Considering how much of our average day is spent imagining, creating, daydreaming, night dreaming, trapped in fake arguments with real people in our heads, it’s clear that we are a swirling mass of the real and the unreal. Some triggers to the unreal are real and tangible. They are physical stimulants—like coffee. But some are not—like memories.
Children are new to the planet. They don’t have a lot of life experience from which to draw, so they invent it. Adults see this as rehearsing for real life, but really kids are filling in their mind space with adventures and teddy bear tea parties because they are not yet cluttered with exterior experiences and the demand to make decisions based upon teachings and life experience. Life experience is like wood on fire: there is this seemingly tangible now moment burning away into an ephemeral gas called memory. This memory retains some of the qualities of its former self, but it is not the same. It is an unreal representation of formerly real events. Still, we treat this unreal happening—this dead thing, this memory—as if it is us and as if it is the thing from which we grow. We learn lessons. We add to memory. We mature. We evolve. We become… what? More us?
Do we? Can a real person grow from the unreal? Or is it that, similar to how we filled mind space as children, as adults, we’ve created a context, which we treat as real, and within that bubble, imagine ourselves growing and learning. Perhaps this growing and learning is the unreal counterpart to the physical reality of bodily development and natural expansion. Perhaps if we zoom in our focus, we’ll find a stillness that is deeper than all of these movements and descriptions of movements.
A Deeper Lesson
Let’s go back to triggers. Imagination being triggered by stimulants is an indicator that free will, as we define it, is an illusion. There are always causes for everything. But what is the cause of the causes and what caused that? If free will is an illusion, so, too, is control from on high. There is no you. There is no god. There is only our undoing. Seeing all of this—understanding it deeply, beyond the intellect—is our undoing.
What happens next is the only mystery worth being.