🌿 Introduction
✨ In this deeply personal and reflective writing, Master Woo Myung shares the journey from living in illusion to awakening into Truth.
He describes a life filled with dreams, struggles, judgments, and burdens created by the mind, revealing how human life is often lived within a false world of memories and perceptions.
🌌 What we hold onto—our past, our identity, and our beliefs—are shown to be illusions that do not truly exist.
Through profound realization, he explains that true freedom comes when the self is completely discarded, leaving only Truth, the world itself, and the empty sky.
🌿 This teaching offers a powerful insight: real fulfillment is not found outside, but only within, beyond the false self.
📖 ORIGINAL WRITING BY MASTER WOO MYUNG
Living a False Life
If you are alone in this unfamiliar foreign land
without relatives or friends,
there is nowhere to go and nothing to do.
And if you also had no money, nowhere to sleep or rest,
your life would be very bleak.
I had many dreams and aspirations in my youth,
but before I realized what I wanted to do and achieve
that time was gone.
Of the faintly lingering memories of the past,
not all of them are beautiful;
there were times that were desperate.
There was no one to take responsibility for my life,
no one who understood or acknowledged it.
The life I lived following my delusional dreams
was exhausting and with much toil.
I am getting old with the passage of time, and now
I am so thankful for all the difficult times in the past
that were my fated destiny.
I scolded myself often,
telling myself that I am not a great person,
or a clever one; that I am the one most lacking,
the worst person.
Most people live believing that they are great,
but I did not think there was anything great about myself,
nor did I tolerate deceiving myself in such a way.
In any case, time passed and I became Truth,
and I now see that in the dream-like life,
it does not matter how you live.
But because of my framework of mind, my preconceptions,
I made judgments of what I thought was right and wrong,
what was clean and dirty, cold and hot,
what I liked and disliked.
The mind of judgment had been my only mind.
In the lifetime of the human world,
there were many hills to climb, and many joys and sorrows;
they had existed because of my mind.
Even though one’s life in the past
is an illusion that does not exist,
people live holding onto it in their hearts,
so they carry a lot of baggage.
Now that I am born in the world,
I know that I laughed and cried over my life, over nothing,
and I had put everything on the line for that life.
I regret having wasted years dreaming a false dream,
that has no meaning and does not exist in the world.
In the new world, there is no past and no future
and one sees the world as it is,
without even the mind of seeing.
The dream world that had been my life, has disappeared.
In heaven that until now we have only heard of,
there are no worries or anxieties,
and it is freedom and deliverance.
It is freedom because I do not exist,
and it is deliverance because I do not exist.
Because I do not exist, it is endlessly peaceful
and because I do not exist, I know God born in Truth is alive.
It is hard to know if I am awake or dreaming,
for I have become Truth
and now I know all the ways of the world,
that I had not even dreamt of knowing.
After erasing and eliminating my worthless self from the world,
only the world remains.
After discarding even the world, the empty sky remains.
When this existence itself became my mind,
I was reborn with the body and mind of the empty sky,
and I live as the Soul and Spirit of Truth.
My self from the past is false and my true self is real,
and the true world is within me and this place is heaven;
and my self born in this place will live together for eternity.
The master of this true land is he who has this place.
The time when one put everything on the line
for his false life has gone,
and I am thankful for all the unfulfilled dreams,
all the numerous things I left undone.
Everything looked for and pursued on the outside is false;
everything that is found within is true.
People all live the other way round,
and they only seek to gain from the outside.
The only true gain is what is gained from within;
only then can one truly gain or fulfill anything.
While each person has his own outlook on life,
his own set of values, he will know they are false
when his mind, of bubbles, is gone;
If he discards the bubbles,
he will also be able to know the ways of the world.
– Woo Myung
🌠 Reflect at Santa Clara Meditation
At Santa Clara Meditation, practitioners are guided to discard the false self and the accumulated mind of illusions. 🌿
Through meditation, one can go beyond the life of dreams and awaken to Truth, where there is no past, no burden, and no separation.
This is the state described by Master Woo Myung—
a life of true freedom, where one lives as the eternal existence beyond the self. ✨
