Deep sleep, REM sleep and wake up. You wake up from a dream and reality is there. But what is dream and what is reality? The two sometimes run together it seems, seem a delusion: a fata morgana or an illusion. A Fata mirage is a mirage, a result of large temperature differences in different layers of air, creating different refractive indices (the way a light beam breaks) for light and thus creating a kind of mirror or lens. An illusion is an apparent reality or an incorrect interpretation of reality by false perception. The dream could see you as a mirror. According to some philosophical schools, reality is an illusion, as in solipsism. For example, Plato and Kant think that reality is an illusion. Philosophical skepticism denies that the world would be known, man simply is unable to rise above his colored perception. Carl Jung writes that man can never get around his own subjectivity when observing the object. Reality is what actually exists, claiming others again.
But then what is the truth, that which the froward man is looking for? Truth is often confused with existing or own beliefs. Truth is to be consistent with reality, but what if that reality cannot be known? The statue of the onion appears. The truth, or the real thing would be to peel off all the layers of an onion, to take away the veils that hinder vision as it were until one penetrates to one cause, the One. Only how do you do that? That's not that simple to me. Probably you are enlightened, freed and or redeemed when you have achieved that. And is there such a thing as the One? The tricky thing about asking questions is that it leads to more questions. For some, finding the truth is being enlightened after reaching death when your last breath blows out. The moment you remember the teachings of the Tibetan death book and free yourself from the chain of successive earthly lives. But what if you want to see the light during your earthly life, when you cannot wait to stand in the face of reality?
In India they have their own methods, the increasingly popular meditation and yoga here. Another good way is to read books on the subject. The books I call WOW books, which open your eyes a bit, take away a piece of peel, as it were. Reading alone is not enough. There will also have to be some connection to the earthly. Reality could be a marriage between heaven and earth, where you yourself are the marriage officer, the priest. I don't know what happens after death, but maybe there's a way to enlightenment on earth by knowing yourself.
