The central insight of the mystical philosopher, shared by mystics of all kinds, is that ordinary physical reality, as we experience it everyday, is in some way illusionary, or at least, that it is not the deepest, most fundamental level of reality.
I suppose you could have told I was destined to become a philosopher by the nature of the things that bothered me as a child. For instance, the idea that when you seen green, and I see green, we might not be seeing the same color, that our perceptions might be different. And if that were true, then perhaps we were also in entirely different worlds, and not knowing it. The thought made me feel incredibly lonely and alone, not know if anything I experienced was truly shared with anyone else else.
Another thing that bothered me from the time I was quite young was the persistence of reality. I've always had unusually vivid, elaborate, coherent dreams, and in them I've lived entire other lifetimes, only to wake up and realize those had all be lost, along with the people in them. So it's perhaps no wonder I developed a paranoia that my waking life might be just another such illusion.
Since dreams inspired these fear in me, perhaps it's appropriate that another dream resolved them. One night, when I was well into adulthood, I dreamed I was a student at a large, international boarding school. The students were all gathered in the spacious courtyard when we received the disturbing announcement that the world was coming to an end. There was a predictable mix of reactions from the amassed crowd --panic, denial, grief and anger --as well as a untraceable rumor that began to circulate that there was a select group that would be chosen to survive the dissolution of the universe. As for me, I took the news calmly, perhaps because of my secret conviction that I would among those who would be saved.
Later, in the dream, night had fallen, and the outside gardens were quiet, deserted and already beginning to fade at the edges as I entered for the last time the vast, almost limitless mansion that had housed our beloved school for so many generations. As I climbed up the wide empty staircase, I passed a group of huge circular machines, patiently cleaning and polishing each surface of the ancient building in preparation for its destruction. I saw no other living creature until at last I made my way up to the roof. There the air was suddenly full of light, music and laughter as the teachers of the school gathered to hold a last party for those students who still remained.
I could see the teachers for what they were now, something older, wiser and more powerful than human beings, and I sought one of them out, a beloved teacher of my own from when I was very young. She took me aside to a dark and quiet part of the roof and there we spoke under the starless sky.
As I stood there, I realized the rumor had been wrong. It was true that I would survive the end of the universe, but there would be no group of the elect to go forward with me. It would be me and me alone. I knew that my teacher knew this as well as I did. Yet--and this was the amazing thing to me--even knowing this, she viewed me and treated me no differently than any of her other students. I knew that she loved me, and I knew that she also loved each one of her other many students in the same way, and with the same depth, even though I would go on living, and they would soon dissolve into nothingness.
"What was this all for?" I asked her. "What did it all mean?" I wasn't asking about the end of the world, but about everything else--the school, the hard work of educating students, the careful cleaning of a building that was destined for destruction, the party thrown for guests whose time was measured in minutes. What possible significance, meaning or value could any of it have in the face of the end of everything. "Was any of it real?"
"Love," she said. "Love is real. Love is meaningful. Love will survive."
In that moment, a bell tolled and I awoke... to the realization that in a sense everything in my dream had been true. I had been in another world--the world of my dream--and it was also true that it had had a limited lifespan, that it had come to an end, and that I alone of all its inhabitants had survived the journey into this other world of my waking life. And I also knew the last words of my teacher were also true--that love is real, that love is meaningful, that love survives. Although I knew that the rational, objective part of my mind could call her nothing but a fiction of my subconscious, I could still feel solidity of her love like an embrace.
That single dream had a profound influence on my life and beliefs. I realized there is a validity and a reality to the way we live and the way we treat others, regardless of any objective reckoning of fact and fiction. The teacher in my dream was real, not because she was flesh and bone, but because of her values and the way she cared about her students. I now understood that the same kind of reality was available to me, even were I a figure in someone else's dream, a fictional character, a simulation on a computer, a NPC in a game, or a disembodied brain in a vat. To love, and to be loved is to be made real, as in the story of the Velveteen Rabbit.
And though it was not a part of my dream, I also understood that the converse must be true--that giving way to cruelty and hatred would render me as unreal and as insubstantial as any of the nighttime wraiths and monsters whom we so gladly bid farewell with the approach of morning.
The dream also taught me that to do things with love, no matter what those things are, is to render them meaningful. I learned that from the action of the great cleaning machines, and their patient--and seemingly pointless--cleaning of the school. I had always been impatient with tasks of routine maintenance such as making a bed or cleaning the dishes, things that had to be done repeatedly or that seemed to have no larger lasting impact. I--fruitlessly!--demanded that any action to which I devoted my efforts be endowed with deeper and more permanent significance.
Yet in light of my own mortality, the threatened extinction of human life, the much longer but similarly limited lifespan of the sun and the solar system, and the probable eventual death of the universe itself, could any activity actually rise to the standard of objective meaning? What my dream taught me that is that even acts of small and fleeting impact carried with their own significance if performed in the right spirit. In the pithier words of Mother Teresa, we could call this "small acts with great love." Or, as the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior, said "If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.'"
So this then is nature of true reality, as revealed to me in a dream. Love is real, and only love is real. Whenever we love, or are loved, or act in love, that is real, and that is eternal, whether we live at the foundational level of reality or not. For, as the Bible tells us, God is love.