Life is a dream
The shamans of the Quiché-Maya and other indigenous peoples teach us even more. They speak of life being "a dream within a dream within a dream." Nevertheless, life in all its facets is real and precious, even if it is an illusion, as the Buddhists call it (maya, delusion). They also speak of "samsara," the "night of error," when describing our physical world of experience. So if we dream our lives - and have dreams in those lives themselves, we should shed more light on this idea.
There is a remarkable novel, "Flatland - A Multidimensional Novel" by Edwin A. Abbott, an English country priest, who in 1884 put on paper his thoughts on understanding and imagining metaphysical planes. In this novel, there is a two-dimensional world consisting only of "width" and "length" - the "flatland". The inhabitants of flatland perceive each other in two dimensions and see each other only in different lines that they can circle. The characters are geometric creatures and the story revolves around a triangle, which travels around flatland and lives its life like all other geometric creatures, until one day something very strange happens. The inhabitants of flatland do not know the third dimension - the height. The acting triangle, the protagonist of the novel, thus travels through the flatland and perceives the other beings as two-dimensional objects like himself.
One day the triangle travels through the plain until a point appears in front of it out of nowhere, which becomes an ever-widening line that, after its greatest expansion, contracts again, becomes a point, and finally disappears again into nothingness. The triangle is in great excitement, believes in magic and cannot explain this magical phenomenon.
The solution is simple. Flatland, as a two-dimensional world, lies embedded in a three-dimensional world and one of the inhabitants, a sphere, roams through flatland coming from below upwards. The point which the triangle sees and which spreads out to a line becoming wider and wider to then contract again and disappear, is the ball which roams with its northernmost point the two-dimensional world on its journey, experiences at its equator the greatest width as "line" (circle) for the triangle in flatland, in order to then disappear up to the south pole again becoming smaller in the nothingness when it leaves flatland.
One day this happens again and the triangle timidly makes contact with the line. The "line" (the sphere) explains to him that it is a three-dimensional being which touched flatland and, coming from below upwards in its three-dimensional world, wandered through the two-dimensional world of the triangle. The triangle cannot imagine the three-dimensional world of the sphere - it knows only circles. The sphere, in turn, takes the triangle, to give it an idea of how it behaves with the different dimensions, to "line land" - a one-dimensional world, one dimension below flatland.
The inhabitants of line land all live next to each other on a one-dimensional line and only recognize their direct neighbors to the left and right of them. They do not know the depth and cannot imagine it. The triangle wonders and contacts the inhabitants and recognizes that the inhabitants of line land cannot imagine a two-dimensional world. The triangle recognizes the connections between the different dimensions and its own embeddedness in two-dimensionality. The sphere, in turn, takes the triangle with it into its three-dimensional world, and the triangle is, in a sense, "enlightened" by this experience.
Hermes Trismegistos, Thot, described in a thought which became famous the equality of different "levels" in short form with the words "as above, so below" – which is the core of hermeutics. And so it behaves with our experiencing of our physical four-dimensional world (the fourth dimension beside width, depth and height is time). Everything resembles each other in principle, is subject to each other corresponding basic principles within the existence - on material as well as energetic levels. When we dream in our lives, we should ask ourselves if we are not dreamed ourselves.
The Buddhists, in turn, speak of the Dyani Buddhas, heavenly embodiments of the earthly Buddhas, who act on our earthly being in the Tushita Heaven. For the Dyani Buddhas our world is "flatland".
Our dreams, which we dream night after night, are partly our "lineland", if they are not lucid dreams. We have the opportunity to process subconscious experience and recognition in these dreams and to journey spiritually. If we are trained in meditation or are clairvoyant/ clairsentient, we experience lucid dreams, which makes it possible for us "flatland beings" to experience next higher dimensions.
Sometimes it happens that we dream "brightly". And sometimes it also happens that in such a dream we imagine ourselves in a bed, fall asleep and dream in the dream. We then change levels. All this indicates that heaven is an experiential state of consciousness that can be experienced - to stay with Thoth - "as above, so below" and is similar in analogy. The multidimensionality of all life represents different states of consciousness and these can be perceived in quantum realities.
Heaven is just a state of mind.
"Patience. For this world is broad and wide."
Edwin A. Abbott, English country clergyman and author of "Flatland - A Multidimensional Novel," 1884.
