 The Parable of the Butterfly Dream The great Taoist master, Shuang Zha, once had a vivid dream that he was a butterfly. He fluttered through the bushes and the trees, having a simple consciousness. He no longer had any awareness of his individuality as a human, and all he knew was the life of a butterfly. He flew around the gardens, experiencing fully the existence of a mere insect, and suddenly he awoke and was taken out of his dream. He sat up and looked around, and thought to himself, was I a man who just dreamt about being a butterfly? Or am I now a butterfly dreaming that I am a man? Which one is it? Could it be both? This amazing parable explores the nature of reality itself. Are we merely dreaming this reality together? Is our experience on earth one huge collective dream that we're all engaging with? And who truly knows? This parable also speaks to living in and seizing the moment. When Shuang Zha is in his butterfly form, he isn't concerned about why he's a butterfly or whether tomorrow will be something else. He is simply a butterfly, right now, living his best butterfly life. Perhaps the lesson here is a simple one. We get so caught up in life with worries and anxieties of things that haven't even happened yet, and many a time forget to just be and experience the physical reality that we are in as a reality in itself. This also relates to the process of death, something that may seem very scary when it's not truly understood. When we die, it is arguably much more accurate to think of it like waking up from a dream and moving into a new kind of existence. This idea is Echoed in Descartes' famous maxim, I Think, Therefore I Am, which argues that the only thing we can know for sure in life is that we exist. Even if we are all currently in an afterlife or spirit world, we still exist in that world. Our consciousness does not simply cease to exist, but carries on from one life into the next. We never truly die, we just transform, the energy changes shape into something new. Much like when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, the consciousness of the caterpillar does not cease to exist, but is transformed. When we view this reality as a huge interactive dream, then we can understand that, just like in a dream, we are able to create our world. We have the power within us to manifest anything we could ever imagine, and the first step is always just believing that it's possible. Perhaps we are all just figments of each other's imagination within the mind of God.