Buddha Buddhism

Depends a great deal on personal associations with Buddhism, but may represent your core self and wisdom from a wider awareness than your everyday knowledge. In this type of dream there is an awareness of wonderful release from the limitations we impose upon ourselves through believing the illusion we erect from our sense impressions, or beliefs and habits. So the Buddha sometimes depicts a form of liberation from thinking and desiring, and the worldview that arises from the sensory impressions of the world and the belief that one is only the body.

But often, in Westerners dreams it is associated with the denial of, or loss of, ego.

In a Christian persons dream it may depict a threat to their belief system. See: archetype of the self and archetype of the buddha; Buddhism and dreams.

The Buddhist beliefs are built upon the statement that human pain can be overcome or left behind. This could be seen as emerging at a time and historical period where masses of people were in a social condition causing pain. The second example is comments from a person exploring in a dream state.

Example: The memorandum also contained this grim warning: “It is probably no accident that the society which most consistently encouraged the use of these substances, India, produced one of the sickest social orders ever created by mankind, in which thinking men spent their time lost in the Buddha position under the influence of drugs exploring consciousness, while poverty, disease, social discrimination, and superstition reached their highest and most organized form in all history.”’  Quoted from David McClelland, Chairman of the Harvard Center for Research in Personality response to the use of psychedelics.

Example: As I explored the states of being suggested in Eastern practices I saw something I had never seen before. Firstly it was to do with the whole social situation of Eastern countries. Always the individual cells – the individual men women and children – were in stress in the sense that society pushed them to conformity. The cast system of India, the killing of students in social conflict, the conformity seen in Japan, and the recent feudal systems; all pointed to individual stress and pain. I saw the image of the termite hill as representing this. If the mound satisfies the individual members then their needs are met. But supposing there was not enough oxygen in the mound, this would show as individual and collective distress.

The other telling point was that the information I had received about the ‘answers’ to life in the Eastern system were always suggested as a release from pain. Buddha’s nirvana was an extinguishing of the integrity of the individual, so there would be a release from the pain of life. The sight of death, illness, suffering in Buddha’s life was what motivated his search for an answer. The path of Buddhism is a way toward release from suffering. This suffering I realised as the individual ‘distress’ such as the termites might feel if their ‘social system’ were not actually supplying the needs of its individuals. The massive concretization of the caste system suggests this from another angle.

In fact the whole story revolves around a young prince who lived a life of intense advantage and in looking at the life of those not so advantaged felt their pain. He did not preach a way of the rich sharing what they had with everyone, as was and is done in such systems as the Native Americans or many tribal people, but taught a way to escape from pain. And of course it still carries on, and today we are a people who are medicated out of their social pain. See We do Not Realise

What are my feelings or central experience in this dream? Is it of peace and liberation or threat?

Is there something in my dream that is like a paradox – if so what can I learn from that paradoxical experience?

If I imagine the mood or feelings of the dream what does it create in me?

Read LifeStream; Methods of Awakening and Victims