Consider your last sleeping dream. There was a character, the star of the dream, “you”!, that was seemingly doing all kinds of things within the dream and experiencing all kinds of experiences, some pleasurable and some not pleasurable.
Looking from your present awakened state here/now, what independent power did this dream character ever actually possess?
None. The dream itself dictates 100% what ALL the dream characters within the dream do and don’t do, what appears to exist and what doesn’t appear to exist, what appears to happen and what doesn’t appear to happen, etc.
However, imagine if part of the dream character’s make-up/design included a sense of free-will/autonomy. That within the dream it imagined it could do whatever it wanted by controlling if not the entire dream, at least certain portions of it.
Now, the truth is the dream character is not separate from the dream and thus it is not possible for it to do anything except for what the dream dictates, i.e., what happens next in the dream!
You can further Imagine how much suffering this dream character would be experiencing if it thought/believed otherwise, i.e., that it did indeed have power over the dream in some way, shape or form.
Now, let’s imagine even further that you could enter your next sleeping dream and tell the star of the dream, this dream character “you,” that in fact it is not real, only a dream character, and thus it has no free will whatsoever and never did!
What do you think its reaction would be? Would it just suddenly believe you, or more likely would it argue and insist that it does have free will because it was taught it does (“Your responsible for your actions.”), and more importantly, because it thinks/feels/believes it does?
And suppose you explained to it that that too is part of the dream. That this sense of having free will/control is built into the dream character, just like its hair color, height, skin color, etc.
Would it believe you?
Probably not.
Michael Jeffreys
Michael Jeffreys 