What is life?
By Claudia Burdick ©2009 Burdick Insitute LLC all rights reserved.
How do we know that what we are living is more than just a dream?
How do we know that what we feel isn’t just our imagination? What are the signs of life?
Life defined by our current understanding or paradigm consists of a body moving through time and space experiencing others who are also moving through time and space, connected to but not wholly aware of a dynamic energy.
This energy is dynamic enough to propel us into this time space continum through the awesome experience of gestation and birth. All humans are born or engage life through this bursting forth into the NOW. And there we stay, in the NOW until we burst forth into another reality through another propulsion called death or transformation.
We might dream a dream over and over, night after night experiencing the same sequence. So how do we know that our “life” is not a dream? Dreams are broken up by the day. Our life is broken up by the night, however, our day “dream” changes every day in little supposedly inconsequential ways.
Today, we awake and eat a breakfast of eggs, toast and juice; tomorrow we awake and consume oatmeal. Seemingly the same sort of routine goes on, but there are vast differences in the details. Details in dreams are hard to remember and they do not form a consistent and unbroken pattern.
We can dream one day that we are pirates on a ship and the next day we can dream in our sleep that we have won the lottery. In our waking moments we are aware that these are dreams. In our sleeping, we do not realize that we are dreaming. Some dreams seem so real that we wonder what is real for a few moments upon awakening, but it’s only for a few moments, a few seconds.
The most consistent thing about life is that we can plan our next day and work through the steps to create that plan. In our dreams, we cannot plan another dream, or work through steps that move toward a dream sequence. Even if we desire to have certain dreams, they often elude us. If we have desires in our waking moments, we can take certain steps to ensure the experiencing of those desires.
The feelings we are feeling, how do we know these are not just our imagination. The pain we feel when we stumble and fall down the stairs, how do we know that isn’t just our imagination? Our body gives us many answers to these questions.
If you fall down the stairs, you will see bruises that can appear long after the fall reminding us of the fall. When you experience things in dreams that should raise a bruise or even break a bone or two, nothing happens and in fact, upon awakening we are so glad “it was only a dream”.