Buddha Nature

In this dream, I witness in slow motion – slow motion so that I don’t miss the significance of this dream – a bullet strike a bulletproof block of glass: the glass cracks and an eight-pointed star forms. The important symbols in this dream are the eight-pointed star, the bulletproof block of glass, and the star forming in the glass.

The star represents our celestial divine, deepest nature and essential self. The number 8 has many symbols that generally point towards the Self.

Some Sufis take the point of light to be our identity when they say that the dhat (identity) is a star. (Almaas, 2001, p. 448)

The symbolism of the bulletproof glass becomes more apparent when we take into account the stage and station at which this dream occurred. According to the five-stage alchemical model – this dream occurred in the Outward Stone: Station 7, which relates to Almaas’s quintessential dimension/ co-emergent nonduality/ nondual presence. This stage/station is ‘the self-realization of the greatest depth of Being’ (Almaas, 2001, p. 428).

Almaas correlates this level of self-realization to some of the Buddhist schools, i.e. the Nyingmapa, to their highest teaching – Dzogchen. This level relates to Buddha-nature or Buddha mind, bodhicitta – ‘the enlightened mind’ and the experience of a nondual presence (enlightenment fully embodied in the world) that is both ‘clear ‘and ’empty’. (Almaas, 2001, p.432). The Tibetan term for this is rigpa.

The emphasis of the teaching is on the nonduality of experience where the presence is totally nondual with all manifestation. (Almaas, 2001, p. 432)

The bulletproof glass can then be understood to represent the purified Buddha body and Buddha mind symbolically. This dream captures the mystical union of an individual spark of light ‘the star’ becoming fully embodied in the indestructible, clear and empty ‘bulletproof-glass’ body.