On a recent trip to BodhGaya, I was thinking about the similarity between this life and the movie Inception. Wise saints have said that this world is a dream. We should look at it like we look at our dreams while we are sleeping. While dreaming, we feel everything is real and we feel happy or sad as our dream progresses. But, once we wake up we realize that we have been dreaming and stop feeling the pain or happiness associated with it. So, is our life. We are in a dream-like state not able to realize that we are dreaming, but in reality we are. In the movie Inception, the characters are shown to go into successive dream like states where a kick is required to wake them up and bring them back to reality. Until characters are woken up, they can not figure out whether they are in a dream or not. The movie ends in a mysterious way with audience not knowing if the main character was dreaming or not.

I keep thinking what is that the Buddha would have realized while sitting under the Bodhi tree. If we look at his life, he had all the things that we often strive for- wealth (son of a King), good lifestyle and more. Still he left everything. I am sure there has to be something much more deeper and greater in self-realization which we can never find in things around us. But, its difficult to be The Buddha, difficult to leave so much around us and realize something, the concept of which is so elusive to us.