinking about their impact, they create an atmosphere of tension which can lead to others subtly avoiding the person for fear that they will trigger the person's anger. While this may be advantageous for an authoritarian personality, it doesn't go well in groups or teams of people.
Another part of an angry dream is indeed, the idea of hurt pride or honor. When we "lose face" or reputation, we can behave like the asuras or "jealous gods", who endlessly compete with each other in a certain kind of heaven for things like merits and blessings. If, on the other hand, we let go of honor or reputation, we become like a poor man with nothing from which a person can steal. Who steals from a homeless person or a vagabond? This is an analogy but the poor in spirit is someone who has nothing to lose and nothing gained either. Such a person is unafraid of losing honor, and can remain happy when the powerful around them are competing for titles and honors.
Anger feels like power, at least momentarily, but it often doesn't wield very much power beyond the ability to hurt our bodies. If I become angry, my heart races, my face turns red, and my stomach becomes very sore and very unstable. All of these symptoms do not happen to the person with whom I am angry! So, by generating anger, I only hurt my own body. So why do we so often see portrayals of heroes in movies using their anger to reap a satisfactory "vengeance" on the enemy? This is because movies don't accurately convey the workings of karma. A heroic journey is nearly always an uphill climb to success, whereas the real story of life is always a circle of ups and downs. Whatever I exert will come back to me in some form; it can't go anywhere else.
It might be better to find the sadness that underlies our anger. Anger is about some kind of threat of loss. But as soon as we are angry, we have already lost! We have lost our peace of mind, so we should really turn anger to sadness and see how the situation we are in is one of extreme suffering. Turning from hot anger to cool sadness is like water pouring out a fire. Sadness is much more controllable--it never rages outside the boundaries of our heart. At least realistic sadness suggests: we can never really get what we want all the time, and we might have to live in a state of constant compromise and negotiation as a result.
Let's look at the sutra again:
it must seem to you like a dream of which it cannot be said: it is permanent or it is destructible,
Remember how in the previous section, the flower was used to illustrate the idea of no birth and no death. Now the sutra turns to the notion of impermanence. We can't say a dream is permanent, because it consists of nothing but mental imagery that is unfolding in our mind. But nor can we say a dream is "destructible", precisely because its core nature or essence is mind itself. Nobody has ever "reached out" to a dream and crumpled it, threw it in the garbage, or even blew it up with dynamite. That is, there is no causal efficacy to dreams, because dreams are only images that flit about here and there. Even in the case of "lucid" dreaming, can we say there is a real "dreamer" manipulating things in the dream? Where is the dreamer, and where is the dream? These are concepts that can't even be located. The dream is little more than a succession of ideas.
Buddhism isn't nihilistic: it doesn't say, all things are nothing but images with no reality. It goes deeper than that, suggesting that the nature of life cannot be reduced to causes and effects. In a dream, nobody comes in and becomes the hero, because all the elements of the dream are from the same mind. Nobody "wins" or "loses" and there isn't a predominant element, because these cascading thoughts have no connection with each other. The ideas we impose upon life--causality, substance, nature, matter, people, self--simply fade out when we start to compare existence to a dream. These ideas are simply contrived principles that don't have a tangible or endurable existence.
Even the concept of "Impermanence" is only one of many illusory constructs. It's meant to point to a nature of mind that is forever infinite and changing, but there is no impermanence/permanence--they are only relative concepts that mean nothing. Impermanence comes close to what we experience directly in the present moment, but we mustn't imagine there is such a thing called impermanence or permanence. That's because these are dualistic concepts. When we finally have the last leg of the chair taken off, there are no more concepts that we can cling to to capture this moment, now, the thusness of what is. It's dream-like, but on the other hand cannot compare to anything we can conceptualize mentally.
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