Buddhism 499: Life is but a Dream…
Grasping at memories is like trying to grab air. There is simply not much there. And yet we treasure our memories above almost all else, that walk in the park and that kiss in the dark, that moment so long ago that seems almost like today in its freshness. You can still taste it, right? And smell it? See it and hear it? Everything but touch it, something that you probably never did in the first place, the non-tactile sensations much easier to reproduce in an ephemeral memory or dream.
And that’s fine, as long as we give little or no weight to it, because memories are notoriously unreliable. That’s an object lesson, also, about the nature of reality and the phenomena that inhabit it. Because none of the phenomena of life are any different. It’s just that memories, like dreams, are such obvious bad actors in a hollow play with no substance real or even imagined. This is heavily implied in Buddhism, also, that life is but a dream, and not in such a shallow way as a kid’s play.
Because the word maya is used frequently, and that’s magic, at best, illusion, more accurately, or deceit, at worse, more or less the acceptable range of sense perception as an accurate description of reality. But in modern parlance it might actually be more like a simulation, but not digital, like Virtual Reality; it’s neural, a precise, if not exact, neural twin of our brain’s (mind’s) own neural landscape, so that we can coexist in this world, the facts of which are too complex to duplicate by art or artifice. Another quark for Mister Mark? I’ll take a rain check. That’s too complicated. Just buy me the moon, or some reasonable facsimile.
streaming consciousness... 
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