Did God give us Donald Trump to help us achieve enlightenment?

PLEASE do not interpret this question as an assertion. However, I do view it as a serious question well worth thinking about (with the understanding that the word "God" is not so trivial as most people assume it to be).

Just two years ago, one of my many scientist friends said: "For years, I have been 100% convinced that the cosmos is totally governed by mathematical laws, and that all this stuff about 'life is just a dream' is total nonsense. But then...  after what has been happening lately.. culminating in Donald Trump being president, it really has gotten me to wonder. Is it possible that it really all is just a dream after all?" (So that election got him to think....)

For myself, I am still 70% convinced that the cosmos is not only governed by mathematical laws, but that it is governed by the kind of mathematical laws physicists have become comfortable with -- stuff like partial differential equations (PDE) or like Schrodinger equations over a multiverse based on ordinary 3D or 4D space. But what about the other 30%? Just how weird could life really be?

This morning, I start to feel like that other guy. If the whole world starts to feel like a kind of bad dream, shouldn't we start paying more attention to striving for more lucid dreaming and some VARIETY of positive visualization (more than just the biased polyanna PR which is part of the bad dream)? Is that the whole point of this?

I still remember a time, back when I was fourteen, holding a copy of Spengler's Decline of the West, sitting on a hard wooden bench waiting for the school bus. I remember thinking: "Ohmigod!
If this guy's theory is right, I will be seeing a lot of pretty wild things right in my own life, in the next 50 or 60 years!! How does THAT affect how I think about things...?" Of course, I have read a lot of other theories, but I have also gotten deeper into the decline and fall of the Roman Republic and Empires, and that has always been deep in my mind. It is hard not to see recent events in the US and Europe in that light... and to tilt my dreams that way, even with refinements. Trump fits right in there; he often reminds me of the ampitheater dug up in Cartagena in Spain...

And so, it was ever so great a pleasure a few months back to read a book I bought on kindle:
www.amazon.com/Tyrant-Shakespeare-Politics-Stephen-Greenblatt/dp/0393635759/
The start of the book reads like an attack BOTH on Trump AND on the Moslem Brotherhood, but that wasn't what made me feel better. What made me feel better was the chapter on Henry VI, which offered a whole other dream (grounded in reality as much as Spengler was), with far more real hope of life becoming better despite the kind of horrible confusion swirling around us today (as it was then). Can we change the channel from Spengler to Shakespeare?

That thought came very strongly to me today, when the dreams Out There were portraying Trump as now more like Macbeth, with a bloody knife in his hand. I said to Luda: can't we make it more like Henry VI? Her response: sure. Next section is Richard III. People keep comparing Trump to Richard III, but Richard III was more like Stalin. But OK, maybe that's the next chapter.

God help us.

But we do all have our roles to play, and responsibilities, even those who are just watchers or witnesses. After the MacBeth scene, the question was addressed to me: "OK, Paul, what do YOU see? You've been doing due diligence, struggling hard to be detached. What data do you enter for the record?" OK: while CNN has promulgated false horror about Trump's accusation that they have supported the drumbeat for a new world war (US and Israel versus Russia and Iran, per the explicit game plan of the Moslem Brotherhood), Trump just authorized free and uninhibited cyberattacks on Russia. The Russians and Chinese for their part have clamped down on any hope of the North Korea situation being solved short of war, and have joined the Texas mafia folks in pushing for an insane and suicidal explosion of nuclear threats of all kinds that they know about. He is certainly no Hitler, more like the old transitional Junkers or Mussolini, but he has sold out and violated the integrity of the republic in numerous serious ways which do set the stage for worse. At least Hitler knew how to add and subtract. The left is lately even more out of touch with reality, so what could be done?

Enough. Can we not find SOME way to change the channel? What ever happened to the spirit of love and the spirit of truth? Let alone the kind of strict fairness we used to strive for in the old NSF? (Fair selection is a key requirement of reality on a small, bounded planet like this.)

But... as dreams and reality intermix... a year ago, I had a chance to do a Doctor Strange reenactment in Nepal. (Don't underestimate how literally true that is.) Soon, I sail into the setting sun, officially for a kind of reenactment of Moana, hauled onto the boat of a worthy young woman.. who knows? I certainly don't.

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One more data point. The firing of an FBI guy for saying the wrong things about Trump in email to his mistress was a VERY clear data point on the negative side. The security clearance issue was perhaps debatable, as strange things ARE going on, but a misdirected missile seems likeliest there too. Trump's enemies have clearly been giving him guidance on whose rights to violate, preparing both for his .. denouement,,, and for reduction of democracy in the US. The news about voting fraud by Republican governor in Georgia also has a final days feeling to it.

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Speaking of Nepal, I posted to the (reconstituted) Vedanta group this morning:

Is there a way to think seriously about the Possibility of life being a dream, without just freaking out and disintegrating either into jellyfish or into irrelevant hardened ideologues out of contact with real life?

I see more of that in literature (despite ITS many bad practitioners, like any field) than in philosophy or religion or science these days.

For example, I remember a time many years ago when someone I met on the astral level recommended four science fiction writers for me to read. I was very frustrated at the time when I could find no writings of one of the four, but a year later that other one was there too. One of the four was Dan Simmons, best known for his Hyperion series. Certainly real enough. But he also had a short novel called "Muse of Fire" which I see as a way to try to get real about idealism. When I read the book, I had the impression that he was really hoping to displace Farenheit 451 as a little book assigned in English classes all over the country... that it would be a good thing, but not so likely for now. And of course, the movie Inception grapples with issues fundamental in idealism. 

In truth, the recent news related to Trump has ME thinking more about life as a dream, and about the need for more lucid dreaming. Not as a joke, as a serious thing. 

Avtar mentioned the linguistic origin of the word "samadhi" as union with the whole. OK, if the whole is the Great Dreamer, a bit like that sleeping Vishnu you guys must know about, then the 

issue of lucid and constructive dreaming should be something more unavoidable as one approaches that state, even in the earliest stages, no?

Vinod's suggestion that there are of course no seductive females in any of the worlds of dreams... well, it is comic as much as it is sad. It is also sad to 

reject any elements with any hint of life or perfume in them. But no, those are not trivial elements. Nor is the present situation of humanity trivial.