I took this photo in Bali last year, just days after downloading every translation of an ancient sutra I could find.
Low tide, silhouettes, more sky than shore. It looked like the exact idea I had been chasing: that Life is a kind of dream.
It all from one album, “Beautiful Illusion” by @jonwirtzmusic with the voice of Ram Dass woven through. The record ends with part of the Vajra Prajna Paramita Sutra, a sutra the Buddha called “The Diamond that Cuts through Illusion,” and that ending is what reached me.
A version of that sutra now opens my upcoming Tropical Sci-Fi novel “The Kaleidoscopic Universe.” And Vati, an exiled AI, takes the idea and runs with it.
I found the whole album on YouTube free, and I’d love for you to hear the soundscape I was living inside while I finished the book, here it is:
Beautiful Illusion on YouTube →
Fair warning: it pairs suspiciously well with the trilogy, and it may leave you unsure of which layer of the dream you’re currently reading from. 😉
