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’s all from one album, “Beautiful Illusion” by Jon Wirtz 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 my upcoming trilogy, and it may leave you unsure of which layer of the dream you’re currently reading from. 😉
