Dreams & Voices

The Buddhist tradition is full of stories about prophetic dreams, beginning with the Buddha’s prophetic dreams before his awakening.

One of them was that he was pacing back and forth, doing walking meditation on a huge mountain of excrement, and yet he wasn’t soiled by the excrement. It meant that when he became Buddha, he’d receive lots of gifts, lots of offerings, but they wouldn’t soil his mind. He’d use them wisely, seeing the danger in getting attached to them, and freeing himself from that danger.

That kind of dream is useful. It’s about what to do. After all, the mind is basically a doer. We’re constantly fabricating the present moment, putting things together, but then the present moment passes away, so we have to put together another present moment, and then another one. We’re constantly doing this, and we need guidance.

Sometimes the mind communicates guidance to itself through visions or dreams, and sometimes other beings can communicate. But where these visions and dreams come from doesn’t matter. What matters is, what are they telling you to do? Is it in line with the Dhamma? This is one of the reasons why it’s good to study the Dhamma, so that you can get a sense of what’s really in line with the Dhamma and what’s not.

The dreams you might have about past lifetimes or different facts about nature, about the world: If they have no practical guidance—in other words, they have nothing to do with what you might choose to do or not—you can just put them aside. But you can ask yourself first, “What kind of Dhamma lesson is in there?”

The main lesson from visions about the past is how changeable you are, how changeable you’ve been. As the Buddha said, the mind is more variegated than the animal kingdom. Every animal had a desire to become that kind of animal, so these are all possibilities of the mind—and your mind, too. There are lots and lots of things you have been and still could be.

So you might use that thought to develop a sense of samvega. If you see yourself in a very poor position in a previous lifetime, you can tell yourself, “Yep, I’ve been there.” It teaches you not to look down on people who are poor now. If you see yourself wealthy, powerful, “Yep, you’ve been there, too.” That teaches you not to be jealous of people who are more powerful than you are now. It also raises the question: Did you use your power well? If the vision or the dream doesn’t tell you, just let it go.

One of my favorite dreams in the forest tradition is one of the Ajaan Suwat’s. He was in a coma after his accident. One night, during the coma, he found himself sitting next to his body on the bed. He looked at the monitors that told his vital signs—his blood pressure, his heartbeat, his oxygen levels. He said the numbers didn’t look very good. So, he thought, “Let’s just change those numbers.” And he did.

After he came out of the coma, he mentioned this to one of the doctors. The doctor said, “Ah, that explains it. Your numbers were looking really bad until one night, all of a sudden, they got very good.” If you can do that with your concentration, then go ahead and do it.

Otherwise, if something comes along and suggests something to do, ask yourself, “Would this be in line with the Dhamma?” If it seems like it might be in line with the Dhamma, then you test it. See what the results are.

Ajaan Mun, when he was in the forest, was one of those meditators who had lots and lots of visions. So he had to be very careful to test his visions in this way. If you believe everything you dream, believe everything you see in a vision, you’re going to go crazy.

One example he gave was that he had visions of devas coming to tell him how to do walking meditation. Whether they really were devas didn’t matter. What mattered was how useful their lessons were. “When you do walking meditation,” they said, “don’t gaze around here and there. Focus your eyes down along the path. Don’t swing your arms. Don’t look at the beauties of nature around you. You’ve got work to do in your mind. So get the mind focused with as little input from outside as possible, just enough to be aware that you don’t walk off the path.”

He tried out the advice and found that it worked. He could get his mind into stronger concentration while he walked. That’s the kind of thing you can test: something that deals with what you’re doing or might do.

As I said, the mind is an active mind, and it needs guidance. The problem is that it’s giving itself guidance in lots of different ways, with different voices. We talk about the committee of the mind; Ajaan Lee talks about all the different consciousnesses that are in your body: your consciousness, the consciousnesses of the worms and the germs, and those of the various spirits that are in or around your body. It’s easy to get them mixed up. They slip into the mind, either consciously or just barely subconsciously. They give answers to that question the mind always repeats: “What to do next? What to do next?” As the mind gets more and more still, then the layers of conversation fall away. You find that this question is like an ostinato, a repeating theme that goes on all the time: “What to do next? What to do next?”

The voices that propose answers to his ostinato are the ones you want to train. When you make up your mind to do something good, you’ve got to get all the other voices in line with that. As when you’re sitting and meditating: There’s one voice that says, “Okay, focus on the breath.” Another series of voices say, “No, I’d rather do this. I’d rather do that.” You have to ask them, “Where is that going to lead?”

As the Buddha said, the sign of your wisdom is learning how to look not at what you’d like to do, but for the long-term consequences of what you might do. If you see there’s something you’d like to do but would give bad results, you learn how to talk to yourself into wanting not to do it.

Notice that. You don’t just force yourself not to do it. You get yourself not to want to do it. At the same time, there are things you may not like to do but will give good long-term results. So you have to learn how to get yourself to want to do them. You cajole yourself, use whatever psychology you can think of to get yourself to do what you should be doing and not do things you shouldn’t be doing.

That requires a lot of inner conversation. Which is why meditation is not simply a matter of being with whatever comes up or of trying to snuff out all the voices in the mind. Sometimes you have to reason with the unreasonable voices—because every desire has its reasons.

Years back, I was reading one of those Very Short Introductions from the Oxford Press on the topic of early Greek philosophy. The author pointed out that one of the big issues in those days was the question, “Are your passions and your reasons totally separate, or do all your passions have reasons?” The Platonists were on one side of the question, the Stoics on the other. I think the Buddha would be on the side of, “Your passions have their reasons.” Often they know that their reasons are not very good, so they try to hide them.

Which is why some of your passions seem to be just brute force as a subterfuge. They have their reasons, just that they’re trying to hide them under a scary veneer. If you want to figure those reasons out, then try to get the mind as quiet as you can so that you can detect and understand the whispered reasons of these impulses in the mind. When you see what they are, then you can deal with them.

This is why when the Buddha talks about understanding what’s going on in the mind, it’s not just a matter of seeing the drawbacks of your unskillful behavior. You also want to see the allure: What about it is actually attractive, enticing? What captures your imagination about these things? When you can see what it is, then you can deal with it.

This is going to require that you go through many layers of conversation, because all too often the mind doesn’t like to admit why it likes certain things: what thrill it gets out of lust, what thrill it gets out of anger.

Because these things are defilements, ultimately the reasons are going to be dumb. But as we’ve seen throughout human history, people can dress up their ignorance, they can dress up their stupidity, to make it look sophisticated, to make it look reasonable.

This is one of the reasons why the Buddha also sets up standards. Take the whole issue of the three perceptions. When you see that things are inconstant, stressful, not-self, those facts on their own don’t really tell you what to do. If something is inconstant, is it worth going for? Sometimes, even in very unskillful cases, you can actually convince yourself that it would be—especially if you tell yourself that that’s as good a pleasure as you’re going to get.

But then there are the standards of the four noble truths, and one of those is the third noble truth, that the cessation of suffering is possible. And it’s not just a blank or boring lack of suffering. Think about when the Buddha came to teach the five brethren: Before he taught them the four noble truths, he said, “Look, I’m going to teach you the way to the deathless.” That’s a happiness that’s totally unconditioned and totally without limitation of any kind. So that possibility is there in the background, that standard against which you can measure other things.

When that’s a possibility, then a lot of the things that otherwise would seem worth the effort even though they’re impermanent and inconstant, suddenly don’t seem so worthwhile after all. This is why the meditation is not simply a matter of noting what comes and goes. There’s going to be some arguing back and forth, some reasoning back and forth, value judgments about what to do, what’s worth doing, what’s not worth doing.

The conversation will include some conscious reasoning, but there will also be some subconscious undercurrents. Some of those subconscious messages will be in words; some in images. To really be in charge of your mind, you have to learn how to detect and deal skillfully with all these things.

For the basic pattern, think of the four noble truths. How do these things fit in with the four noble truths? Take the four noble truths as your standard.

Think about the Buddha’s teachings on appropriate attention. All those questions he said that are not worth answering, or even asking, about the future, about the past, about your existence or non-existence here in the present moment: Put those questions aside.

The standards for appropriate attention, things you really should pay attention to, are: What is the suffering right now? What’s causing it? And what can be done to put an end to it? Those questions are worth asking and answering. They’re your standard.

When there’s a conflict inside the mind as to what to do, bring the standard out. Let it pass judgment. If any part of the mind rebels against it, you have to realize it’s wrong. Even though you may like it a lot and want to side with it, still you’ve got to realize that for the sake of your true happiness, you have to learn to see through it. It’s lying to you.

Anything that’s not in line with the four noble truths is at best an ignoble half-truth, and more usually an outright ignoble lie. Think in those terms and then decide on your actions accordingly.