Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Lucid Waking

Here then are the last few things that I need to accept. This notion of lucid waking.
The world is a dream and yeah yeah, we’ve all heard that. That at one level this is just a big delusion, the play of Maya on the substratum of consciousness. The weaving of the intricate drama of life in reference to the physical and the tangible, based on thoughts and emotions and the sensory impacts on the body. This drama that is created by the ego is the dream of the Waking Life. It is similar to the dream in the Sleeping Life.

The dream that I experience while I am asleep has characters and scenarios and dramas and fantasies and excitement. There is rarely drudgery but there is often fear and frustration. And there are two ways that I experience the events of my dream, in my dream. Unconsciously, when I lose myself completely in the dream and then feel the emotions and the adrenalin rush and the reactions to the scenarios. I sometimes wake up sweating or smiling and then realize – shucks (or thank god) it was just a dream! No harm done, I perceive all this at a conscious level and then go on living my life. My waking life is the reality for me then – and everything else was just a silly dream. I can laugh it off, shrug it off, shake it off.

There is another aspect of dreaming – lucid dreaming. And that is when things get really interesting. When I am dreaming, and I know that it’s a dream and therefore have the power to control, experience and even influence the events of my dream, in my dream. But regardless of whether I do, I am fully aware of the dream and witness it with detached interest. It’s all a dream anyway – I’m just the witnessing presence in which it is unfolding.

And so, shouldn’t there be a similar principle in the Waking Life? The two choices of how one lives life?. One where one is completely unconscious and takes everything that is happening (thoughts, emotions, actions) as reality and as such gets heavily influenced by them.

And then, shouldn’t there also be Lucid Waking? Where I know that whatever is happening is happening within me and not to me. That I am that Presence that is simply experiencing all these things and events.