Lucid dreaming and dream yoga.

A well known but uncommon practice of the Buddhist meditative tradition is the practice of dream yoga. Most of what you hear about dream yoga is the spectacular stories and experiences people have during lucid dreaming. Everyone has heard the tale of flying in your dreams, or exploring unknown lands, the heavens, or even the depths of the ocean. These stories are often other-worldly and quite unlike our everyday waking experience, so they are fun to hear and talk about.

I am not going to discourage you from exploring the hidden territories and landscape of the dream world. Maybe you will find something that you are looking for, or come away with some insight that you can carry with you on your journey. At the very least, lucid dreaming is interesting and fun.

Dream yoga is a practice of waking up, gaining some insight into who we are so that we can recognize our true nature and show up in the world more fully. With this understanding, using lucid dreams to go on adventures or have a good time seems a little mundane. We start to realize that lucid dreaming also provides great potential for mining the depths of our own wisdom and manifesting our innate Buddha nature in a very experiential way. There are many ways to do this, but I invite you to consider a quote by the great master Padampa Sangye:

Go to places that scare you.  In haunted places, seek the Buddha within.  

Use the practice of dream yoga to wake up. Go to the places that scare you, that bring up fear. Use that fear to 'wake up' in the dream. A Buddha is 'one who is awake', and that is what lucid dreaming is all about, knowing that you are awake in the dream and that this is a dream. 

Think about your normal experience of a dream. You are normally immersed in the plot as it unfolds and have no power or control over what happens. You just go along for the ride as a bystander and are subject to experiencing the highs and lows of this subjectively real dream world as they come. Does this sound a little bit like waking life? 

Normally, it is only after we awaken from the dream that we discover freedom and a sense of relief, "Ah, thank goodness. That was just a dream." In dream yoga, the key difference is that you wake up in the dream, knowing it is a dream. When you wake up in the dream you discover a natural freedom because you know that what you are experiencing isn't real. It can't hurt you, it can change. 

"This is a dream. This isn't real. I am free." That's a nice sort of mantra for waking up in the dream.

With this insight, going to places that scare you is a powerful way to look at what you are holding onto. What is that monster? It looks terrifying, but what is it really? Who is it that is chasing you and what are you running from? 

Waking up in those dreams allows us to look at our own confusion and grasping. It allows us to invite the hidden recesses of our mind into the light. I see you, I hear you, I understand. Those are just as powerful in the dream world as they are in the real world. 

Waking up in this way, we might ask ourselves, "What would Buddha do?" As a Buddha, what would you do?

How does our wisdom and generosity show up in the world? How do we exercise compassion and patience in difficult situations? How do we maintain an open and responsive presence when we are in the midst of confusion and overwhelm? 

These are questions that we struggle with during the day, and questions that we can continue to work with during the night. 

Go confidently into the darkness. Find the light within.

"You can be anything you want to be."

I call bullshit.

This idea that you can be anything or do anything descends from our social theory of individualism and the American Dream. Basically, if you work hard enough or want it bad enough, you can have or be anything. Many parts of this social theory hold to be true in our experience. If you work hard, you can accomplish many of your hopes and dreams. And of course, life may get in the way and you may not.

The fundamental belief of this theory is that where you are is not where you ought to be, or where you want to be or need to be. At this moment in time, you recognize the value and worth of your future self and your future contributions, without seeing the value and worth of your present self and contributions. This idea is further conflated with ideas of gaining wealth, power and prestige. When we can "become the person we want to be," we will have the most to give and live our most meaningful life.

Of course, this day rarely comes.

Our idea of who we are going to be is just a projection. Undoubtedly, it creates a picture of where we want to go, and this picture shapes our actions and choices. We move closer to the projection, but the projection itself always shifts and changes. The result is that we are exhausted and after all this work, we feel unfulfilled.

The alternative is to wake up in the world in which you are currently living. You choose to embody the person that you are, in the world as it is. When we can embody this genuine presence, we discover that right now we have the resourcefulness and initiative necessary to meaningfully contribute to the world around us. We begin to engage and participate with the problems and tension of our present day.

Through our presence and contribution, we discover that we continually shape and create the world, that the world around us is not "some thing" that we simply experience as a bystander, but that it is continually unfolding and undergoing creation and destruction.

Our world doesn't need more people who are going to be the best versions of themselves in ten or twenty years. We need you now. We need you to be the beacon of light in the space in which you are living.

The work that we need is not the outer work of doing, but the inner work of being.

Easier to carry the familiar.

Form is much easier to carry.

Many of us, most of us perhaps, find that our situation is not quite what we would hope it to be. Maybe we have a few pounds to lose, or maybe our relationships are not quite as good as we would like them. Maybe we could get a better job, or a nicer house in a better neighborhood.

But we already know all of this. We think about it every day, or whenever it's a slow weekend, or maybe whenever we get a chance to get out of the city. We think about what our life could be.

But it isn't what it could be, it is what it is.

There is a gap between the life we imagine and the life that we are living. In that gap lies uncertainty.

Uncertainty is formless. It is by nature unknown. The unknown is rather scary, certainly much scarier than our current situation however miserable it might be.

You see, our current situation has a form that we recognize. We know it and even if we don't like it, we develop various ways to cope and more often than not to dream.

But uncertainty has no form. We don't know how to carry it. We don't know how to leverage the possibility or to leap into the darkness. Surely we must land somewhere, for we must all be somewhere right? But alas, it is perhaps more in our nature to grit our teeth and keep on working harder. We are good at working harder.

This One's For You

Normally you are told what to do for your homework.

Now we are asking you to do YOUR homework.
     Self-directed.
     Self-reliant.
     Motivated.
     Independent.
     On your own time.

And don't worry about failing.
Fail.  Fail often.
Then we will make sure you pass the class.

Dance Standing Still

The ultimate bodhicitta slogans are instructions that are meant to allow one to recognize and cultivate ultimate bodhicitta in meditation.  

2. Regard all dharmas as dreams.

Normally, our reality and day to day affairs seem very concrete.  Our experience feels very real as we are going through it- the whirlwind of our thoughts, surging emotions, feelings of joy and our aches and pains.  We usually don't examine our experience and we just take it for granted.  Life in a nutshell.  

As we move away from our experiences, in the following hours, days and weeks we find it increasingly hard to remember what it was exactly that we were holding onto.  What did that wine and steak taste like again?  What were we arguing about?  What was it that we were so desperate to uphold, reaffirm or prove?  Was it worth all the effort?  

Regarding all dharmas- all experiences, sense objects and activities- as a dream means that we relate to them with less fixation, more openness.  Dream here doesn't mean hazy or unclear.  We can have very lucid dreams, dreams that evoke very real emotions and feelings while we are caught up in them.  The key is that when we awake from a dream we know it was just a dream and that the experience was temporary and fleeting, that it was just something that we were fixating on in our own mind. 

We can experience this sort of insight in our own meditation.  When we take our seat in meditation we become aware of an endless dance of thoughts, sights, sounds and feelings.  Our habitual tendency is to fixate on these phenomena in all their variety, but in meditation we just let them be as they are without following after them.  As we begin to relax into that illusory dance we begin to discover an underlying stillness.

Within the space of meditation, without grasping at the dynamic display that is arising in all its variety, we begin to notice and appreciate this unchanging quality.  Despite movement there is stillness.  It is here that we can look at the next slogan.

3. Examine the nature of unborn awareness.  

When we look at this awareness, we are aware of this unceasing dance of phenomena that is occurring, but since we are not getting caught up in that display we are also aware of this calm stillness.  Look at that.  Where does this come from, where does it go?

When you look at the dance you find there is nothing to hold onto, it is an endless play that can take any form at all and yet never exists as a single thing whatsoever.  When you look at the mind, there are all these things we are aware of, yet there is an underlying stillness that is lucid and alert.  When you look at that mind, you cannot find anything.  There is nothing there to hold onto, mind is unborn, yet there is this awareness that perceives very clearly.  From here we can address the next slogan.

4.  Self-liberate even the antidote.

When we look at the dynamic dance of phenomena, we find that despite the unceasing play there is this unchanging stillness which could be interpreted as nothing ever really happening.  When we look at the mind we find that while it is aware, we cannot find any particular 'thing' that is actually mind. 

The danger here is that we could come to the conclusion of 'Well, what's the point? Nothing matters, nothing ever happens.  Who cares, it doesn't matter what you do'.  This is very tricky, for we risk becoming nihilists- heartless narcissistic bastards.  Don't do that. 

Self-liberate the antidote means not to get caught up in that experience, don't solidify that experience of emptiness.  Don't fixate on that experience of not finding anything that is truly lasting.

5. Rest in the nature of the alaya, the essence.  

In meditation, we seek to move beyond our coarse level of mind and learn to rest in a more subtle level.  There are eight types of consciousnesses- five sense (sight, hearing, olfactory, taste, touch), conceptual consciousness, emotional consciousness and the alaya, or foundational consciousness.

The idea of resting in the alaya is that we are not supposed to get caught up in the dance of the other seven consciousnesses.  We don't want to follow after all the sights, sounds, smells, feelings and thoughts we are experiencing as we sit in meditation.  Learn to rest in a calm, clear, non-discursive awareness.  As we familiarize with this place of natural rest, free from coming and going, we also familiarize ourselves with ultimate bodhicitta.

It is important to understand that the alaya is not ultimate bodhicitta, but it is a much more subtle level of mind where we can begin to appreciate the qualities and characteristics of the nature of the mind.

Resting in the alaya we can see the dreamlike nature of all phenomena.   Not getting caught up in the dynamic dance of phenomena, we are able to examine the nature of unborn awareness.  Without clinging to that experience we self-liberate even the antidote, which is the empty nature of awareness.  We rest in lucid clarity, the mind open and expansive.  All of this is something that we are not creating in meditation, it becomes self-evident as we continue to sit with the proper instruction.

6.  In post-meditation, be a child of illusion.

At the end of the meditation session, don't just get up and go about your day.  Carry whatever insight or experience you have from meditation into your daily life.  Let it infuse your relationships, your work, your good times and your bad. 

Regard all situations and activities as dreams.  Don't get caught up in the dance.  We need to participate in the dance, we don't really have a choice here.  We cannot be a wallflower in the dance of life.  But as we dance we can adapt, respond; we can lead or follow; show strength or vulnerability.  We can affect the shape and the form the dance takes, a miraculous display that can appear in any way whatsoever. 

Go dancing, be a child of illusion.