The sleep has no value, or to be more precise, activities in sleep have no value. It is all fiction. Activity in sleep does not need any courage; rather things which we cannot to when we are awake, we do them in the dreams. Dreams are like customizable lives. All that we want to do, feel, get; it can be done felt or gotten in the dreams.
This living world is also nothing but a dream. One remarkable thing about dream is that, when we are having a dream in night, it feels totally actual and real. We generally don’t doubt while having a dream that this is a dream.
I remember a beautiful story from Lao- Tsu. One day, he had a dream. In which he was a butterfly. After waking up, he was all confused. His disciples gathered around him, and asked what the matter was. Lao Tsu answered, “Today, I saw myself as a butterfly in dream. Now I am wondering if I am a Lao Tsu dreaming a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming a Lao Tsu?”
Many spiritual doctrines consider this life also as a dream. That all these things we do, are being done in sleep. If this theory is to be accepted, then, things can be put up like this-
‘If I kill a person in the dream, I will be punished for it in my dream only. In the same way, if I do any activity in the sleep of my delusion, and if by chance I wake from this sleep of my ignorance, all the punishments are gone.’
This is one of the reasons why Zen people give emphasis on awareness rather than forcing some moral rules.
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