Not like a dream, but that it truly is a dream.

  Randi: Well, let’s see, the Buddha, for one...

  Me: Yes! Buddha for sure. Also the Dalai Lama. Lao Tzu, the great Taoist. Oh! Speaking of Taoism, the author of the wonderful book The Tao is Silent, philosopher Raymond Smullyan, who, by the way, admires you very much, often writes about this life being a dream.

  Randi: The man has excellent taste, I must say.

  Me: (smiling) Speaking of taste, that reminds me...

  I slowly reach outside the window and just pluck the moon from the sky and hold it in my hands before Randi’s eyes and then I gently move it up to my mouth and I take a bite out of it, as if it were a juicy peach!

  Randi: (just shakes his head and waves goodbye)

  Randi wakes up alone in his bedroom. He peeks out of the window at the gorgeous moon in the sky and chuckles, dumbfounded.

  CHAPTER 4

  Down the Rabbit Hole

  ARGUMENTS FROM AUTHORITIES

  YES, I AM VERY AWARE that the title above is a fallacy. But for a moment, forget western logic. Try to think Eastern. Let us look at some of the amazing minds throughout the centuries that say the same thing that I have been saying about life being a dream. Maybe you know some of these names. Maybe you even admire a few of them. Maybe you admire all of them. Let us begin, shall we?

  Buddha, Christ, Lao Tzu, Huang Po, DT Suzuki, Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, John Cage, John Lennon, George Harrison, Eckhart Tolle, Meister Eckhart, Marguerite Porete, Thomas Merton, The Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Han Shan, all the mystics, all the Sufis, all the sages. That’s just to name a few!

  The search for self becomes the quest for no-self and this in turn becomes the search for True Self. Here is the analogy. Right now you are having a dream. Like dreams, your waking dream arises spontaneously. You, as the dreamer, dream up a character and this is your “self”, your “I”, your “ego”. From the point of view of you as the dreamer, everything happens, or unfolds, and there is no control. Any ideas of control or free will are illusory.

  In the dream, your dream character “self” has no free will, the dream is being dreamt by you, the dreamer, and that dream character is really just along for the ride. The dream character is a fiction making its way through life’s dream. But from the point of view of the character within the dream, all appears to be real, even the notion of free will. But this isn’t you, you are the dreamer.

  This book is all about dissolving the imaginary blocks to your True Self.

  How do you view life, dear reader? From the point of view of the dream or from the point of view of the dreamer?

  RAMPING UP

  I studied these ideas for a few years, discussing them with Paul daily by phone, through email, and through text messages. I meditated every night and after a while I really started to see the truth in it. This was the key to discover the meaning of it all. This was what all the sages were indeed pointing to. I watched every documentary and movie on it, read all the literature I could get my hands on, and studied meditation and the mystical and psychedelic experiences. Skeptically.

  I was now seriously questioning the nature of matter. Questioning its apparent solidity. Questioning where it came from. Pondering the nature and architectural structure of a dream and constructing a conceptual map of awakening and toying with the idea of direct experience.

  As you will do.

  My meditation ramped up.

  And then my beautiful and loving mother, who had been suffering from cancer for over a year, died peacefully in her bed in hospice.

  I was now ready to embark on a journey into the unknown. The journey all true sages and contemplatives eventually make. The journey within, wherein I would ascertain the true meaning of the mysterium tremendum.

  Thus began the journey from the light of reason to the source of all light.

  UP IN SMOKE

  Blowing smoke in Death’s face, I took a long drag off my cigar and gently held my Shakespearian Hamlet skull up to my face. Soon that will be me, I thought. And sooner than later. Death is swift, be wise with your time. Now you see you, now you don’t. Everything eventually goes up in wisps of smoke.

  One night, one glorious night, I prepared to meditate as I had done every night for the past months. The preparation was very simple: lights out, in silent darkness. A sliver of milky moonlight peeked through the shades of my bedroom window, one of two rooms in my tiny, monk cell apartment.

  The only sound in the room was the sound of my big heart beating. The heart that was broken permanently, first by the loss of my poor precious four legged canine best friend, Eugene, my beagle, dying and then by my sweet girlfriend of eight years flying the coop due to me not wanting to bring a baby into this just too big and often nasty mess of a world.

  Fact: Armadillos nearly always give birth to identical quadruplets.

  The last blow of all was the vanishing of my dear mother into the black endless void.

  The Sufi poet Rumi said you must have your heart broken over and over and over again until it finally opens.

  Nice words, but soon I’d understand exactly what he meant.

  I could hear the sound of my poor finite heart, beating, the sound now faintly filling the room.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, my heart decelerated. Softer, less rapid.

  The heart of a blue whale is so big, a human can swim through its arteries.

  A LOOPHOLE

  Eyes closed, I began the silent journey within. Who knows? Maybe materialism was not the only way? Maybe there really was something else? Certainly not anything supernatural, paranormal, or occult. No laws of physics can be broken, this was for sure. But perhaps something else, something so essential, but just out of sight.

  A loophole. Maybe!

  Deeper and deeper into uncharted inward country traveled your new skeptical friend. As images and thoughts bubbled to the surface of my teeming consciousness, I told himself “not this, not that” and let them pass by like strange visitors in the night.

  This old meditation technique of not this, not that, was used by the great sages and was called neti neti. If it worked for the great past masters, who was I to not use it? It meant when thoughts appeared in the stillness, allow yourself to dismiss them, by thinking “not this, not that.”

  Non attachment.

  On this night it was working like a charm. The thoughts slowed, catching up to the heart, which seemed to have stopped. Seemed, but did not. The heart quietly and softly drummed on. A few more thoughts came and left and breathing slowed.

  SILENT NIGHT, HOLY NIGHT

  As thoughts, likes waves, began to slow, a peculiar thing occurred.

  Any sense of a separate self, or an ego, or sense of “I” began to gently dissolve.

  The “I” that I knew was a fake, a fraud, a farce, a myth, an illusion, now started to just melt away and a soothing wave of peace washed over what was left.

  This sentence reminds you that this was one skeptical guy. Don’t forget it!

  Now, soaring deeper within, the ceaseless chatter of the always present cerebral calisthenics of monkey mind were totally halted and the sense of “I” was truly slipping away.

  There are more fake flamingos in the world than real flamingos.

  Did you know that?

  SHIFT HAPPENS!

  And then, just like that, it happened. What happened?

  Something far beyond words. Something eff-ing ineffable. Something far beyond incredible!

  The false sense of “I” gave way completely and my materialistic paradigm went pop and an extraordinary shift in perception occurred.

  A flip of some inner switch, click, and suddenly I knew this was it.

  I was IT.

  Holy Shift.

  I was, for lack of a better phrase, on the other side. The other side of what?

  It was pure astonishment.

  Here was the oneness the thousands of books I had read had discussed and here was the true meaning of Buddhism and Zen and Taoism and all of the religions. Here was what every sage spoke of when urging us to go within, here was the Nazarene’s idea of the kingdom of heaven being within you, here was the Christ-mind, the Buddha-mind, the one mind of Huang Po.

  Here was Nirvana. The extinction of the false self.

  Out out, brief candle…

  UNHOUSED AT LAST!

  Out out, brief candle, life truly was a walking shadow. A poor condemned shadow ceaselessly shuffling in circles, hopelessly trapped in the hamster wheel of Plato’s cave of the mind. On came a tremendous oceanic feeling, as if pure peace was washing over me. The true meaning of nothingness was finally understood.

  Also, the genuine feeling of astonishment, my true nature. No “I”, no “me”, no “you”, no mother, no father, no reader, no body. The experience was quite the thing.

  But understand it is no thing.

  Well, it is one thing, which is no thing, which is everything. Whew.

  See? Words fail here. Pointless! Yet here I am doing my best to point it out to you. See that moon over there?

  Whatever you do, don’t get caught sucking on the finger that’s doing the pointing, just discover for yourself what the finger is pointing at. Words will do that to you, they will comfort you and keep you in the dream. The finger is pointing out the way to see through this world and into beautiful never-ending nothingness. Since the night of my awakening, I now felt infinite and all encompassing.

  It was as if a third eye had opened, but in my chest. My heart. I was everything. I was what we call god. I was what we call love. All was one. God truly is love. Not some being. Love is god.

  Everything all made sense in an instant.

  In a flash, here was the meaning of it all, tucked away deep inside, hidden and diligently guarded by this tenacious as a motherfucker sense of an “I” called the ego and protected by the most fantastic lie of all time, the lie that “you” are a person.

  The truth is, persons do not exist.

  “You” do not exist. And, there’s nothing more real than nothing.

  Really.

  PARADIGM POPPER

  Don’t believe it? Believe me, I understand. Don’t you worry, after you finish this book, you can see it for yourself. You’ll try it. What do you have to lose? Besides your false personhood, your illusory “I”. Your faulty view. Your worries of mortality. And everything else.

  Go ahead. Pop your paradigm. Flip your perception inside out. While there’s still time. Remember, the grave awaits. Lights out. Sooner than you think.

  Vending machines are twice as likely to kill you as a shark is. Fact!

  Back to the journey.

  Remember how I said I could grasp it with words? Well, that’s equivalent to eating the pictures of food on a menu.

  The meal is what you want.

  Or standing on a map and thinking you’re in some new exotic location.

  The map not the territory.

  But now…

  Here was the meal, here was the territory. No more menus, no more maps.

  I was it.

  Pure consciousness, pure awareness, one gorgeous, spectacular endless flowing of peace and love and knowing, oh so much knowing.

  Knowing knowing knowing itself.

  What a beautiful loop!

  Such serenity, such brilliance, such joy. Here was the true infinity! Forget about the old idea of a monkey typing away forever and eventually arriving at the script of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

  Here was a skeptical and upright monkey with a tail always bent towards finitude spinning a tale about his discovery of true infinity.

  This was the mystical experience.

  This sentence is going absolutely bananas right now!

  By the way, a strawberry isn’t a berry, but a banana is. Fact!

  So are avocados and watermelon.

  TIME AND SPACE

  Time had totally stopped. I was outside of the temporal and spacial limits, I was limitless, had gone beyond belief, leapt beyond cosmogony!

  A thousand seconds is just about 16 minutes. A million seconds is just about 11 days. A billion seconds is about 32 years and one trillion seconds is just about 32,000 years.

  We think a trillion is a lot. But the good news is: Honey never spoils.

  You can eat 32,000-year-old honey.

  Sweet!

  DEEPEN PERCEPTION

  I wrote Paul immediately afterwards and told him what had happened.

  “Welcome home” was his reply.

  He told me it gets deeper and deeper to where it is obviously the true reality that the world and body illusion arise from.

  At the very least I will find “myself” getting more and more peaceful, even if or when the outer world experience is falling apart.

  All I knew was I wanted to deepen the perception of it. This was it, the true meaning of life. It was such a beautiful feeling and it was like a flip of a switch on reality, on what can be seen.

  Huxley was right!

  But I decided I wanted to go deeper into it because I was sure it would get even more beautiful, to the point of tears.

  Meditation was the key. It was all a locked book until the key was found. It was astonishing, that open space communicating with its illusion of a separated self, just the one big endless mind trying to convince the sleeping dreaming part of itself to wake up from its dream. Eventually that space would become more and more my normal state and could be deepened with just a moment’s pause.

  So now my toes were in the wet sand of the beach and pointing toward the ocean. The real journey home had begun. Where you are going, dear reader, you won’t need books or knowledge or a yoga mat or anything at all. Everything you need is already inside of you.

  Let go of the dream.

  I’m reminded of the great writer Joseph Conrad who felt that when a person is born they fall into a dream like a person who falls into the sea. It’s all a matter of flipping the perspective, a matter of not valuing what you see all day in front of you.

  The map is not the territory. The menu is not the meal. See? Sea? Si!

  Dream Dialogue

  Five

  Me: So you can’t just tell me this is not a dream.

  Randi: (grunts and groans)

  Me: We are born into this. There is no easy way out. One must realize it’s a dream by waking up.

  Randi: Yes, but...

  Randi wakes up in his bed! He simply cannot believe he was dreaming again! Scratches his head. Giggles to himself. Pinches himself. Laughs.

  Randi: Astonishing...!

  Randi sighs, then looks over to his nightstand. There, next to the lamp, sits the unfinished manuscript of this very book, The Skeptic’s Apprentice!

  Randi: Strange. Now why would that be here?

  Oh…oh no...!

  Randi wakes up AGAIN.

  A double wake up!

  Randi: Dammit! It all seems so real!

  Randi glances slowly over at the nightstand. The manuscript is gone. He pinches himself. Giggles. Rolls over and goes back to sleep.

  CHAPTER 5

  Row, Row, Row Your Boat

  Talent hits a target no one else can hit;

  Genius hits a target no one else can see.

  -ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

  EVERYTHING IS WITHIN YOU

  IMAGINE THE SHIFT IN CONSCIOUSNESS when I realized that I didn’t exist in a body? That a body existed in me? What a profound realization!

  “I” no longer existed in the world. The world existed in me.

  My whole life I just knew there couldn’t be a soul hidden in the brain. I knew it.

  But to realize it was really that the brain was hidden in the soul?

  I wanted to shout it out over the rooftops of the world!

  This book is my shout!

  Many people can’t admit that their philosophies of life might be wrong and I was one of these people. For a long time I just stayed locked in my comfortable paradigm of materialism and really believed that Randi and I had all the evidence on our side and that we were in the know.

  Without a doubt.

  Then I had this direct experience and learned the astonishing truth. What amazement! What surprise! No wonder Albert Einstein declared that the mystic emotion was the finest emotion one could hope to experience.

  A SWITCH IN IDENTITY

  It was earth-shattering to make the spectacular move from matter being first and making up everything in the universe to consciousness being first and foremost, consciousness being everything, to consciousness being the whole lot. When the shift occurs, any and all paradoxes fly out the window in an instant. Everything makes sense in a flash. For many years I had read tons of books, books on everything, I read anything good that I could get my hands on. But now I know the words aren’t the truth. Some words point directly to the truth, but what you truly are all of the brainpower in the world cannot find. The intellect is caught up in fragmentation, in boundaries, limitations, and concepts, with all of this taking place in time and space, like those mind boxes Paul had pointed out.

  This way of thinking, materialism, assures us that we’re merely something that just transpired between the maternity ward and the bone-yard. But really we are the whole show, the whole shebang! This has all been said innumerable times before by countless sages in voluminous volumes. The funny thing is, as I’ve said before, I read all of those books but still missed it, and maybe, just maybe, you missed it too.

  Don’t miss these words, my friend. The problem is that almost all of those books can be misinterpreted and taken as just poetry and the supreme communication gets lost. So let me be clear, I am not speaking poetical here, or just using metaphor. Everything I write here is true.

  TWIDDLING THE KNOTTY KNOBS OF THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION

  Wrestling with what had just happened and expanding meditation sessions to twice a day, every day, I had the sudden realization that the seeker was also a part of the dream. The quester was part of the illusion.

  The path, the quest, must be dropped. You can’t wake up, because there is no you. There’s nothing to find. Absolutely nothing.

 

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