Are You Truly Awakened? Or Are You Just Trading One Dream for Another?

Greetings, dear friends. I invite you to ponder this: Why would you seek to awaken from this dream with your eyes wide open? 

And now, allow me to take you even deeper with this question.

How do you awaken each morning?

 Do you realize that each time you awaken from your slumber, you are not just leaving behind the world of your dreams but stepping into another dream—a dream that carries its own illusions and distractions?

The dream state you enter each night when your eyes are closed is a world of its own—woven with symbols, stories, and experiences.

 Yet, when the morning sun rises and your eyes flutter open, you believe you have truly awakened. 

But what causes you to wake from the dream of the night?

What transitions you from one dream with your eyes closed to another with your eyes wide open?

Here lies a profound truth: deep within your being, an unseen force gently shifts you from being the dreamer lost in the dream to the thinker who lives it.

In that fragile, fleeting moment of transition, if you can grasp the essence of awareness, you will awaken to the realization that you are not the dreamer lost in the illusion. You are the consciousness, ever-present, ever-aware, timeless in your true nature. 

Yet, like a vast ocean of thought, the mind pulls you back into its currents, and you find yourself once again lost in the dream of daily life.

So, why awaken from this waking dream?

Ah, to answer that, you must first come to know both states—the state of deep, chaotic identification with the mind and the state of stillness and silence beyond the mind. 

These two worlds, my friends, are not merely abstract ideas; they are lived experiences. 

The first is the world of suffering, swept away by the tides of thought, fear, desire, and confusion. This is the dream of misery, where you identify with the mind’s incessant chatter and think you are the mind. You become entangled in its dramas, anxieties, regrets, and projections.

Here, you live as a puppet of the mind, driven by its patterns and conditioning. And this, my dear friends, is a dream of endless turmoil.

But then, there is the other state—when you fall into the depths of meditation, into the peace beyond thought, into the silence that resides at the heart of all beings. 

Here, there is no identification, struggle, or pushing or pulling. There is only the calm and bliss of simply being without the mind’s interference. You touch the essence of who you are—something vast, something eternal. 

And in this space, you discover that you are not the mind but the witness. You are the stillness that observes the waves of thought without being disturbed. In this state, there is peace, there is joy, and there is freedom.

Now, you may ask, why would anyone not choose this state of peace and freedom? 

You might wonder why anyone would choose to remain in the turmoil of the mind instead of embracing a state of peace and freedom.

 Perhaps we’ve become so entangled in the endless pursuit of doing and becoming—so focused on striving for this or that—that we’ve forgotten our true nature, simply being.

The answer, my friends, may lie in direct experience. To truly make a conscious choice, one must fully encounter both realms—the turbulence and the stillness, the suffering and the serenity. Only then can we genuinely decide which path to walk.

When you live in the chaos of the mind, you are tossed about by its waves. You cannot see beyond the thoughts, emotions, or conditioning.

 But once you taste the stillness and rest in the peace beyond the mind, you realize that the mind’s noise is a passing storm.

 You realize that you are not the storm but the sky in which the storm passes. From that place, you can see clearly that the mind’s turmoil is not worth the price of your peace. You choose the bliss of silence over the suffering of identification.

This is why all great seekers, all awakened beings, urge you to awaken from the dream of the mind. 

It is not enough to know intellectually that you are caught in a dream—you must experience the liberation from waking up from it. 

You must taste the difference between the misery of the mind and the peace of the awakened state. 

Once you have experienced both and felt the difference in the marrow of your being, the question of why to awaken answers itself.

So, I invite you all to dive into the silence, step out of the chaos, and awaken to the truth beyond all thought. Only then will you know why this awakening is true freedom and peace?

Let’s embrace this transformative journey to genuine happiness and well-being through fitness, meditation, mindfulness, and stress reduction. Visit us at nycfitliving.com to start your journey today.