The Watcher in the Dream

If you think back, perhaps you have had a dream that you remember, a significant one, or maybe a scary one, or even a nightmare.  Then, for some of us, perhaps for most of us, while you are having this terrifying dream, there is another consciousness in you, in your dream, that tells you that this is only a dream, and that it is ok, and that you merely have to go through the nightmare. 

There is a dreamer inside of the dream, like a spectator almost, but one that delivers commentary to you.  So there are seemingly (at least) two entities here.  One is the dreamer experiencing the nightmare, and the other is like a sub-dreamer who is also conscious of it all, but not really experiencing the nightmare so directly, though observing it all.

Meditation leads to something like that.  You become more aware of an observer-consciousness existing inside of you.  And this observer-consciousness grows over time and becomes part of your daily life in this world as your meditation practice progresses. 

Just as the extreme terror of the nightmare is tempered by another observer-consciousness even though in the dream, so too is the reality of this life and the world somewhat tempered by the development of your own observer-consciousness.

This does not make you more or less of a participant at all, but one develops more of a tendency to see the world and your life for what it really is - a passing phase, with an underlying, more stable reality that becomes much more valuable to you. 

The effect of this is that you gain more control over affairs in your world from inside of you, even though nothing changes outside - all of that still remains the same.  But it becomes so that instead of being at the mercy of what life brings to you, you control your "reaction" to it through this insight and understanding, even though you are unable to affect things in the world in any real way.

In short, you start living from here to there - and not from there to here.  You increasingly manage your life from in here, and you are increasingly not managed by what comes from outside. So the result of meditation is that everything changes for you, and yet, nothing out here changes at all.

That is what meditation does for me, and for many others. Try it.

Namaste.