More and more this life appears to me like an endless dream. And I, the dreamer, am perpetually shifting between states of dreaming and wakefulness. Like an existential hangover, my moments are filled with an undercurrent of grogginess in which my consciousness phase shifts between one reality and another.
I recently listened to a YouTube recording about Ramana Maharshi in which a number of people who knew him spoke to the state of awareness he was in. One person mentioned that Ramana’s position on the self was solipsistic to the extreme, believing the self to be the only reality and everything else to be just a dream or the imagination of the self.
When I was young, I was deeply solipsistic in my outlook as well. But I discarded that view over time because it felt flawed to me. The idea that I alone exist and that everything else is unreal felt too implausible and seemed to defy my experience of reality.
But now I find I have come full circle – back to solipsism as the basis of this reality.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Dark Knight of the Soul (formerly Advaitaholics Anonymous) to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.