I realize its been quite a while since I posted anything here and I’m hoping my reader base will forgive me. My writing practice had a couple of hiccups until recently while I’ve been busy with other activities. Luckily not blogging doesn’t mean I haven’t been experimenting.
My latest kick has come from rekindling my nearly forgotten lucid dreaming practice and taking my sleep hacking to the next level. For those of you who might have been living in a cave or intentionally hiding from things that are cool as hell, lucid dreaming is the act of becoming aware that you are dreaming… while you are dreaming. Thus giving the dreamer control over the dream’s content as long as he remains lucid.
There has been an surge of articles online recently about how to get yourself started with lucid dreaming although most of it is just rehashing the information thats already out there for beginners.
Doing reality checks during the day so the habit rolls over into your dreams at night.
Doing the various lucid dream rituals prescribed by Stephen LaBerge like MILD, WILD, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dreaming#Wake-back-to-bed_.28WBTB.29
All very important things for the beginning lucid dreamer. But after reading through what I could find online I was disapointed in the lack of information for intermediate and advanced dreamers. Like so many areas of self development and consciousness exploration everything seems to be geared to the beginner, once you’ve taken your practice beyond that level you’re on your own exploring undocumented territory.
Once you’ve already mastered flying and have “indulged yourself in the sex binge” to quote Tim Ferriss… then what?
Thats what I’ve been asking myself for a while now trying to carve out a plan for exploring some of the lesser plumbed depths of lucid dreaming consciousness.
One of the most interesting philosophical questions posed by lucid dreaming that rarely gets asked seriously is: once you have the power to do whatever you could imagine, with no limitations what-so-ever… what do you do? If I gave you a blank hola-deck and you could be anyone, anything, anywhere…. who would you be? and once all your materialistic and sensory pleasures were satisfied… then what?
When people think of billionaires… they usually imagine people who have everything sipping champagne by the pool on a tuesday for no other reason than they can. But how often is the billionaire satisfied with just a simple life of pleasure. What really happens to a human’s brain when we have everything we want, get bored with it, and have to start looking for new challenges, new horizons proportional to our vision and capability.
I think this is the real gift of lucid dreaming practice. Its an opportunity to find our true passion, that one thing that we would do once we could do anything… in a world where nothing would stop us. The potential for this application alone is enormous but sadly gets buried in the ‘be superman! sleep with run-way models!’ attitude so many lucid dreaming books have.
So that’s my only beef with the lucid dreaming work online. Most of it consists of simple lists of techniques to help the beginner and there isn’t too much in the way of group experiments into the weirder aspects of this powerful state of consciousness. I did however find a great site called SpiritWatch which has an archive of every issue of the ‘Lucidity Journal’ since the early eighties (I highly recommend reading the work by Jayne Gackenbach and Paul Tholey) but besides that and a few forums online there isn’t enough of a lucid dreaming exploration community for those of us who are past the beginning stage and ready to do more with our dreams that just fuck and fly.
One of the far overlooked aspects of LD I’m interested in exploring is the ability to interact directly with the contents of your own mind. The research on using lucid dreams as a tool to achieve physical and emotional healing is sadly lacking. There are countless first person accounts online of people using the dream state to visualize their tumor shrinking, or to interact directly with their unconscious mind to create changes in their waking consciousness.
The same kind of fascinating work on the limits of our own mind is highlighted in the research of dream characters and how much information and abilities they actually possess. I for one am continually shocked at how much valuable information and guidance I can receive from my own dream regulars and some of the accounts online of other oneironauts only drives my point home further that there is a storehouse of insight waiting for us in our dreams waiting to be tapped by those who know how.
Another interesting activity I intend to explore more is the ability of your dream consciousness to separate itself into two different points of awareness and experience two sets of dream sensory input. This means you could be staring up the staircase at yourself, staring down the staircase at yourself staring back up. Its fascinating areas of the mind like this that we discover in the realm of lucid dreaming that shed light on how our own waking consciousness represents the outside world to us and what the limitations on that consciousness really are.
These are just two of the topics I want to expand on in the next few weeks as I write more on the topic of Lucid dreaming and keep you all updated on my own personal experiments into conscious self growth using this method. Matt and I plan on doing some reviews of some of the books we’ve read and have recently begun to incorporate the use of various supplements to increase our lucid dreaming potential, all of which you will definetly be reading about in future posts.
As always anyone who would like to share some of their experiences with lucid dreaming, especially experiences pertaining to bending the boundaries of what people may consider possible… even in a dream, please feel free to share them either in the comments or email us at the blog, we’d love to put some up. Otherwise look forward to more posts in the future and the Focused-Awareness Blog coming back into action online.
-Chris
More stuff on the web: Stephen LaBerge and the Lucidity Institute LD4All Not my favorite site design ever but a good online community with some interesting posts. Paul Tholey Some collected English articles by one of the most interesting oneironauts I’ve read about. Be sure to read his great paper called ‘The Importance of Light Heartedness’
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I read a fair amount of psychology /self improvement literature and I’ve mentioned before how I consider myself a bit of a self help junkie. However there is a such thing as going overboard with it and a number of gurus and talking heads you’ll come across online are definetley capable of taking the idea of self improvement way too far.
My friend Rob calls it ‘the endless pursuit of tech’. The idea that becoming a better you is not only possible but hey… it should be easy. Tech refers to exactly the kind of stuff I love and the core ideas behind this blog. Think NLP, Tony Buzan, Lucid Dreaming, Meditation, all tools to change your consciousness, change your state, and eventually change your life conditions. Psychological devices that are designed to make the transition easy… like pressing send in your inbox.
Well in this post, I want to talk about something totally different than Tech… I want to talk about the opposite of tech. Good ole’ willpower.
Plain old fashion just doing it. I know it seems almost too simple to even write about.
Today at work I found myself engaging in an ancient piece of human communication technology called ‘talk radio’. Just one minute of talk radio commercials will hammer it into your head how much of a million dollar industry self improvement tech has really become. There’s an easy way to do everything now a days. There’s an easy way to loose weight, to become a millionaire, get out of debt, meet women. There is a special little gimmick around every corner that offers you the magic cure. Are there easier answers out there? or is this kind of marketing just creating the impression in alot of peoples minds that self improvement techniques are all bunk and the only people who succeed are those with success in their genes?
I’m afraid the answer, like many answers in life, is neither black or white. There is alot of great techniques out there, hopefully you’ve already read about some of them here on the site, but what about the no-technique approach? What if for some of us… the reliance on ideas and philosophies about HOW to “do it” is the very thing that keeps us from the simple doing of it.
Many people thinking having information is a good thing. having techniques means your equipped. You hear therapists and self help gurus of all shades saying things like ‘ you need to understand your problem clearly, you need to become aware of the situation, visualize success, change your modalities’ all great advice, for certain things and certian people. But here are strong cases that occur in real life, and often times having a knowledge of different change modalities like NLP or something will obscure the clarity of purpose a person has about reaching a goal, when they are waiting until they feel like it to make that next leap.
Over thinking can occur.
One of the important aspects of living the life of constant improvement is being able to push yourself to make an attempt even when you have a very slim chance of success.
You’re building the Do It habit.
The Do It habit is basically the simplest form of self improvement philosophy ever.
Most of us at some point or another do make a decision to do something different with our lives. Perhaps we’re a bit over weight, maybe we’re in debt, whatever it is… we decide one night and emphatically declare to ourselves that we are going to make a change now. How often do we make that first decision under the influence of strong emotions? How often do you wake up the next day to begin your new habit or your new pattern and find that the subsequent individual choices you have to make after the emotional honey moon wears off is part of the challenge?
Its easy to commit to quitting smoking when your aunt gets emphezema. But a week or two down the road when your work buddies are stepping outside to smoke, those neural pathways will light right back up. The emotional state that made your decision to quit so clear now seems hazy… and its not such a big deal if you don’t stick to it… or just have one… you can always start again tomorrow…
Discipline in certain circles has a muddied meaning it’s started to aquire alot of negative associations with it. There’s a growing idea that a person can only conquer a fear by getting over that fear mentally first. Or a person can achieve a goal only by visually believing that they can do it. The do it habit is way different in this respect.
Its about doing it even when you don’t think you can, and even when you don’t feel like it.
Out of the comfort zone and into the sky.
When you start on day one of any new goal or task its easy to get daunted thinking about all the decisions that your going to have to make a head of you. If your starting to hit the gym and get in better shape then you know its not just about making the initial decision to sign up, but making the decision every single day to put one foot in front of the other and go… whether you feel like it or not. You won’t get your perfect body in the first visit… but what you do get is a positive reference experience.
The more you see yourself doing what you want to be doing, the more you believe in your ability to do it. It never occurs to classically trained pianists from a very early age how amazing their skills are because they have no reference experience to what its like to NOT be good at playing piano.
Likewise many people who begin a new habit, or try to break an old reoccuring fear will have only negative reference experiences at first and its important to force yourself, against your own comfort, in order to achieve that first taste of success. Momentum is the key word here… like attracts like. But the only way to get out of a really serious funk is to stop perpetuating the idea that your failing… force yourself to take one step in the right direction every day. Eventually it will become so easy you won’t even need to think about it anymore… goals will accomplish themselves, all you need to do is prove you’re worthy of the challenges and just do it.
Related reading on the web:
Just Do It – another post with some tips for doing it. Remember the key is action without over-thinking though! Self Acceptance Vs. Self Growth – A great post by Steve Pavlina about the line between accepting yourself for who you are and pushing yourself to new levels of growth. Pushing yourself to the Limit – The story of a man who pushed himself physically and mentally to run his first triathlon with only 32 days of training.
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Its clear to anyone who doesn’t live in a cave that there are many problems in the world right now. There’s children starving in countries gripped with war and conflict. There are incurable diseases, terrorist attacks, people losing jobs, and fat cats laughing all the way to the bank with their hard stolen money. There are so many people working on the ground level to deal with these kinds of things but as with all complicated problems, not only do we need to catch the water dripping from the leak… we need to patch the roof.
I was recently read a post by Jonathan Mead at Illuminated Mind about starting revolutions and it got me thinking… if I was to start a revolution what do I honestly care about enough to devote myself to it.
The idea of finding what your passionate about through the lens of what you would be willing to start a revolution for strikes me as a powerful tool for any person trying to find fulfillment in their life.
What in the world means so much to me, what am I so deeply committed to that I would be willing to wake up early every morning and go to bed late every night. What do I love so much that I would answer email, hand out fliers, spread information with all the passionate frenzy that makes up the life of a revolutionary?
There are so many injustices and things in the world that I feel passionate about, so many political situations, so many people suffering who I want to help but then I have to ask myself… Whats the most I can do for these people utilizing the skills I have and the things that I know I’ll be able to wake up and give 100 percent to for as long as it takes?
Sure, I could sign up and volunteer for an organization that moves food to the third world. I could even just go and volunteer for the local Food Not Bombs group in my town and feed the hungry here. These are great ideas, necessary ideas, but what about something a little more abstract. These kinds of activities are curative… what could I start a revolution in that was preventative.
I slept on it the other night, focusing on the question before I went to sleep, ‘what am I passionate about that I could devote my life to it?’ and some point in the next morning I had my answer.
The thing I care about the most, the very activity that lies at the root of all misunderstandings is the human race’s inability to pay attention. I want to start a Revolution in Attention.
Now I know that kind of answer might seem too simple for a lot of people. I don’t mean to imply that paying attention will cure all our ails but lets stop and think about what our lack of awareness about the world and the people around us has brought us to.
Daniel Goleman writes about a form of intelligence he calls ‘Emotional Intelligence’ as opposed to the more cerebral left brained sort of mind we usually associate with problem-solving and remembering information. What this means is that some people are better than others at processing data but might not be as developed in other areas like controlling and dealing with their emotions and the emotions of those around them.
Now I don’t want to fall off topic and get into exploring the specific ins and outs of Goleman’s philosophy which is already written about ad infinitum in other blog posts and articles all over the web. I only bring it up because I want to touch on the fact that I personally believe emotional intelligence is the outcome of practicing the simple act of paying attention.
While the role genetics plays can’t be left out, the amount of emotional awareness a person will have about herself and the people around her will be dramatically increased when she makes paying attention, rather than living in her own head, a priority.
When we stop to look around us, at the people, at the environment, at the technology… it’s impossible to not care. Its really even more than just mindfulness I’m talking about here. I’m talking about simple understanding in an intellectual sense too. Do you know the name of that person you pass in the hall at work every day? Do you know what’s two blocks south running parallel to the street you drive down every single day? How often do you just look around and explore… just for the hell of it?
This week, find some time to explore the things you already think your familiar with. Explore the people, places, things… just for the child-like enjoyment of knowing. Take a walk somewhere you haven’t been, maybe even start a conversation with a stranger you always ride the bus with because *gasp* it’s allowed and you might even end up having a great experience. Really start to pay attention, not only to your feelings and your own thoughts, but to the subtle expressions and cycles going on all around you.
That’s my revolution, which in a sense I’m already working on right now. Its a revolution that’s been going on for thousands of years really, maybe even more, ever since the first proto-human began living more in his own thoughts, fantasies, and fears than the rich green living world around him. Perhaps my revolution isn’t even a revolution at all in the usual sense. We aren’t taking to the streets, we aren’t marching with picket signs past the white house. My revolution doesn’t make much noise Its coming quieter than that. My revolution is about looking around you, looking inside of yourself and taking the time to notice what life is really like… then making the decision to act. Who knows… maybe you’ve passed the person who will change your life a thousand times already… but you’ve been too inside your own head to say ‘Hi.’
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”
Henry David Thoreau
Take a moment to imagine your own personal little ‘happy me’. Your own, one of a kind, internal representation of the success you’re striving for in life. Most of us have some idea of how we’re going to look once we’ve achieved some level of success in our life. Maybe you have one image, or a handful, take a second here to actually look at them objectively, or as objectively as possible.
When we imagine the stereotypical ‘happy me’ walking down the street, basking in the glory of our own joy… whats so different about that person in your imagination?
Does happy me have a stronger body? more hair?
Maybe you can’t see it in the picture but does happy me have a college PhD? or some kind of fancy new business title to be pleased about?
what is it about this happiness idol in your mind that differenciates them from you? and will that thing really make you happy?
Mindfulness and Happiness
How much of your own potential happiness that your experiencing RIGHT NOW goes unnoticed, while you unconsciously derive a little burst of motivation from imagining someone else your going to be in the future. We stoke little flames of delusion that keep us going and give us an excuse for our lack of presence right now. We have to do more than understand intellectually, we need to deeply realize for ourselves that the past is over, and the future can’t be dealt with in any meaningful way until it becomes the present.
What does it mean to do something consciously as opposed to unconsciously.
I think its important to always remember that mindfulness as a concept or idea is really just the base state of human satisfaction.
Think about, when your dwelling on something someone said, or something that might happen in the future, by the very nature of your actions your declaring that you aren’t interested or don’t want to be in this moment. Your investing your mental energy entirely in the future or the past and the present moment goes by in a sleepy, unintentional haze.
The times in every day human life when we are naturally focused on the present moment always goes hand in hand with the sensation of being deeply grateful or deeply satisfied. Seeing your children after a long day at work, the post coital glow of making love, the sense of absorption some of us feel when doing a job we love.
It only makes sense that learning to shut off your internal chatter would leave you in a non-comparing state of mind, which by its very nature must be a satisfied state of mind. Try to remember in the coming days the importance of staying in the moment and focusing on what is in front of you. Not just so you can bring your total energy and awareness to the task at hand, but also because letting go of the past and future means finding the joy that is already present in the now.
ìYou see a pile of stones and fail to see the mountains. The marvelous thing about miniature landscape gardens is that they are imitations of mountains and streams. The base is made to look flowing waves and the cliffs are made to seem covered with vegetation. Sometimes you can see miniature gnarled pine or knobby plum. You might see unusual blossoms or strange new shoots from their trimmed branches.îÖ ìThese stones then, just a number of inches tall, and this tray roughly a foot across, they are nothing short of a mountainous island rising from the sea! Jade-green peaks penetrate the clouds and are encircled by them. A blue-green barrier, immersed in water, is standing straight up. There are caves as if carved in the cliff sides to hide saints and immortals. Jetties and spits flat enough and long enough for fishermen. The paths and roads are narrow and confined, yet woodcutters can pass along them. There are lagoons deep and dark enough to hide dragons.î
An excerpt from the rhyme prose that sums up the philosophy of Bonsai as well as a mindful perspective one can take when dealing with daily life. Today I was thinking of the garden weíre building in our front yard, Iím really looking forward to the chance to get my hands into the dirt, and take the time to converse with plants, bring vegetables out of the soil, and contemplate our exchange. In the past Iíve only been able to grow cacti, their perseverance constantly amazes me, their ability to adapt to my temperate backyard, often rainy or frosty, springing back to life for our parched summers. As far as vegetables, or temperamental flowers Iím at a loss. I canít wait to learn.
I remember as a kid walking with my mom, littler brother and dog, down to the victory garden near our house, people tending their small, twine parceled plots, the garden itself was built by the city during World War 2 to improve morale and conserve veggies for the troops. I remember the care and precision people would put into a four by four square of dirt, little rows, tiny trellises, the slow progression from vine to bean.
Now bonsai gardening is a far cry from vegetable in your front yard, but in reality it’s only as different as you want it to be. The same physical needs of the plant apply. In fact gardening is not so different from mindfulness practice in general. Growing as a human being, growing in emotional and physical awareness is similar to the fruition of fruit. Neither will be attained without patient intent. A flower will wither and never bloom without water and sun, the blossom is not inherent in the stem. The same is true for people, although the potential for mindful awareness exist it doesnít come to the surface without patient intent.
There are some easy to incorporate ways to use a garden to cultivate mindfulness, even a potted cactus.
When you look at your plants, take notice of whether they are simply surviving, or if they thrive under your diligent care. We can ask ourselves this same question at this time.
We can see an all together too hot day or frosty morning and learn to accept things that we canít control, like the weather, but appreciate how it is those same random variables that make our lives and the live of our plants possible.
When you are elbow deep in the soil, pulling weeds or harvesting, and your face in buried in some aromatic leaves purely by proximity, think on your breathing, remember that you and the plant are engaged in an exchange. You breath out, your green buddy breaths in.
We water and till and weed for the sight and smell of their flowers, and the nourishment and taste of their fruit. take the time to think about this exchange, and the lives lead by our plants and ourselves.
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