Short Story: The old Zen master's dream

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The Zen master, Hertlor Rusjoski, awoke one morning, after he had had, a rather unusual dream. In his dream, he was in a library, reading up on some information about the subconscious mind, and so trying to increase his own knowledge in this area. He knew that increased knowledge could lead to increased wisdom, as it stops you from thinking that you know it all, and are right about what you know. You do not know that you are wrong without such new knowledge coming into you. Enough increased wisdom allows you to recognise real truths, and to dismiss faulty ideas too. Our minds want us to live from safety first, survivalist approaches, first. The Zen master, in his dream, was sitting at a table, reading a book, where another man was seated next to him, also reading a book. Suddenly, this man let forth, with a gigantic sneeze. He sneezed, without putting his hand over his mouth. Some fluid from his mouth went onto a page of the Zen master's book. The Zen master was annoyed, and he got a cloth, and he tried to wipe it off, the spittle. Then, he moved to another table, which was empty of people. As he did so, he was thinking to himself that what others say and do around us affects us, and we should never be oblivious to that fact. How we clean up afterwards, and if they try to help us to clean up, shows us the mettle of both ourselves, and of them too. After waking up, the Zen master thought that at the end of our lives, we should have cleaned up as much of our life as we can, and be living it from a greater amount of wisdom than which we started living it from. He knew that he had become rather annoyed emotionally in his dream, and he knew that every emotion linked to, in a dream, is also linked to a thought. This gave him the idea that dreams are answerers of why we feel as we do, and that our dreams are trying to dig out the thought behind the emotion which is controlling us in our life, and this is why a reactive emotion comes out, because a certain unconscious thought has triggered it into being. The Zen master realised that he had an obsessiveness about cleanliness, and this was why he had become so upset about saliva getting onto his book, from somebody else. From then on in, he tried to drop this habit, and let things more be, as they were, rather than him jumping in, and reordering his life so quickly. He could have offered the other man a tissue, rather than grimacing with a disdainfully disgusted face, and moving away to another table after that in the library, as he had done in his dream. Photo Credit: The photo used in this article was sourced from the free media site, pixabay.com Dreams show us which thought is sitting behind which emotion.