THERE ARE THOSE WHO SPEND their lives thus, at the feet of such a teacher, but that’s not what occurred in this case. Nevertheless, the pages that follow are an account of what happens when ‘What Is,’ that which cannot be taught, which is beyond the consensus reality of things, ideas, thoughts, experiences, and sense perceptions, is suddenly and spontaneously seen or apperceived; and when all of this so-called reality is seen and clearly understood to be illusion, of the nature of a dream.

Convention would suggest that I refer to what follows as a ‘first person’ account, but you see here we are again, with that little problem with words and ideas and communication. This ‘first person’ who would be relating this account is clearly seen as part of the illusion, a mere character in the dream, and not in any way as an actually existing individual to whom these events could have occurred or who could be experiencing or thinking or relating anything. After all, if you fall asleep at night and have a dream in which you dream of flying over the mountains, would you, when you awaken, say that anyone actually flew over the mountains last night? No matter how vivid the dream was, the characters, the story, the events, the ‘doing,’ were, in terms of waking reality, all fictitious.

This analogy of a dream, and waking up from a dream, is one that we will be coming back to frequently. It is an image used by many of those who try to teach or convey or just talk about this, and it is one of the best analogies available, but of course it is only an analogy. It is used for illustrative purposes only; if you get to taking it literally it’ll all come apart and make no sense.

When there is a ceasing of the misperceiving of the illusion as real, there is a sudden, complete and irrevocable seeing that there exists not a separate person, but only an appearance in the play of Consciousness which functions in that play or dream as a so-called human mind/body organism. This organism is an appearance only, existing as an illusory, dream-like construct within that which is beyond or prior to this illusion.

This ‘That Which Is’ can be referred to from within the illusion as Consciousness, or Presence, or All That Is, or even perhaps (with some qualification) as ‘God;’ and it is understood that this Presence (to pick one term) is all there is, so that anything which is perceived is always and only Presence being perceiued as some (illusory) thing. This Presence is what streams or flows, to use the image, through the mind/body apparatus, animating it, rendering it conscious; so conscious that it actually thinks, as most others like it also think, that it is an individual autonomous entity, a separate being which is conscious.

But it is not. That is the illusion. There are no separate beings. There is nobody home. There is always only Presence streaming through these apparent forms thus creating this illusion. ‘Me,’ ‘myself,’ ‘david,’ does not actually exist except as a mistaken idea, a misguided and totally conceptual and never ‘real’ separating off of Consciousness into an illusory separate self. And what is realized is that this Consciousness, Presence, All That Is, is what ‘I’ truly is.