By Albert Russell
When I was asked to present a topic, I felt like a person in the middle of a hot and dry desert who suddenly heard the sound of water, and found hope of reaching the water.
I wanted to talk about Arthur Schopenhauer’s book “On the suffering of the world”, but then I thought it might be better to talk about some fundamental questions: “Who am I?”, “Where am I coming from?”, “Where am I going to?’’ and “Do I really exist?”
I have been thinking about the answers to these questions for a long time. As a result, I have come to develop a theory which provides me with satisfactory answers. The theory is that the whole universe is nothing more than a deep dream. And time and space are the factors which make this dream deeper, making it easier to believe it as reality. Since an object has both time and space dimensions, then it will experience past, present and future in one direction. If the same object exists in a realm in which there is no time and space, then there is no past, present and future concerning the object. In other words that object knows about past, present and future at the same moment.
If we assume that this world we live in is a dream containing time and space dimensions, and the waking world is the world with no time and space dimensions, then when we wake up those questions will become meaningless, since there is no past, present and future in the waking world. These questions only belong to the dreaming world.
But this theory leads me to some other questions. “Regarding this theory, do the definitions of religion, science and philosophy change from the dreaming realm to the waking one?”, “Are we free in this dreaming world?”, “Did we choose to be a part of this dream?”
When I read the book “On the suffering of the world” by Schopenhauer, I came to believe even more firmly in my dreaming theory, as I felt a deep connection between my ideas and his. Here is a passage from his book:
“Life can be regarded as a dream and death as the awakening from it: but it must be remembered that the personality, the individual, belongs to the dreaming and not to the awakened consciousness, which is why death appears to the individual as annihilation. In any event, death is not, from this point of view, to be considered a transition to a state completely new and foreign to us, but rather a return to one originally our own from which life has been only a brief absence.”
Socratic Society 
Yes life as we commonly presume it to be is a dream. But at the same time Reality altogether is much much more, and completely different to what we presume or think it to be.
1. http://www.adidam.org/teaching/aletheon/truth-reality.aspx
2. http://www.dabase.org/dualsens.htm
3. http://www.easydeathbook.com/purpose.asp
4. http://www.adidabiennale.org/curation/index.htm
Always the death issue. Views of life seem to be overwhelmingly determined by speculation about death. We would do well to forget death as a topic worthy of any discussion whatsoever. Ask the following question. What were you before you were born? Let that question occupy your mind and just presume that such will be one’s state after death. There is no communicable content regarding this state so consider anything that can be said as being nonsense (not in the foolish crazy sense of the word but in the sense that whatever one says has no sense to it – “unsensable” seems a better description).
Notions of dream states and other fantasies are generated by consciousness in the absence of any constraining forces. It is like being given a string of numbers that one can order in any way that one wishes but there is nothing to which the numbers correspond (that is they are not measures of weight, distance, velocity or distinct objects).
Looked at this way, why would one arbitrary ordering of numbers be preferred to any other.
Regarding death or pre-life, all conceptual manipulations are but a string of arbitrary numbers with no correspondence to anything other than to their relationship to each other as part of the total number of ways in which they can be arranged.
Let’s once and for all dump the death/meaning of life questions which for all we know are generated by some runaway process of the brain as it attempts to organize and synthesize all of the signals it is receiving.
Was it Blake that said that he could not believe that death was anything more than walking from one room to another? Eckhart said some know the rest have to have faith.
you can know rather than believe if you can learn to project your consciousness out of the body and investigate for yourself
Sadly easier said than done.
Eric
I’m ‘googling ‘ to find a contact for the Illawarra socratic society. Tried U3A, and I can’t find any contact . i would love to join the friday coffee club..but can’t find any information on HOW. I live in Bulli. can’t join the U3A because i still work part -time (Mon, Tues, Wed).. but of retirement age.
email address
wendyytucker@hotmail.com