A guided meditation led by Michael Taft. Meditation starts at the beginning and lasts for about one hour. Followed by dharma talk and Q&A. (Warning: the audio quality on this video has some bad spots.)
In the Diamond Cutter Sutra, the Buddha describes how to regard sensory experience:
“This is how to contemplate our conditioned existence in this fleeting world:
Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream;
Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.
So is all conditioned existence to be seen.”
This meditation is about encountering our own sensory experience in exactly this way—seeing the world as dream.
I will hasten to add that I do not regard the actual exterior world as a dream, or other people as somehow unreal. It is very likely (although not absolutely certain) that the physical world and other people are real.
However, in terms of subjective experience, and sensory phenomena have the quality of a dream, and that is very powerful, uplifting, useful, and beautiful to realize.
photo by M. Wolfgang Taft