Is it really true that I am creating the world?
Nukunu:
Yes, and you are also changing and destroying it!
But first of all we have to understand that the world is not really physical. It is experience and that is consciousness. The Buddhists say that there is the “nature of mind” and “everyday mind” The nature of mind is creating the everyday mind. In Advaita they talk about “pure consciousness” and “consciousness with form and names”.
So I am essentially the world. It is all me! But this “me” or “self” is not the ego. It is pure consciousness and it is not personal. The ego is created by pure consciousness, like everything else we can feel, sense and experience.
It is our attachment to experiences that makes them seem real. The more attachments and desires we entertain, the more real they seem to be. When we slowly begin to see that it is our grasping and rejecting that makes up the drama of life, these objects of desire begin to lose their solidity. They start to become impermanent.
In India they worship the rivers, because rivers represent a clear picture of impermanence. The floating nature of mind keeps on appearing as the waves of the river – as the everyday mind. When we start to wake up to the fact of impermanence, the world of form, our feelings and thinking begin to lose its “reality” as objective and separated from us. We literally feel that we are falling into the objects of the senses. This is the beginning of the realisation that we are the world – “We are one with everything”. We begin to see that it is all consciousness or imagination. And when we totally come into the nature of mind the world disappears. Now, we realise that we are creating these unreal appearances we call objects, feelings and thoughts, and that they also disappear into us again just like a dream.
Only the dreamer is real, not the dream!