Row row row your boat

“Row row row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream.” Did you sing that when you were young? I did. But we didn’t have a clue to what it meant even though we sang in chorus with 3 groups. Rowing our boat is akin to our activities that we pursue in life. The stream is consciousness continually flowing like a stream or river. It is gentle by nature. When we realize life is like a dream, we release from all the problems in life that arise from grasping, from worrying, and from fear. We let go of this life and everything being so tangible. We are in the world but not of the world. Slowly we start to “see” that nothing is real. Everything is like a dream, like a mirage, like a reflection. When we are dreaming images seem so real. When we wake up we realize we were mistaken, they were only dreams. Everything takes on an ethereal quality. When we approach the water of a mirage, the closer we get the water shrinks until we realize there was no water there after all. The reflection of our face in the mirror we grasp at as if it was actually us! We primp our hair, we cover with makeup, and we smooth out wrinkles, as if the face in the mirror was actually us!