Dreams Can Reveal the Changes in One's Afflictions

When cultivation reaches the manas, the manas's ignorance diminishes and wisdom grows, which can change it at the root, enabling one to handle many worldly and world-transcending dharmas with increasing perfection. Therefore, in cultivating the Dharma, one must penetrate deeply to the manas. Because the manas is the consciousness that takes charge, determining bodily, verbal, and mental actions, and determining karmic seeds and karmic retribution. It discerns a great many dharmas and can, before or just as events occur, take charge and make decisions in advance,s to everything become harmonious and unobstructed, we become ever more harmonious with our surroundings, with people, affairs, and physical circumstances, and we can liberate more and more sentient beings.

If one cultivates to the level of the manas, ignorance diminishes bit by bit, and greed, hatred, and delusion fade away bit by bit, thereby transforming the manas. When the manas's afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion decrease and fade, this will be revealed through dreams. For example, when the manas no longer wishes to crave and cling to certain dharmas in daily life, corresponding mental activities—thoughts and aspirations—will arise, and the tathāgatagarbha will cooperate by displaying them through dreams. How are they displayed? Greed, hatred, and delusion represent the defilement of the mind, and the defilement of the mind must be represented by defiled states of material form. When the mind's purity increases and its defilement decreases, it is displayed as the environment in which this person dwells being utterly filthy. The filthier the external scene, the more afflictions have been expelled from the mind; the mind has become purer than before. Although the realm is impure, it serves to set off the purity of the mind.

Therefore, dreams also reveal the degree of a person's cultivation—whether the afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion have lessened, and whether the mind is gradually becoming pure. Of course, there is still a certain difference between this expulsion of defilement before enlightenment and before realizing the fruits, and the subduing and elimination of greed, hatred, and delusion after realizing the fruits. Before realizing the fruits, in the course of cultivating the thirty-seven aids to enlightenment, due to the study and practice of precepts, samādhi, and wisdom, afflictions should indeed be subdued to some extent, and the mind should be somewhat purer than before. This is the result of cultivating precepts, samādhi, and wisdom before enlightenment and before realizing the fruits. Otherwise, if the cultivation of precepts, samādhi, wisdom, and the thirty-seven aids to enlightenment has not reached the standard, and the obstruction of greed, hatred, and delusion is still severe, one cannot realize the fruits or awaken to the true mind.