The Dream We Call the External World

One of the mind training instructions is “Regard everything as a dream.”

In this passage from Wake Up to Your Life, Ken McLeod clarifies what this means, and how it relates to daily life. He begins with the reminder that we can not share experience. We can describe it to others, but the only world we can actually know is the one that appears in our own field of awareness.

From there, the instruction opens up naturally. It’s not asking us to believe that the world is unreal, or encouraging indifference or detachment. It’s reminding us to be present to what is right here right now: sights, sounds, sensations, smells, tastes and thoughts.

Seen this way, “regard everything as a dream” becomes a practical instruction telling us to stop projecting solidity onto what arises and reacting to those projections.

Rather than stripping away its mystery Ken has made one of the most enigmatic mind training instructions seem even more magical.

From Wake Up To Your Life, p. 339

What you experience is yours and yours alone. No one else can experience exactly what you do. Even when you express what you experience in poetry, painting, or writing, no one experiences what you experienced. The experiences elicited in them by the poetry are their experiences, not the experience that originally inspired you.

To help us awaken from the enchantment of the abstraction we call the external world, Buddhism applies a bit of common sense and calls the external world what it is—an enchantment, a dream.

The raw materials of the so-called external world are the sensory experiences that arise in awareness. To undo the obsession with the apparent reality of the external world, use the mind-training teaching

Regard everything as a dream.

When you dream, buildings, people, trees, and animals arise vividly. During the dream, you take the buildings and people to be real; that is, you regard them as an external world in which you move around. When you wake up, however, you know that the buildings and people are simply experiences that arose in the dream.

By carrying the idea that everything you experience in your waking life is like a dream, you undermine the conditioned tendency to project an external reality onto sensory experiences. In effect, you move into a more intimate relationship with sensory experience. Your experience of sensations becomes clearer and more vivid, and you are less likely to project emotional reactions onto them.

This instruction is often interpreted to mean that we should not care so much about what happens and not take things so seriously—a dangerous misinterpretation. When we regard everything that arises as a dream, we actually pay more attention to what we are experiencing and how that experience is arising. Instead of automatically interpreting sensory experience as independent objects, we perceive sensory experience for what it is—sensory experience, neither more nor less.

Habitually, we regard awareness and sensory experience as separate and different, but sensory experience cannot be separated from awareness. By cutting through the sense of separation with the instruction “everything is a dream,” we cut through the conditioning, interpretation, and reactivity that are ordinarily set in motion.

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It's a dangerous business breaking enchantments. When you wake up from the dream you've been living in, there's no telling what you will do. No telling at all.

Mind you, there's no telling what you will do in your next dream, either.

—Ken McLeod, reading from An Arrow to the Heart

Always Already

Some time ago I came across the phrase always already in Adyashanti's book The Direct Way. His frequent repetition of the phrase and the specific order of the words intrigued me. Then I heard James Low use exactly the same phrase again and again in several of his retreat series.

For example, in Open to Life (2025) James says:

You cannot free yourself because you are already free. How will you free the free? The effort to free the always already free is what binds you.

Part 19, 18:02

We are always already in our life. We're already always in whatever's arising. We don't come into our life. We don't come into our experience. We emerge as part of the experience, and therefore we take our place.

Part 18, 09:56

We are on a pilgrimage from here and now, to here and now. We have always already arrived, but because we are wobbly, we are always leaving, and then we have to arrive, and then we have to leave. So the issue is about stabilisation, of relaxation and just being here, but if you rely on anything external, it will be difficult.

Part 17, 12:08

My search image primed, I began encountering it elsewhere too. What seemed like an unusual turn of phrase had entered the vocabulary of several contemporary teachers. The more I encountered always already, the more significant and alive it seemed, as though the phrase itself was arising to show me something.

Eventually I became curious about its origins. The expression appears to have entered English through twentieth-century philosophy, particularly the work of Martin Heidegger. Always already is an English translation of his original German phrase immer schon. Yet the insight it points to is far older. Long before Heidegger spoke of what is always already, teachers in Eastern spiritual traditions were pointing to the same recognition in different language.

Much of ordinary life is organised around acquisition and achievement. We learn skills. We accumulate knowledge. We improve ourselves. It is hardly surprising that we bring the same assumptions to spiritual practice. We imagine that with enough meditation, enough retreats, enough insight, or enough devotion we will eventually achieve awakening. We sit. We cultivate attention. We learn to recognise the habits that draw us back into confusion. Practice matters. It may make it easier to recognise what has never actually been absent.

Gradually, I began to intuit why the words appear in that order. Awareness isn't simply already present now, as though it had arrived a moment before. It has always been so. It has never not been the case. The phrase points not just to presence, but to timeless presence.

Not someday. Not after enough effort. Not when conditions are perfect. Always already.

Understanding this conceptually is one thing. Living it is something else entirely. We expect awakening to arrive as something dramatic or special. Yet teachers keep pointing in the opposite direction—towards what is so close, so ordinary and so intimate that it is easily overlooked.

Too close — you don’t see it.
Too deep — you don’t fathom it.
Too simple — you don’t believe it.
Too fine — you don’t accept it.

The Four Faults of Awareness, Shangpa Kagyu, translated by Ken McLeod.

Always already has become a kind of personal pointing out instruction. Whenever I hear or see the phrase, it reminds me to stop trying to get somewhere else. It reminds me to relax, and to recognise what is always already here.

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Freedom from Conventional Notions of Success and Failure

There are joys, too, the joy of freedom from conventional notions of success and failure… the joy that arises naturally when there is no separation between you and what you experience.
—Ken McLeod, Musings, Where Practice Takes You

A friend recently spoke about a book that changed her life. Reading W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor’s Edge as a young woman in the 1960s, she discovered the possibility that life need not be organised around the social expectations of her family and culture. Taking this path did indeed lead to feeling like she lived on a razor's edge.

On her recommendation I read the novel for the first time. Although written more than eighty years ago, how prescient it feels. Many of the attitudes and aspirations Maugham portrays so poignantly have become deeply embedded in many cultures. The questions behind the novel seem even more relevant and urgent now than when Maugham first asked them.

Set in the years following the First World War, The Razor’s Edge follows Larry Darrell, a young American pilot whose war experiences lead him to ask profound questions about the meaning and purpose of life. Returning home, he is expected to marry Isabel Bradley, pursue a successful career, and take his place within the prosperous American upper-middle class. Instead, he finds himself uninterested in the pursuit of wealth, status, security, and comfort. He cannot fully explain what is calling him, only that he must discover this for himself.

Larry’s decisions bewilder those around him. Isabel loves him deeply but cannot imagine a future without financial security and social standing. Willing to give him the pricacy of time and space, she meets him in Paris two years after he begins his search, and realises that his search has barely begun and commitment to it has not changed. After she and Larry end their engagement, he wanders through Europe, studying philosophy and religion while supporting himself as a manual labourer. His actions don't feel like a rebellion against society so much as a response to an irresistible need to know.

Larry eventually travels to India, studies with a spiritual teacher, and experiences a profound shift in understanding—discovering an inner freedom and contentment that doesn't depend on external circumstances. He returns to America, not as a guru or a social reformer, but to a simple life ungoverned by ambition, attachment, or the need for recognition. Throughout Maugham's novel he stands in contrast to the other main characters, whose lives revolve around wealth, romance, reputation, or social prestige. Isabel remains imprisoned by the choices she has made; her uncle, Elliott Templeton by his obsession with status; and her friend Sophie MacDonald is overwhelmed by grief and addiction. Larry alone appears genuinely at ease. His choices suggest that he awakened to a different way of inhabiting the world and meeting daily experience.

When The Razor’s Edge appeared in 1944, it anticipated a growing hunger that would emerge more fully in the 1950s and 1960s. Alongside books such as Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and Allan Watt's The Way of Zen, it introduced many Western readers to a different understanding of what it means to live well. The relevance of The Razor's Edge has only deepened. In the decades since it was written, humanity has achieved unprecedented levels of material prosperity, technological innovation and consumer choice, hand in hand with severe ecological degradation, seemingly intractable social and political conflict, increasing loneliness, anxiety, and a widespread sense of disconnection. Against this backdrop, Larry Darrell’s choice to live without concern for conventional notions of success feels more relevant than ever. The Razor’s Edge endures both as a portrait of our materialistic and transactional age, and because it asks a question that feels increasingly relevant: if comfort, consumption, and achievment cannot satisfy our deepest longings, what kind of life can?

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What is Compassion?

Marinating in these two passages on compassion from Ken McLeod and James Low because I really want to take this in very deeply.

Compassion is the difference between a faith that opens you to what life brings and beliefs that force you to close down to protect what you cannot or will not question. Compassion enables you to accept and appreciate the experience of those with whom you have differences. In difficult situations, it leads you to find a way that meets the vital interests of all concerned when possible and to minimize the pain when that is not possible. Compassion puts you directly in touch with the human condition. It cuts through beliefs. It goes straight to the heart.

From Compassion, Culture, and Belief, by Ken McLeod.

From Open to Life, part 15.

James is teaching from the dzogchen text Uncovering the Mother of All Buddhas, by Gonpo Wangyal. The passage below starts 33:22 minutes into the audio.

James Low: When we see, ‘My thoughts are the radiance of emptiness.’ They have this formation, but it doesn't establish anything. But when you decide someone is an enemy of the people, the conclusion becomes radical and enacted.

So when we look at texts like this, it doesn't say much about compassion, it doesn't say much about helping other people, it doesn't say much about ethics, because that is inherent in non-duality. If you stay with the co-emergence, if you start with the openness, the welcome, the reception, and you respond into that, you're responding to the vitality of a living presence of somebody who is alive with you.

In ordinary language you might call that intersubjectivity, but it's not really subject, but it gives a sense of it, a pulsation between us. And because I feel you as alive and changing and moving, I can't catch you. I can't catch you. And if I can't catch you, that is the basis of ethics, because I'm not defining you. I have to be with you, because I don't know how you're going to be, so I have to be with you in a receptive way, so that my sense of you is being altered as you reveal more and more of yourself. Now that brings us into quite an ethical proximity, I would suggest.

And then compassion is, fundamentally, not to freeze the other, not to define the other, not to make the other equal what I say the other is, that I've caught you inside my concept. So when we shake loose of that, I don't know who you are, but I'm happy to try to relate to you, to stay with you as you reveal more of yourself. So we're in a process of mutual unfolding, mutual revelation. So that would be compassion from this point of view. It's not addressed very much. It's not like thinking, may all beings be happy, which is a lovely thought, but there's no methodology in it.

How do we make people happy? By not freezing them, by not defining them, by allowing them to breathe and express themselves and be responsive.

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Making the Practice Your Own

From A Trackless Path I 13, Ken McLeod

Ken: And what I found is that at some point—and for most people this is after five to eight years of practice, though there’s often another wave around ten to fifteen years of practice when it’s usually deeper and more painful—people who have been trained that way find themselves struggling with the transition, which I like to call making the practice their own.

And it’s a difficult transition because around that period they’re beginning to feel the divergence between what their heart is seeking and this system of practice. And it’s very uncomfortable because they feel that by listening to their heart they’re in some sense either checking out or even betraying the way that they have been trained. And because there are often very significant emotional ties both to teachers and colleagues as well as, frequently, to the material itself, to the scriptures and texts, this questioning initially is usually engaged very, very tentatively, with considerable trepidation. And for good reason. Not infrequently the way many of these organizations and institutions function is that when one raises certain kinds of questions unless one has a really very, very good mentor—and they do exist, fortunately—but in many cases you start asking questions that aren’t customarily asked, and one finds one’s relationship with the whole system changing, sometimes extremely rapidly, which comes as a shock. Sometimes slowly, but you just find yourself being eased out in some way. And for reasons you can’t really figure out because “I was just talking about these questions.”

And now as I said this isn’t universally the case because there are some teachers who really are very familiar with this and are able to provide the right kind of guidance and support through such a transition. And if you happen to have contact with one of those, somebody like that, then treasure them because they’re really wonderful.

But what I’ve come across frequently is people who’ve found themselves outside the tradition of their training, not quite sure how they got there. And at the same time dealing with sometimes quite deep feelings of having betrayed something, but they’re not quite sure what. Or having violated something but they’re not quite sure what. And most of the people I’ve encountered, and I’ve worked with quite a few in this, they haven’t betrayed anything. They haven’t violated anything. What has happened is that they started listening to their own spiritual questions. And they frequently start letting go of certain practices and forming a relationship with particular ones that really mean something to them. Or they may go in quite different directions for a while. But now they’re really engaging in their own spiritual search. And it wouldn’t be incorrect to regard that first phase of their path as learning a lot of stuff, developing a lot of skills, developing abilities which now makes it possible for them to do this more individual search and questioning.

It’s very unpredictable but usually it’s probably over a two to four-year period, there’s a letting go of a lot of assumptions and ideas and tacit understandings, which were part of the institutional setting. And they’re replaced by something that is personally more vital, more visceral, and in many respects, more alive. And alive because there’s a different level of personal engagement. And this is where one moves out of the manufacturing process or a systematic process of, “Do this practice and then this one, and then this one,” into a much more exploratory way of practicing. And it’s important then for the person to be able to find the resources that they’re going to need. And in this process they’re going to re-examine almost everything that they’ve done. And in that process some stuff will fall away as not relevant, and other stuff, as I’ve said before, will take on a renewed vitality, or actually a new vitality.

Now if you look at the lives of most of the great teachers this is exactly what has happened. And it’s often buried in flowery language in the biographies. But most of the really great teachers, the ones who are regarded as holding the tradition, came to that position by doing very untraditional things. Milarepa who is revered in all of the different schools started off by killing 37 people. And it’s not exactly a traditional spiritual path.

Here Ken describes shifts that can occur in waves. You begin to sense a divergence between what your heart seeks and the form your practice has taken. While this can be unsettling and may feel like disloyalty, Ken offers reassurance that this may be sign of engaging the path more deeply because the years spent learning, practising, and trusting a tradition have honed the discernment needed to listen to your own spiritual questions.

When I heard this passage, I could sense this at play in my own life. My first teachers gave me immense gifts. They explained the Dharma, introduced practice forms, and opened the door to the living tradition. A pilgrimage to Tibet and meeting Lama Achuk at Yachen Gar helped me understand that dharma is my life. Yet, once home again, I found myself longing to hear teachings expressed directly in English. Over the long period that followed, I experienced difficult feelings of traitorousness and uncertainty. Eventually the search led to Ken, and he helped me navigate the transition. From the start, he encouraged me to trust my own experience.

Over the years this has continued to unfold in unpredictable ways. The sailboat of practice has passed through storms and languished in becalmed waters before catching the wind once more. And recently I've found myself deep in a second wave of making practice my own.

"So, Ānanda, you should all live with yourselves as your island, yourselves as your refuge, with no other as your refuge; with the Dhamma as your island, the Dhamma as your refuge, with no other as your refuge."

—Mahāparinibbāna Sutta (DN 16), §2.26, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Dhammatalks.org

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