Book Description

Many of us live as if we're in a dream. We are not awake to the reality of life as it truly is, but instead spend the majority of our time consumed by the illusory reality of our thoughts--a reality of imaginations, fantasies, words, beliefs, concepts, ideas, opinions, judgements, and social conventions. We often live as if we are on auto-pilot--our body is doing one thing and our mind is on vacation somewhere else--and so, we miss out on our life experience, consumed and distracted by thoughts, unaware of what we are actually doing in the present moment. When we aren't present to life, it makes us feel vaguely but persistently dissatisfied. This sense of dissatisfaction, of a gap between us and everything else, is the essential problem of human life. It is the basic truth of our suffering--both individually and collectively. Individually, it causes suffering because it creates a sense of separation between us and life--which results in feelings of fear and isolation that lead to unnatural and destructive behaviors. Collectively, this manifests as violence between humans, harm toward other living beings, and destruction of our own environment. Our individual suffering and delusion causes us to act in harmful ways that contributes to the suffering of all life on earth, and unless we wake up to reality, we'll continue to live in our dream of separation, and we'll continue to act in destructive ways because of it. If we awaken to the present moment, however, we can see that we are not separate from life; we are life. Everything is existing together here and now in this moment. Not only does waking up to the present moment bring us peace, happiness and fulfillment--it brings us in touch with the reality of our shared existence. If we can awaken to the true reality of what is, we can realize our own fundamental being, and its inseparability from the being within all beings. This book is a guide to awakening from the dream of the mind and its projections, awakening to reality as it is in the present moment, and realizing the reality of our own presence by doing so.