March/April 2002 Cosmic
Life Has Been Discovered to be a Dream

by Paul Levy

Paul Levy
The great spiritual teacher Paramahansa Yogananda says that the purpose of our dreams at night is to awaken us to the dreamlike nature of the universe. Yogananda doesn't mean that life is "just" a dream in the sense that it is a meaningless illusion. Rather, he is suggesting that this waking dream universe of ours is of a structure similar to a dream in certain revealing ways. It is profoundly important for us to understand that we live in, by its very nature, a dream-upable universe. This literally involves an expansion of consciousness, in which we realize the role our own consciousness is playing in the conjuring up of this very universe. We are like magicians who have become entranced by our own creation.

Our night dreams have been symbolically re-presenting to us that the nature of our waking experience is the stuff of which dreams are made. In night dreams we find ourselves in dreamscapes that seem totally real, objectively existing, separate from us. We have the convincing hallucination that we are actually awake while indeed we are merely dreaming. The meaning pattern we superimpose onto the dream is merely a projection of the mind, and like an inkblot, reflects back our own interpretation. In a night dream, if we change how we view the dream, the dream has no choice but to spontaneously shape-shift, for the dream is clearly not separate from the mind that is observing it.

Quantum physics has discovered that the same process is at work in this waking dream of ours. It is called the observer effect - the act of observation actually evokes the universe that is observed. Our perception is inextricably linked to our experience of the universe; it is part of the equation that is never absent. Our perception of the universe is a key part of the universe that is happening through us. To quote noted physicist John Wheeler, "Useful as it is under everyday circumstances to say that the world exists "out there," independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld. There is a strange sense in which this is a participatory universe."

This waking dream we are living in, being of a more dense vibration than a night dream, is more solidified, crystalized into materialized form, and is hence, "slower" in the way it is a function of our creative imagination. But our creative imagination is truly divine, in that it literally effects the suprasensory blueprint that underlies this seemingly mundane world of ours. Due to the seeming solidity of this waking dream, the effects of the creative imagination on how this waking universe of ours actually gets dreamed up are visible only with much more subtle, refined and rarefied vision. To quote Jung, "I am indeed convinced that creative imagination is the only primordial phenomenon accessible to us, the real Ground of the psyche, the only immediate reality."

We can't separate our perception of the universe from the actual universe itself. In fact, it is the lens or axiomatic set through which we view our moment by moment experience that actually has a reality-creating effect, and gives form to whatever universe we find ourselves in. To quote Gary Zukav, author of The Dancing Wu Li Masters, "A powerful awareness lies dormant in these discoveries; an awareness of the hitherto-unsuspected powers of the mind to ‘mold’ reality rather than the other way around."

Our dreams themselves are revealing to us the malleable nature of our waking situation. Once we stop superimposing our concretized mental constructs upon the canvas of reality and start allowing it to manifest as it truly is, it will reveal its dreamlike nature. To quote Michael Talbot, author of The Holographic Universe, "One implication (of the new discoveries in physics) is that objective reality is more like a dream than we have previously suspected." Or, I might add, than we previously "imagined." Imagine that!

A leader in the field of dreaming, Paul Levy is in private practice, helping others who are also spiritually emerging to wake up to the dreamlike nature of reality. A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, he is in the new book Saints and Madmen: Psychiatry Opens its Doors to Religion. A long-time Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, he is the coordinator of the Portland PadmaSambhava Buddhist Center. He can be reached at (503) 234-6480.