The World is Like a Movie, a Dream, a Video Game
Many sects of Buddhism consider the dream metaphor central to their philosophical positioning. When a woman asked the rest while Prince Siddhartha, shortly after his enlightenment, what he was, he used a term drawn from his native language, Pali: ‘Buddha’. Though this is often translated today as ‘enlightened’, the word’s literal meaning is ‘awakened’, based on the Sanskrit root word ‘budh’, which means ‘to be awake’ or ‘to become aware’.
Common sense tells us that if someone can ‘awaken’, then they (and the rest of us) must be asleep. The metaphor of dreams has been a staple of the Buddhist worldview since the very beginning of the religion, including the Tibetan practice of dream yoga, one of the six yogas of Naropa.
Even the Quran hints at this idea that the physical world is only a distraction, a pastime, an amusement, and in various translations, a kind of game: ‘This life of the world is but a pastime and a game. Lo! The home of the Hereafter—that is Life if they but knew.’4
The Suffering of the World and Motion Pictures
Over the years, many have used the metaphor of the stage play, including the Vedas, describing the world as the Lila, or the play of the gods, and Shakespeare, in his famous line the world’s a stage and the men and women are merely players. In the twentieth century, our advanced understanding of light and motion made it possible to tell stories in a new, engrossing, realistic way: the art of motion pictures.
An illusion is defined as something that looks real but is not. The ideas of light and vision, of what we can and cannot see, are intrinsically linked to the concept of the illusion, particularly a carefully crafted illusion (maya) that is put on for us to lose ourselves in.
Yogananda himself used this updated ‘modern’ metaphor of the physical world being like a motion picture. Unfortunately, this metaphor wasn’t available during Shakespeare’s era or in the time of the Vedas, or they might have used it too!
