Friday, 27 February 2009

I dreamed I was King of a golden palace...

An addition to the Night's Camp blog entry... in particular where I was observing the wastefulness of "house" living... occurred to me this morning to remix that old Zhuang Zi thought...

Last night I dreamed I was the king of a golden palace and a mountain top. Today I AM the king of that golden palace and a mountain top dreaming I am no-one and living in a garage.

This is perculiarly more insightful to me than the original... (and there is some nonsense on the wiki page - the notion of 'spontaneous order' ... how could we ever speak of "order" if it wasn't a given and innate to existence? There is no more "sponteneity order" than "spontaneous disorder" - order in dance with disorder is the very nature of existence... anyway I digress)...

It illustrates the emptiness of phenomena and of ourselves quite well. That what we may struggle a good part of our lives to achieve i.e. being King of some empire and have the money to build a gold palace on a mountain (no doubt some feat!) is of no use if when we dream, we dream of being back in the gutter! A King dreaming he is a poor subject is still a King it is true, but the "being a King" has no solidity or importance anymore! If he is so completely distracted from his "being a King" by just a dream how insubstantial and empty this "being a King" is. Now we ask is such an transparent thing really of any value? Was it worth all the work? And the King realising this might well feel profound unease about what he really is. He may well turn nasty and tyrannical to continually prove his power so as to chase the fears of insubstantiality away - but it is a losers game. The self ultimately evaporates - this is the emptiness of self. We are all Kings, we are all losers in this game of "being someone".

On the more trivial level the issue of "having a house" is of little value if we always dream we are homeless. Likewise the no-one and who is homeless but who dreams always that he is a King and lives in a Palace: is he really any poorer?

Anatta and Dukkha are thus related - fear of non-self creates dissatisfaction as we realise that we are nothing, and everything that we may "believe we own" is just an imaginery relationship.

p.s. in the original Zhuang Zi dreams he was a butterfly.

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