In his dream, he was sat in his music room, listening to his latest find. Of course, he didn’t know he was dreaming, everything seemed so…..real…
When he woke up, he was in his own, far smaller, far less wondrous room, lying in his bed in the low light of the early dawn. He thought about it. One minute, he had been in the music room, the next, here, and all that had occurred had been his waking up.
In the music room, in his dream, everything had seemed so real. The floor had been solid as he had sat upon it, the records had been solid, their vivid artwork had delighted his eyes, and the music!…the music had amazed his ears, just as it did when he was awake.
Yet here he was now, far from there, in his little room. Waking had revealed to him that there had been no music room, no solid floor, no vivid album art, no wondrous music. The whole time he had just been here, asleep in his bed. His mind had clearly made the whole thing up!
What a wondrous concept! The idea that the mind can create for itself such vivid sensory experiences, based upon seemingly physical objects that have no real existence independent of the mind that thinks them. That his mind could do that!
But then, a more disturbing thought crept in. What if he went to the music room now, while awake, sat upon that solid floor, gazed upon those vivid images and listened to that sublime music. How could he possibly know whether any of it was real? If his mind could create such experiences when asleep, what was to say that it wasn’t also doing so when awake? What proof did he have that the seemingly physical objects that he experienced were not, in actuality, creations of his mind, just as they were in his dreams?
Was that how the world worked? Was the entire universe merely a creation of the minds that seem to populate it? How could they ever know that the physical world existed when they were not perceiving it? How could they know whether or not matter had any kind of existence independent of the minds that experienced it?
He thought back. He could remember being a very young child, wondering around the castle on his own for the first time. He could not remember anything before that. He had been told that he had been born in the castle, but that his mother had died shortly after, and she had been his last blood relative. He could not remember being born, could not remember his mother. Had his mind existed then? Was birth the origin of one’s mind? And was death the point at which the mind ceased to be?
What about before anyone was born? What about the time before there were any humans on Earth? Did that mean that there had been no minds on Earth? Did other animals have minds? What about trees, plants, rocks? If there were no minds around, then no one was experiencing the physical world. Yet it still must have existed in order to give rise to rocks, plants, trees, animals, humans – the things that have minds.
But if matter has no existence independent of minds, then how could the world have existed without minds? This led to the most extraordinary thought of all – What if his mind HAD existed before his birth, before his body had come into being? What if minds were not actually just a part of their bodies? For the body is also a physical object that is experienced by the mind, therefore, just like the world, is a creation of the mind. The mind MUST pre-exist the body. His mind, and all the other minds in the universe, must have pre-existed the physical world, which was, in fact, merely a collective dream created by the full collective of minds. The universe was nothing other than a collection of minds, who all perceive a vast physical world, yet that world has no separate existence from the minds that think it.
But if this was so, then why could he not remember anything before being a very small child? If his mind, like all others, had existed for eternity, and had created the physical universe, then why could he not remember? Why did he not have access to the memories of all of his mind’s experiences from the dawn of the physical world up until now?
Perhaps his mind had, for whatever reason, selected this body, when it had been born, and somehow linked to it. Perhaps that is simply what minds do. Perhaps they created the physical universe, and created it in such a way that it would eventually produce these complex bodies that are capable of having such experiences. Perhaps a mind NEEDS a body in order to have these experiences, in order then to learn about itself, learn what it truly was.
Perhaps linking to a particular body causes the mind to forget all of its previous experiences, as remembering all that would be very disorienting for a young child. Perhaps the brain to which a mind connects acts as a kind of block on all of those past memories. But they must still all be there, locked somewhere within…
All of this opened up some extraordinary ideas. He had lived before this particular life he was living now, and he would live again when this body died.
Getting out of bed, he somehow felt as if he had, through the analysis of this dream, stumbled upon some great secret of the universe. For is that not where all great secrets are hidden? In the vast chasms of the mind…?
Omega Synthesis 