Friday, March 4, 2011

Inception, Dreams, and the Mind

This past week we continued our study of the working of our mind, and what the wisdom of the Bhagavad-Gita has to say about it, by exploring one of the most fascinating aspects of our mental reality, the dream. We viewed a scene from the recent hit film Inception as an initial way to frame our discussion, and in this scene, we saw how the main character, Cobb, a master of mental espionage, revealed the workings of the dream state to his young and impressionable architect friends, Ariadne. This is a dream state one is aware of being a part of, and one that can be actively controlled and created, like the phenomenon of the lucid dream. As we watched, we saw that Ariadne learned that the power of the mind and the contents of the subconscious that arise in a dream can be both wondrous to control and too overpowering and dangerous to handle.

Dreams reveal to us so many different things within us that make up the contents of what we have taken into our consciousness in this life, and perhaps in previous lives. We discussed how certain dream experiences could be echoes, or actual memories, of previous lives, and how this connection may further our own consideration of the phenomenon of reincarnation. We considered again the ABC News video of a young boy who remembered, through vivid dreams, his previous life as a WWII fighter pilot, and whose parents actually researched and corroborated much of the info he was relating from his dreams as being historically accurate.

The mystery of the dream may never be something that can be fully captured, and to a greater extent this also applies to the mystery of our mind. The Bhagavad-Gita has plenty of thought-compelling wisdom to present, which can challenge our own conceptions of our mental and overall reality, if we have an open mind to it.

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