From: "David Yeh" <ldreamr@...>
Reply-To: BardonPraxis@yahoogroups.com
To: BardonPraxis@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [BardonPraxis] Interesting experience to share
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 19:27:03 -0000
Hi, I just thought I'd share this experience I had this morning.
To preface: I've been really working on emptiness or vacancy of mind,
and also thought discipline in everyday life. I've been finding it
pretty difficult.
Lately, to add to that, I've been eating a lot of sugar, and just
sitting around, which I think contributed to my mental agitation and
restlessness. It has made for difficult meditation -- it's hard to
even pay attention to how my mind likes to be distracted.
I woke up at 4:30 to go to the bathroom and my mind was so jerky that
I couldn't get back to sleep until around 6. When I finally did
drift back to sleep, at some point I found myself in a lucid dream.
I've had lucid dreams before, but at the point in my life when I was
really trying for them -- when I really put a lot of myself into the
effort -- they tended to be very short and also very sexual, in a
knee-jerk way.
This was pretty different. The dream-situation was fairly normal --
just walking around in a public area. But this time I was relaxing
into it, which I usually forget to do. For the first time I had a
sense that I could keep myself from waking up, by relaxing. I
attribute this to the practice of meditation, making me more aware of
how I tense up and am afraid all of the time.
Well, I was walking around, and I had a few different kinds of
experiences.
Every time I saw a woman that I was sexually attracted to, and
started thinking, hey maybe I'll try to have sex with her, she
started to fade and the dream went all hazy, as it does just before I
wake up. So I tried to relax away from that desire. Then it
happened a few more times, and I realized what was happening: my
desire was causing tension in me.
A little bit later, I was walking down a road and somehow I had a
garland of flowers around my head. Then suddenly it was a vine of
some evil plant that started biting me. I tried to get away from it,
but the more I resisted, the more surrounded I was by trees and vines
that were biting and snapping at me. Again, I realized what was
happening, and I stopped resisting. I let them bite me. It hurt for
a few more moments, and then they all vanished.
I realized then that any kind of ATTACHMENT caused me to tense and
grasp the object of attachment, or push away from it, depending on
the nature of the attachment. And that caused the reality of the
dream to fade. Conversely, when I was NOT attached, I couldn't
believe the clarity of the dream. I could see details of leaves on
trees a hundred yards away. So this has definite analogues to
physical vision, too. Everything become so real and vivid -- until I
got attached to something else, which was pretty frequently.
I thought that this experience really strongly illustrated the effect
of attachment on consciousness. I've heard and read Tibetan
Buddhists saying that the lucid dream state is the fast track to
enlightenment, and I can see why. The effects of attachment were so
immediate; it's necessary to cultivate a deep presence and attitude
of nonattachment in order to even stay in the dream. And, there are
so many opportunities for immediate gratification.
In addition to having "enlightenment" possibilities, experiences like
this seem to give really good feedback for what needs to be worked on
in terms of soul mirror stuff.
So, just thought I'd share. I don't have many lucid dreams anymore
but I guess that one was brought on by insomnia. Maybe I should do
that more often. :)
Thanks,
David