Mandala Meditation

Here's a meditation based on a series of mandalas that I created and Ray Lynch's inspiring piece "Quandra," taken from his Sky of Mind CD with his permission. 

I would advise using this prior to meditation, and especially in the middle of the night, when the world is at rest. 

The dream of the master gardener

Last night, I dreamt of a master gardener who has nurtured an impossibly towering red oak in the Rio Grande Valley, along with huge pines and other non-native trees. I want to talk to him so badly, as if he's a holy man. I finally speak to him, and discover that he once considered becoming a monk (as I once considered) and I tell him, "Your life work has amounted to so much more as a gardener than as a monk." He, in turn, tells me that he I could not have become a farmer, because of the sheer physicality, and that I, too, have chosen my vocation correctly. At the end of the dream, I think of Carl Jung and how, just before his death, he dreamt of the tree falling with the gold nuggets entwined it its roots.  I believe it is every person's dream to believe that the choices we have made have been the right ones, and that we have made a constructive difference in this world.

Isn't it amazing the images that our dreams give us--full of so much meaning that cannot be reduced to words. I know that in the days ahead, I will remember looking up into those towering branches and feeling the same awe and pleasure that a tree of such majesty has survived and thrived in a place far from its home.

A Deeply Healing Lucid Dream

You may wonder what the big deal is regarding lucid dreaming. I have to admit that sometimes it seems rather silly and pointless to pursue experiences beyond the body when physical life itself is so precious. But things can happen there that are simply beyond our reach in the waking state--things that are necessary and essential for our healing and development. I know you can relate to the idea that we all carry around memories of unfinished business relating to other people, and that it often seems impossible to revisit those relationships in order to work out whatever conflicts still seem to remain. We are often left to deal with such memories on our own, hoping that our prayers and our own personal growth will eventually take care of those lingering wounds. One of my mottos is to have no regrets, but frankly I have many, and most of them have to do with things that I have said or done or left undone in relationship to people who were once precious to me, but who have left my life.

 Some background to the lucid dream: Two days ago, I was managing my online stock account and discovered that my ex-wife's name was still on one of my accounts. Not thinking that I was about to set in motion a very upsetting sequence of events, I e-mailed the company and simply asked them to remove her name from the account. It was, after all my account, and her name was a mere artifact of having shared the account with her up to almost 3 years ago. Well, the next thing I knew the company had put a hold on the account, preventing me from accessing the funds. They said that I would have to submit I a notarized form from my ex-wife releasing her claim on the account. I'm usually a pretty cool guy, but this action really upset me. I could've emptied the account and opened a new one, but without realizing the consequences of my request, I effectively created a mess. I did not want to have to contact her and ask her for a favor, even though rationally speaking, I expected her to be kind and to help me. I have a hard time asking for help, but I certainly have a hard time putting myself at a disadvantage with people who might not feel charitable toward me. My fears were unfounded, and she quickly agreed to submit the form that was necessary. But the internal struggle that I experienced set in motion feelings that apparently set up a particularly powerful lucid dream encounter with my ex-wife's daughter, with whom I enjoyed a  good relationship until the very end of the marriage when things went south.

 Julie and I got to bed very late after watching a movie, and so my early morning meditation took place at nearly 6 AM. After meditating for about 40 minutes, I went back to bed, not sure that I would be able to get back to sleep. But eventually I drifted off.   This is what I experienced:

I seem to be in my own home even though it was unfamiliar, and I was moving things around in order to neaten up.  I was moving my fly tying equipment to a more out-of-the-way place when I noticed that S. entered the room.  It seems that Julie was nearby, but I'm not sure. I was surprised to see S.  after  the problems that we had experienced around the time of the divorce. I greeted her, and she walked up to me and we embraced. She began to cry, and as I held her I noticed a man who appeared to be myself sitting nearby. His head started to brighten until it became a luminous orb of violet light. Meanwhile, I felt very moved by  the sense of reconciliation and forgiveness that was coming over us as we embraced. Finally we parted, and I bent over, and wept. I wondered if Julie could hear me cry, or whether my tears were confined to the lucid dream. I drifted into physical awareness and saw that Julie was fast asleep, and I felt relieved and deeply healed. My eyes were moist.

All  my life I have yearned for something beyond my reach. My sense of spiritual purpose has always been profoundly evident in everything I do. (Just having fun can be hard for me.) Consequently, when there are interpersonal conflicts that I can't seem to fix, it distresses me to no end.  I'm not the kind of person who can simply blame the other person, even though they may have had a big part to play in our conflict. What I have found is that in my dream journey, I have opened up to countless experiences of deep, direct, interpersonal encounters, which have given way to immense relief and healing.  And so when people ask me, why do you seek to become lucid in your dreams, I have to remember such dreams as this one, when I might have reacted less openly if I had not been lucid. Without such dreams, we are left with far fewer options, and a much more difficult path toward healing and enlightenment.  One might ask,  Was the other person really present?  I have addressed this question in another entry to this blog, but suffice to say that my answer to this is as follows:  Since we can never know for sure, it is far better to believe that the other person is, at least in part, present in the embodiment of the individual dream character. By believing that the dream figure mediates the actual soul of the other person, it provides us a genuine arena for making interpersonal breakthroughs, and celebrating them with the conviction that the work has been mutually felt on some level. 

I believe it's interesting and confirming that I witnessed my own double sitting quietly and witnessing my exchange. Indeed, there must always be a part of us that witnesses the struggles and the breakthroughs-- a divine part of us that  celebrates and  literally lights up in joyful affirmation of our willingness to set aside pettiness and resentment. I am a much healthier person today than yesterday because of my lucid dream.

Is it really you? The ultimate identity of a dream character

One of the most persistent and unresolved questions in the field of dream study is, "When I dream of you, is it really you?" Standard answers range from "No, it's a part of you," to "Yes, if there is a 'felt sense' that it's really you," to "Of course." Most psychotherapists are loathe to venture beyond the first answer, fearing that to do so would encourage a client to project onto others, who might already have a tendency ascribe his or her own issues to others. But in the case of lucid dreaming, the vividness and interpersonal "otherness" that dreamers often report challenges the strictly "internal" source of dream imagery.

A more sophisticated answer, which emulates the principle of indeterminacy in physics goes something like this: The image is a not an object, nor a symbol, nor an aspect of dream "content," but rather a mutable interface between the dream ego and the unseen, intrusive content that is surfacing in the dream. The source of the content can be "local" or "nonlocal," or a combination of both. That is, the
dreamer may be accessing a memory, or may be receiving information/essence beyond the boundaries of the self. In the act of perception, the dream observer sees clearly, or perceives through filters that distort the incoming content, thus co-creating an image that changes constantly as the perceiver's response to it shifts in real time. So that's where I arrive at the term "mutable interface" to describe what the dreamer actually sees. The image is a moment-to-moment vectoring of the dreamer-dream content interaction.

So the question, "Is it really you?" necessitates a deconstruction of the image into "projected" and "received" components. If the dreamer can say that he or she is open to the dream character, and has no distorting feelings that can be projected upon the person, then the essence of the person may be free to express itself through the mediating image. But this is rarely true. We almost always have impressions, biases, fears, needs, etc., that are projected onto the significant others in our lives. So the resulting image is likely to be a "cocreated" product that has to be analyzed as such.

I dreamt of my deceased mother in a lucid dream two nights ago. She appeared younger than she was when she died, and her face was lit up in a golden light. At first I felt that she was soulfully present, but then her face began to look less familiar, and so I concluded in the dream that her essence was fading away, leaving behind an inaccurate rendition of my mother's actual self.

But then again, who can ever know the answer to this question? Van Eeeden, the first lucid dream theorist ("A Study of Dreams,"1913--you can find it on the web), believed that a "felt sense" is the only way to know if a dream character's soul is manifesting through the dream imagery. But this criterion is highly subjective, and not likely to satisfy a more empirically minded researcher. Henry Fielding's words from his book Tom Jones come to mind: "Until they produce the authority by which they are constituted judges, I shall not plead their jurisdiction." In the domain of the soul, empiricists can never really compete, because there is no foundation upon which they can base their conclusions.

So is it really you? Only I can say.

The Tantric Principle in Lucid Dreaming

An aspect of my own lucid dreaming experience has been the concurrent activation of powerful energy and sound, which in the East is referred to as the kundalini. Just two nights ago, I meditated at 5 am, and then returned to bed for a while. As I drifted into a half-sleep, the energy awakened. At first it sounded like wind coming in waves, as usual. But as I meditated on it, it increased in intensity and became a constant flow, flattening out instead of coming in pulses. (When I was younger, this would be uncomfortable, but at this stage in my life, it is quite pleasant.) As I meditated on the energy, trying to put aside my ego assessment of what was happening, I noticed that my field of vision was brightening and revealing a subtle lattice-like pattern as it became whiter and whiter. Meanwhile, I was aware of dreaming, as well. I was lying down on the slope of a hill, with a couple of colleagues who were waiting with me for entrance into a conference where we would speak or teach.

When I was younger, the activation of this sound-energy would often escalate into a full-blown kundalini activation. That is, a full-body vibratory experience of light and ecstasy. This still happens, but not as often. More recently, the activation has usually stopped with the flat flowing sound. At the moment that it flattens out, I discover that I can roll out of my body and enter into a fully conscious lucid dream/out of body experience. Robert Monroe, in his book Journeys Out of the Body, said that without first awakening this sound/energy, he could not leave his body. I have found this to be so true.

What can we make of this energy experience as a component of the lucid dream? As early as 1974, when I wrote my master's thesis on lucid dreaming, I suggested that lucidity and the white light were subjective and objective aspects of the same thing; that is, heightened consciousness. The Tibetan tantric system gives us more insight into the relationship between consciousness and energy by stating that the two are interchangeable, or reciprocally related. This means that any movement in consciousness has a corresponding movement in energy, and vice versa. Lucid dreamers do not always report a concurrent energy experience. Indeed, in my experience, it is relatively rare. Perhaps some lucid dreamers simply do not experience the energy as much as others do. But in the tibetan tradition, dream yoga is considered one of six accelerated yogas - accelerated because they involve activation of the kundalini. Well, this is good news and bad news, because the kundalini awakens dormant memories, some of which are disturbing and heretofore repressed or at least forgotten. Thus the energy component "forces the issue" into consciousness, and thus can result in destabilization of the ego as it confronts necessary unfinished business and emerging archetypal forces. All good in the long run, certainly. But in the short term, it can awaken fear as the ego struggles to retain is supremacy.

In the Tibetan tradition, meditation is treated as a slower, but less destabilizing approach to enlightenment. By focusing on awareness, the energy awakens, but only a a byproduct of mental activity. This approach (mahamuudra) is advocated unless the seeker has a guru who can oversee the dynamic process of kundalini awakening.

For myself, I believe I've had a rather rough ride over the past 40 years of meditation, lucid dreaming, and kundalini awakening. I wouldn't trade it for anything, but I have grown to respect the power of unseen forces, and counsel  others to take a more cautious approach, especially if their journey includes frequent kundalini awakenings alongside the quest for lucidity.

Lucid Dreaming Course Coming this Winter

I am working with Ryan Hurd (of dreamstudies.org) and Alice Grinda (www.aliceinwakedreamland.com) to launch an intensive lucid dreaming training program on Shadow | Community of Dreamers this winter. Shadow will be launching a smartphone app that works wirelessly with a sensor that will awaken you when you are dreaming, and allow you to dictate your dreams into your phone, and then have them converted to text and uploaded to a cloud server. In addition, Shadow will be creating a vast online community of dreamers who will be able to share dreams, learn from each other, and be able to participate in training programs such as the one that we are developing. I Skyped with Ryan and Alice for the first time last Wednesday, and we have started to pool our knowledge and experience in order to create a dynamic month-long program. I will be announcing the program as we get closer to the launch sometime in February. 
 (WWW.DISCOVERSHADOW.COM). 

Darkness in Dreams

Last week, I was an invited guest at Craig Webb's online dream class. I have known Craig for several years as a fellow IASD member, and a serious lucid dreamer. He wanted me to be available to his class as a lucid dream pioneer. It was a great meeting, and I had a chance to review a great deal of my own history in the field. One class member, whose name was Jim, asked me about a phenomenon that has recently concerned him--darkness in his dreams. He described being in darkness, unable to see anything. I immediately connected with him, saying that for the past several years, many of my dreams have been characterized by darkness. While the darkness may suddenly shift to bright settings, I spend a great deal of my time "groping" through dark scenes.

I am finding that darkness is a phenomenon that many people experience. I saw a woman for the first time in therapy three days ago, who told me a recurring dream that has worried her. She is on a mountain road, with sheer drop-offs on both sides, and a very narrow passage between the cliffs. Suddenly, it becomes pitch dark, and she does know how to make it through safely. It's important to know that she faces two severe existential issues: the normally fatal disease of scleroderma (now in remission, thankfully), and an adult daughter who has suffered a psychotic break and now lives the streets of LA. My client is deeply aggrieved by her daughter's predicament, and by her inability to help her. As if the narrow mountain passage is bad enough, lacking any way to gain feedback from the situation so she can negotiate the challenge has brought her to a standstill.

Darkness in dreams may represent, simply, a sense of feeling alone and lost in life. From a deeper perspective, it may signify the beginning of trusting another source of support, which is, as yet, not evident. Sometimes we have to be brought to standstill before we learn to rely on deeper resources. I am inclined to have hope for my client, as I have hope for myself. Perhaps we are poised on the threshold of a new life that bears little resemblance to the one that preceded it. Regardless, I am there for her, and so at least there is another voice in the darkness.