Chapter 17 Master & Initiation

Human existence is like being asleep. Humans are asleep. Even any form of wakefulness is, in fact, sleep. Enlightenment is intimate contact with an enlightened person. Unless you have intimate contact with an enlightened person, you cannot emerge from your sleep, because the mind can even dream that it is awake. The mind can dream that it is no longer asleep.

When I say that humans are asleep, this statement must be carefully understood. We dream constantly, 24 hours a day. At night, we shut the doors to the outside world, locking ourselves inside to dream. During the day, our senses are open to the outside world, but the dreaming continues within. Close your eyes for a moment, and you're dreaming again; it's an internal continuity. You are aware of the outside world, but that awareness is inseparable from the dreaming mind. The outside world is imposed on that dreaming mind, but the dream continues within. That's why, even when we're awake, we can't see the real thing. We impose our dreams onto reality; we never see the truth of things, we only ever see our own projections.

If I look at you and I have a dream in my heart, then you become a projection. I will project my dream onto you, and everything I know about you will forever be mixed with my dream, with my projection. When I love you, you appear different in my eyes. When I don't love you, you appear completely different in my eyes. You are not always the same, because I am merely using you as a screen, projecting my dreaming mind onto you.

When I love you, my dreams are different, so you appear different. When I don't love you, you're still the same you, still the same screen, but the projection is different. Now I'm using you as a screen to project another dream of mine. Dreams can change again; I can love you again, and then you'll appear different in my eyes once more. We never see the true face; what we always see is our own dream projected onto it.

I appear different in each of your eyes; each of you projects something different onto me. Only to myself am I the same. But if I'm dreaming, even I feel different from moment to moment, because my interpretation is different each time. But if I am enlightened, then I am the same. The Buddha said that to test whether a person is enlightened, one only needs to see if they are consistent, like seawater, which is salty everywhere.

There is a hazy wall surrounding you, composed of various projections, thoughts, ideas, concepts, and interpretations. You are the projector, constantly running, projecting things that exist only within you and nowhere else, and that whole becomes the screen. Therefore, you can never be aware that you are asleep. There was a Sufi saint named Hijira. An angel appeared in his dream and told him to store as much well water as possible, because the next morning, all the water in the world would be poisoned by the devil, and people who drank it would go mad.

That entire night, the man stored up a great deal of water. Sure enough, the next day everyone went mad, but no one knew that the whole city had gone insane. Only the mendicant monk remained sane, yet everyone in the city said he was insane. He knew what was happening, but no one believed him. So he continued drinking his water, remaining alone.

But he couldn't go on like this forever; the whole town was living in a completely different world. Nobody listened to him, and eventually, a rumor spread that he should be arrested and thrown in jail. They said he was crazy.

One morning, they came to arrest him. They would either treat him as a patient or lock him up in jail; they couldn't give him freedom in any way, because he had gone completely insane. No one could understand what he was saying; he spoke another language.

The mendicant monk couldn't understand. He tried to help them recall their past, but they had forgotten everything; they knew nothing of the past, nothing of what had happened before that maddening morning. They couldn't understand; the mendicant monk had become beyond their comprehension.

They surrounded his house and seized him. The mendicant said, "Give me a little more time, and I will heal myself." He ran to the communal well, drank the water, and was cured. The whole town rejoiced: the mendicant was now cured; he was no longer mad. In fact, he had been mad. Now he was one of the masses.

If everyone else is asleep, you'll never realize you're asleep too. If everyone else is crazy, and you're crazy too, you'll never realize it.

To be enlightened means that you have surrendered to an enlightened person. You say, "I don't understand, I can't understand. I'm part of this crazy, sleeping world, I'm always dreaming." Even a person in a deep sleep has this feeling, because sleep isn't always deep. Sleep is unstable; it's not always deep, but rather varies in depth. Just as ordinary sleep fluctuates in many levels and layers, the metaphysical sleep I'm talking about also fluctuates. Sometimes you're right on the borderline, very close to the Buddha, and at that point you can understand a little of what the Buddha was saying, what he was talking about. Of course, you'll never fully understand what he said, but you've at least glimpsed the truth.