Rebirth.
You've never incarnated.
This is a dreamlike illusion.
You know very little about your mind, which is common in modern thought, eastern and western.
Confessing that we are proud is the first step towards humility.
Confessing that we are ignorant is the first step towards knowledge.
Confessing that we are immature is the first step towards maturity.
Confessing that we are foolish is the first step towards wisdom.
No matter where we are, until we reach perfection, which is unattainable (yet must be attained), we are imperfect, and if we fail to realize the depths of our own ignorance we will not be humble enough to realize the depths of much else. Emptying out our false assumptions in this way is the first step towards so-called higher truth, which is the emptying out of all falsehoods, and if constantly cultivated eventually returns us to the fundamental reality of which this world is but a fleeting illusion within illusion within illusion, dream within dream within dream.
Who is the dreamer? The dream. What is the dream? Dreams are nothing but ephemeral fleeting visualizations overlayed upon the void we experience when we close our eyes at night. So really I exist as no more than an illusory production of your imagination, and you exist as no more than an illusory production of mine. For everything in all realms that have form, it is this way. Yet how sublime, how wonderful, to exist in this way and become aware of it! Awareness experienced like this is the blessing of life, always tempered by the knife edge of awareness that our experience of physical existence is temporary.
When we speak of "real truth", "higher truth", "true understanding" and things like this we mean something far more fundamental than the conventional definition of truth. Conventional truth is often described as "worldly". Worldly truth comes with falsehood, as the mental concept of truth is dependent upon the mental concept of falsehood existing for it's own existence. This may sound like complete nonsense at first, but it actually has to be like this in our so-called physical world.
Anything which is brought into existence as a form (and even thoughts and emotions are considered mentally created forms) has an opposite: right implies a left, up implies a down, light implies a shadow. Without a down you wouldn't call anything an up, it would just "be" and you wouldn't label it. Living without labels, without judgments, is living beyond duality, and living, thinking, beyond duality, thinking with a united rather than divided mind, is the next hypothetical step in the evolution of mind.
This does not mean always living without any discrimination. We must discriminate between healthy and non-healthy, appropriate and non-appropriate, so that we and our children grow up knowing how to thrive, but in order to ensure we are seeing things objectively it is also useful to train our minds to think from all perspectives without bias in order to select the most beneficial.
So getting back to the point, in the same way that the concept of a left can't exist without the concept of a right, without a concept of truth there can be none of it's opposite, which is a concept of falsehood. This is a key point of Zen, and it is essential to understand in order to have even a limited intellectual understanding of so-called enlightenment. When we do not attempt to communicate we cannot create falsehoods or misunderstandings. So falsehoods and misunderstandings are at best an unintended byproduct of, and at worst a deliberate inversion of, the quest for an understanding of real truth or higher truth, which we define as "truth beyond the human mind's ability to define it".
This is part of why Zen monks only bow or move slightly instead of speaking when asked questions, or speak of the physical when asked about the spiritual and the spiritual when asked about the physical. They are answering in this way to call your attention to the concept of dualistic opposites and showing you the doorway beyond suffering which results from freeing ourselves of such concepts. In the East trying to explain Zen with words marks me as an idiot of the highest caliber, but as Westerners your minds have been trained to understand before you accept, so I must attempt to build a bridge halfway across so that more of you can make the leap!
So what we call real truth is actually beyond "truth" and "non-truth". It is what existed before truth and non-truth or any other dualistic framework were conceptualized within the mind. It is before thought, which is why meditation, which gradually quiets our minds, can bring us to a state of absolute truth that simply cannot be conveyed in words. We call that unformed state of real truth the "absolute reality", or "God", "the creator", "the source", "Buddha mind", "no mind", "emptiness", "nothingness", "where there is no self or other", etc. and we call this dreamlike physical world we pretend to exist within "relative" reality because things here appear to exist in relation to each other. Within the absolute there is no dualism, no thought, no emotion: those things can only be experienced, can only even pretend to exist or be contemplated of, within our illusory relative minds here in this illusory relative world.
After our mind retreats from our body whether at death, during meditation, or during sleep, we briefly let go of all thought and return to the unformed void from which all pseudo-realities spiral, the place all dreams originate from, which we never actually see from without because we're it: the unformed void is all of our true nature. You cannot see it because it is your eyes. You cannot hear it because it is your ears. You cannot smell it because it is your nose. You may smell the sweat on your nose, but not your nose's sensory components themselves. Fire does not burn itself because it is already the fire, water cannot wet itself because it is already the water, and in just the same way we cannot physically experience our true nature because our true nature is neither physical nor non-physical, we must let go of dualistic thinking about physical and non-physical and even the concept of experiencing and not-experiencing in order to experience our real nature.
But mind cannot easily be ordered to unmake itself, so a beginner doing this intentionally is, at least for most, quite impossible! Only by letting go into meditation and strengthening our contemplation and visualization do we have any chance of lasting success. Once we have better grasp of our mind we can use the mind as a tool to control which level of reality we experience at any moment. That is an example of real mastery! For such a person, performing "miracles" is trivial, no more difficult than controlling your arms or moving your legs is for you now. These things are not supernatural, just so rare to find awakened within a living being that we consider it supernatural.
This book is useful.