Lucid Dream Work

13 Dec 2018 - I took a dream class through the Seth Institute last April and have been recording and interpreting my dreams on and off since then and experimenting with various types of dream work. I have recorded up to seven or eight dreams in one nights, though when I am on a roll nowadays, I try to limit my dream recording to the one dream each night that I *think* might be the most significant (something that in reality is not possible to do because I find that the simplest of dreams can lead to profound interpretations).

However, I also find that when I travel or when I am burdened with my day-to-day waking work, that I often will not record any dreams at all because I am too tired to either remember them or to wake up to write them down. I don't worry about this, because eventually I will get a dream that knocks at my sleeping mind's door loud enough to get me to record it on the tablet that I always keep by the side of my bed.

I really enjoyed the April class and more recently I listened to a series of interviews from the DreamWork Summit, which were initially free, but now cost money to access. That peaked my interest in lucid dreaming, which was covered toward the end of the class that I took, and which has occasionally worked for me (see my 30 July 2017 post for an example). I downloaded a few Kindle book samples on lucid dreaming, and I ended up buying one of them, partly because it was only $0.99 cents.

The book is: "How to Master Lucid Dreaming: Your practical guide to unleashing the power of lucid dreaming" by Sean Kelly. The first assignment in that book is to write you goals for the next two weeks and to *share them* somehow. See here are my goals (mostly copied from the book) shared with the world here on my blog...

1. Remember 1+ dream per night on average over the next 2 weeks
2. Write down my dreams every morning upon waking
3. Update this blog with my progress (below)
4. Get 6+ hours of sleep every night for the next 2 week
5. Post these goals, and maybe some version of my dreams on my blog
6. Select a new Reality Check item each day and Do Reality Checks throughout the days when encountering the item or anything else that seems odd 

So there it is. I have now done my first homework assignment! - and have updated it as the days go by...

entrance to the Beer Club in Hanoi, Vietnam

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Dream Progress

I have already been recording dreams since April -- close to about 200 of them so far. So recording and interpreting my dreams is not knew. How I am doing it with the new method is new, however. The main difference is that what I record now is very short with limited interpretation. But because of that, I am writing down more of them each night.

Here are the number of dreams that I have recorded so far:

12/13 - 3 dreams

12/14 - 4 dreams - I was flying around the world with my granddaughter in the first one

Starting 12/15 I am to pick a Daily Reality Check (DRC) item, which I will do a Reality Check each time I encounter the item selected. In addition, I am to do Reality Checks whenever something strange occurs and at other random intervals that I set. So the following dreams show what my DRC is, as well.

12/15 - 3 dreams - the last one was food related and so I made "food" my DRC item - I did a terrible job at remembering this one, however
12/16 - 3 dreams - the last one was about driving, so I made driving my car my DRC item
12/17 - 2 dreams - last one was a of ball of lights, mostly white with a few colors, unrelated I made looking out a window my DRC item, and the first thing I saw out a window was Venus glowing through a skylight this morning
12/18 - 2 dreams - both were related to projects I am working on these days are work. My DRC item is opening my thermos to either add to or drink what is in it today.
12/19 - 3 dreams - all different, but also each was very clear. Repeating the DRC item from yesterday.

12/20 - 4 dreams - busy night - two with very long entries - one with a long interpretation - one very lucid. DRC item for today is my cell phone - I will do a DRC each time I open and look at my phone
12/21 - 2 dreams - neither was long - my DRC item for today is Passing through a building entrance doorway
12/22 - 5 dreams (very busy) - a couple quite long, one fairly lucid, though with a lot of distractions - will try the same DRC again, as I did not remember to do it well yesterday
12/23 - 1 dream only recalled last night - new DRC is when I pick up something to drink
12/24 - 0 dreams recalled last night, and that is OK - new DRC is each time I sit/stand at my desktop computer today
12/25 - 2 dreams, both about Christmas - new DRC is when I see a decorated Christmas tree
12/26 - 3 dreams, no new DRC
12/27 - 3 dreams, all three were dreams about dreaming - new, and permanent DRC is whenever something occurs that is strange or out of the ordinary
12/28 - 3 dreams, all related to my work place, and two of which were very detailed - continuing same DRC as the day before
12/29 - 8 dreams, varying degrees of lucidity and detail.

After 16 days I am finished with my Lucid Dream Work book assignment. This is my last update of this blog post. For $0.99 cents, the  "How to Master Lucid Dreaming" book by Sean Kelly was worthwhile. I was never able to get a good grasp of the Daily Reality Check items that I selected, and I gave up in the end. I found that the Wake Back To Sleep technique (not discussed in the Kelly book) works better for me, personally. (I should note that the reason the Kelly book is 99 cents is because, while giving quite a bit of useful information, it is also very short and is essentially an advertisement for his online lucid dreaming classes.)

Recently, like this past week, I was introduced to Jurgen Ziewe through the Buddha at the Gas Pump interview podcast (https://batgap.com/jurgen-ziewe/). Since that Batgap interview, I have listed to about a half dozen videos of Jurgen discussing his Out of Body Experience (OBE) that he has recorded for over 40 years. He has written three books based on his records. For me, at this point in time, he is the most insightful person on the topic of dreaming. The reason I had 8 dreams last night was because I was using meditation more to bring about dream recall and lucidity. This is what Jurgen does -- he sees lucid dreaming as a by product of meditation, which I can identify with, given my own long history of meditation practice. So, I strongly suggest checking out Jurgen Ziewe, if this is something you are interested in (for example, see his three part video series on OBEs: https://vimeo.com/19830435) 

Every situation is God Sent

Every situation is God Sent. 

With this supreme wisdom of life any situation can be used to our advantage and regarded as a blessing of Mother Nature.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Quotes

There is no good or bad, no sacred or evil, at the level of absolute being and pure consciousness in the moment point of here and now. Good and bad only come into existence when we assign those meanings, based on our beliefs, to phenomena as they become experienced in the state of relative, corporeal reality. This teaching cuts across Buddhism, Taoism, Jane Roberts/Seth and Vedic literature. If anything, all phenomena and experiences are fundamentally good, true and sacred in their source.

And yet, it seems that this is the hardest truth to understand and communicate to those who seem to only know a corporeal/physical reality formed by mass beliefs that are reinforced through all forms of officially accepted institutions and media. Ram Dass has a photo of Donald Trump on his alter, next to a statue of Hanuman and photos of his guru, Maharajji, to demonstrate and try and teach this idea to others. While I am not willing to go that far, I do find that President Trump offers an opportunity for deep reflection on the nature of reality, even though the few people I have mentioned this to tend think I am crazy.

More difficult still, is understanding how pain, suffering and death also have origins that are beyond goodness and badness, and which can be a "blessing of Mother Nature."  Buddhist stories talk of enlightened monks who have reaches such a state of consciousness, and the other traditions listed above also seek to guide their students toward that state of being. I felt that the simple quote from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is one of the better reminders of this deep truth, which is so easy to forget.

One of my favorite quotes from Seth (Jane Roberts) that is related to this is: "Creativity often parades under the guise of disruption." This, of course, also contains the idea that every situation that we are presented with is a blessing, if we approach it with the right attitude. Maharishi says that as long we keep the goal in sight (for him the goal is enlightenment), then even when we seem to be facing obstacles or going in the opposite direction, we should understand these as temporary deviations, and we will succeed.

Another related, but longer, Seth (Jane Roberts) quote is: "There is nothing in your exterior experience that you did not originate within yourself. Interactions with others do occur, yet none occur what you do not attract or draw to you by your thoughts, feelings, attitudes or emotions. In your terms this applies both before, during and after physical life. In a most miraculous fashion you are given the gift of creating your own experiences."

This quote represents a fundamental teaching of Seth that is only a little different from Maharishi -- for Seth we are all expressions or appendages of "all that is" (what Maharishi calls "god"), and he has even said that we are "gods in training". For Seth, every situation is created by our inner self (or inner ego) which expresses the beliefs of our outer ego (or conscious self). In this way, every situation is an opportunity to understand our selves (our beliefs). In doing this, we can then change our beliefs and the situations (realities) that we encounter (or create). Our inner and outer egos, our conscious and subconscious selves, our past, present and future selves, are all, in total, our god in a state of becoming. When our outer ego (one small, but important part of this totality) realizes or experiences this, then all situations are a blessing of existence. 

Bali from Lombok, Indonesia, at sunset

Note: From what I have been told, Maharishi talked about "god" more in the early years when he originally formed the Spiritual Regeneration Movement (SRM) in the late 1950s. As he spent more time in the west, however, he talked less about god and more about "science". The quote above is the only one in the book of quotes that it comes from that has the word "god" in it.

Conscious Dreaming

My First Dream Manipulation

So probably I am more "eclectic" than I am Buddhist...

Background 

I read a few pages of Jane Robert's Seth material, from various sources, every night before going to sleep. Recently, I was reading comments by Seth about dreams, and how we can be (and are, without knowing it) as awake in our dreams as we are in our daily life, with one difference (among many) being that our desires are more instantaneous in our dream life. According to Seth, if we can consciously master this in our dream life, we can bring this skill into our waking life (at least that is what I think he is saying.) One of his suggestions was to ask or comment about being in a dream to people as we meet them in our dreams, and see how they respond.

We are all in a dream!

Early morning, Sunday, July 30th

I woke up about 1:00 am feeling quite fidgety and a little bit hungry, after having had a very light dinner (more like dessert) after a very aerobic Ashtanga Yoga class. I doubled my pillow height and tried meditating myself back to sleep using various mantras that I adopted for this over the years. At one point I felt half awake and half asleep -- I was actually thinking that I was still awake. But then I found myself eating a granola bar, and being accused by about four or five young Hispanic boys of taking their granola bar from the airport security belt -- which I was sure I had not done.

At that point, I said, "Hey, we are all in a dream!"  The boys all said "no we aren't", but a tall man who was behind them (either their teacher or other chaperone) laughed and said "yes we are." Then I thought, well in that case I can produce a new granola bar for the boys, and at the instant a granola bar came out of the scanner on the belt and the boys all cheered. I then thought, I should get enough bars so they can each have their own, and then a small pile of granola bars came out. They were happy, and so was I . I woke up shortly after that.

While this might not be my first conscious manipulation of reality while dreaming, it is the first that I remember so vividly ... enough to right it down, at least.

North Coast Redwood Forest, California

The Life You Give Yourself

...you give yourself the life that is being lived through you.
You make your own reality.
There is no other rule.
Knowing this is the secret of creativity.

from The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book, by Jane Roberts (1974, page 14)

I just finished reading The Nature of Personal Reality. When I was about 20 years old, I read a Seth book (not sure which one) that had a great influence on my perceptions of reality and views toward life. Now, some 40 years later, I have read this one, and again I find that it comes closest to my beliefs and experience of the world.

The top photo taken by me on 3 January 2017 along the Columbia River near Portland, Oregon.
The bottom photo take by my wife in front of our house at sunrise on 24 January 2017 in Flagstaff, Arizona. 

Systems Science and Buddhist Emptiness

I have been reading Modern Buddhism, by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso (2013). The central message in this book is the section titled "Training in Ultimate Bodhichitta" (starting on page 101). That chapter is about emptiness (or non-existence), which is possibly the single most difficult teaching of the Buddha for most people to grasp (including me). The chapter may be the best explanation that I have personally come across. It may be that is speaks to me because I can see connections to systems science, which is an area of interest in my day-job.

Bamboo forest, central Taiwan

Systems

I was recently explaining to a student how important it is to clearly define the spatial and social boundaries of the systems that one is researching, because that will tell you what variables are relevant and valid to measure and what variable are not. In this student's case, there are four geographic (spatial) systems that are fairly easy to define. Three of them are small, separate islands, and the fourth is the combined group of three islands, which is administered as a single "village" government. These all exist as subsystems in a spatial hierarchy extending to the country and the globe, and there are, of course, many alternative ways that one could divide the geography of this place, such as coastal and inland, higher and lower elevations, settled and unsettled areas, different types of landforms or vegetation, and more. Fortunately, in this study, these other spatial scales are mostly not relevant.

There are, however, social systems that also need to be defined. Examples of possible social systems that could be studied are: government, religion (maybe different kinds), businesses/livelihoods (both all and grouped into different types), residents (maybe of different social classes and ethnic or language groups), physical infrastructure (utilities and roads/paths), the NGO/civil society (which can have multiple interests), and more.

In my opinion, there are an infinite number of ways in which both spatial scale and social scale could be defined, meaning the potential systems than can be studies are also infinite. How we define the best systems to study depends on the nature of the research question that is being asked (and its theoretical foundations), and the types of responses or results that the research question and methodology anticipates. In turn, the research questions and methods adopted are driven by the literature that has been consulted and established in the researcher's mind in preparing the study.

Rice paddy fields, Shan State, Myanmar

Emptiness

• "The instant you speak about a thing, you miss the mark." - Wumen Huikai (Chan Buddhist Monk, 1183–1260)

Recognizing that I may miss the mark, here is how I currently understand the Buddhist concept of emptiness, based on the book Modern Buddhism. Emptiness is the essential nature of all things -- everything. Emptiness is also known as "non-self" in reference to ourselves. What struck me is that Geshe Kelsang Gyatso explains this in a similar way as I describe what a system is. Every object that we think is real, is actually a system of component parts that only has meaning because we (individually and collectively) give it meaning. (Buddha used the concept of "aggregates" to explain how multiple components come together to enable our different perceptions of the system that we become aware of.)

He uses a car as an example (p.105). If we try to understand exactly what part of the car is the car, we cannot do it, because the car is not found in any of its parts. Nor is it found in all of its parts piled together. It only exists as a system of parts that are connected to each other and operate together in a certain way. We "know" a car when we see it because we have been taught that when these feature come together in this configuration, then it is called a "car".  This system-building process is also true for each component that goes into making a car -- each has it own name -- down to the smallest screw, which also is made up of particles, none of which is a screw in itself.

In the opposite direction, we define the car a a system that is separate from the roads, driveways, parking areas, fuel supply, brand name and image, color scheme, surrounding air molecules, owners, vehicle taxes, dead bugs on the windshield, and innumerable (infinite) other components to which it is almost always, or very often, connected. That is because we have drawn a system boundary around the "car", based on our social conventions.

This path of logic applies to everything that we see as materially existing, including the human body. They are all systems composed of finer elements that are independent systems in themselves. And they are also deeply connected to components that, within our normal conceptualizations of them, are usually considered external them. In reality, there is no car and there is no body without the mental constructs that we hold of their existence.

Another possible way of thinking about this comes from a story told by Oliver Sax in his 1995 book, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. It is about a man who was blind for 50 years and whose sight was restored through an operation. Upon seeing for the first time, all he saw was a mass of colors and lights that had no organized structure. It was not until a doctor spoke that some of those colors and lights came together to form a human face. Because of his age, his brain was never able to fully conceptualize, or structure, the mass of visual information that he was now exposed to. (Apparently this story was made into a movie in 1999, titled "At First Sight".)

This story points to two things. The first is that there is definitely a real and useful evolutionary biology in us that seeks to structure the world into simpler systems than actually exist. The second is that structures do not exist in reality until we form them. While this example is related to visual reality, Buddhism says that this is true of all reality.

With this in mind, it is possible to conceive of a civilization that is equally intelligent as ours on another planet, but which constructs its reality systems in an entirely different way than we do on Earth. This would make for significant challenges in communication, as it already does on our planet between the subtle (and maybe not-so-subtle) differences that exist between different cultural (and political) groups today.

Because everything that we perceive as reality is a mental construct, there is nothing real in reality. As a friend of mine often says, "there is no there there". For Buddhism, the only thereness is emptiness (or the awareness of emptiness/non-existence) because emptiness is all that is left when the mental constructs (the systems) are taken away. As ephemeral as they may be, once we have defined a system at our gross level of awareness, we have also defined the variables that we use to test it and to understand it, just as with the systems defined for social science and physical science research, described above.

• "The purpose of realizing emptiness is to end attachment." - Gautama Buddha

With an awareness of the ultimate emptiness that underlies all things, we are no longer attached to our expecting or requiring a system to behave in a fixed way. Instead, we appreciate all of the systems we encounter (that is, everything that we encounter through our awareness) as being equally valuable and full of wonder. This is the foundation of Buddhist enlightenment and happiness. (Although, again, enlightenment is one of those things that is fundamentally non-describable).

Lessons

As I said above, emptiness is the essential nature of all things -- everything. In Buddhism, the awareness or experience of emptiness is the ultimate happiness and satisfaction, free of the vicissitudes of our emotions and attachments. System science has some theoretical considerations that come fairly close to that. In general systems theory, all systems are subsystems of other systems and complete independence (a closed system) does not exist (Klir, 1969. Approach to General Systems Theory). In addition, systems are in constant flux. System boundaries, therefore, do not exist as fixed entities except in our minds, usually based on assumptions. If we did not have a preconceived idea of what the boundaries "should" look like, they would not be there. Phenomenology, as a social science research approach (as I understand it), seeks to reduce preconceptions by fully recognizing them, and then investigates social phenomenon with an openness to all possibilities and without prejudice. Emptiness, however, is not quite within the realm of system science -- maybe quantum physics....


So, as this is about Buddhism, I am posting it here on my Buddhism blog. Since it is also about system science, I am also posting it on my community resilience blog, This version tends to speak more to Buddhism related topics, whereas the other version of this post discusses the system science side a little bit more.

And of course, as always, ... "this, too, shall pass."

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UPDATES above are Underlined.

UPDATE: 18 November 2016 - Another perspective on non-existence from Modern Buddhism (page 120), which also has significance for systems building:

"If all the necessary atmospheric causes and conditions come together, clouds will appear. If these are absent, clouds cannot form. The clouds are completely dependent upon causes and conditions for their development; without these they have no power to develop. The same is true for mountains, planets, bodies, minds and all other produced phenomena. Because they depend upon factors outside themselves for their existence, they are empty of inherent, or independent, existence and  are mere imputations of the mind."

UPDATE: 22 November 2016 - So I like the Sutra part (first 1/3) of the book, Modern Buddhism (2013, available free online), which is what my discussion above is all about, However, I am not so crazy about the Tantra part (remainder) of the book, which feels too much like "religion" for my tastes. I have also been reading about the author, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, and the controversies related to his New Kadampa Tradition, which I find somewhat disturbing. You can find out more by searching online about this.

Close your eyes and look with your ears

Close your eyes and look with your ears.

See and touch the world through the sounds that you hear.

(This idea came to me as I was laying on my bed and resting after my morning meditation today)

Buddhist Mantras with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

A couple of months ago I was looking for music similar to what I hear in some of the yoga classes that I attend several times a week. Mostly these are from singers such as Krishna Das, Snatam Kaur, Wah! and Trevor Hall. While listening to songs come up on YouTube, I came across Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Since I do not listen to popular music at all, this group did not mean anything to me.

There are two songs, however, that are associated with this group has on YouTube that I have a hard time getting out of my head. The melody is part of it, but I think more important are the words and their significance from a Buddhist perspective.

The first song is "Every Part of You" - the singer, I later found out, is Aaron Embry (not Edward Sharpe/Alex Ebert, who is the guy drumming on his chest). The main chorus of the song is "Every part of your is another part of me" and it compares that to the rivers flowing into the sea. This is obviously aligned with the "not two" mantra that I wrote about previously. There are two version on YouTube: Version 1 (my favorite, embedded below),  Version 2,






The second song is "Do You Realize??", which is actually by The Flaming Lips (singer Wayne Coyne) - another group that I had not really known about, but is here performed with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros (Edward Sharpe/Alex Ebert plays the bowl at the end). So again, not a song sung by Edward Sharpe/Alex Ebert. The main chorus is "Do you realize?", which is then answered in a number of ways, with the closing chorus being "That everyone you know someday will die." This song reminds me of the "this, too, shall pass" mantra that I also had written about. Awareness of death is, of course, on of the recommended five daily reflections taught by the Buddha. The song has some other Buddhist refrains, such as "that happiness makes you cry". This song was voted the official rock song of Oklahoma in 2009 -- apparently a very Buddhist state.

There are many versions of Do You Realize?? on YouTube, this is, in my opinion, the best one, by far...





There is one other Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros song that I also sometimes get stuck in my head -- and I think this one is actually sung by Alex Ebert (aka Edward Sharpe). It is "Man on Fire" and the video (below) may be part of why it sticks. Enjoy!