Waking, dreaming, real, illusory, self

Regardless of gender, pretend that the next person you see was your spouse in a previous lifetime. You were deeply in love, and now, here you are in completely unrelated lives without the slightest awareness of all that “once was,” only you have knowledge about this previous relationship, and you have absolute conviction that it did, in fact, happen.

Explore with your imagination this possibility and what such a belief might do to your relationship with this person who has “amnesia.”

Ask yourself,How would I behave towards this person, if I truly and deeply believed that this were true?

What can I do with this person now that reflects such a fantastic possibility and that is socially acceptable to me in this life with this personality?

How would this person react to proof that it were indeed the truth? Given this exercise’s premise and assuming my conviction that it is true, how can I be so certain of my predictions regarding this person’s reactions to “my truth” when my “vibe” and demeanor around this person would be so changed?

If I believed in such things as previous lifetimes, what would I believe to be the chances that the people around me are also friends and enemies I once knew?

If previous lifetimes are possible, how far back into time can I imagine them going? Can I go back far enough for virtually everyone on this earth to have once been a loved one of mine?

How does this imagining of a physical presence throughout time affect me emotionally? If the ultimate truth of reality is one that includes almost endless reincarnations that one is almost perfectly unaware of, so what? What if I actually once were Abraham Lincoln or Gandhi or, perhaps some arch villain? So what?

If I have a dream in which I, by my definition of the word, sin, what should the waking “me” do about the sin of the “dream me?”

When I consider the content of my dreams, the characters I have created, the “masks” I have worn, the heights and depths of morality, fear and spirituality I have played with, these entire universes created from “scratch,” have I been a god?

When I see someone I know and remember something about them, how do I know if that memory is true instead of something I once dreamed or an unsubstantiated belief I somehow have concocted? Why do I trust my memory?

How do I know that I am not a character in someone’s dream? What is my absolute proof?

If in a dream tonight, a dream character comes up to my dream character and asks, “Am I less real than you?” what would I like “my” dream character to say to that “other” dream character?

Relatively speaking, who’s more real: me, compared to a dream character that I believe is me during the dream, or the “real waking-state me” that is being created by the “creator of me?”