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Subtle Energies and the Uncharted Realms of Mind Practices: Lucid Dreaming
Stephen's thirst for answers to the big questions of consciousness led him to a lucid dreaming experience that fundamentally changed his view of reality. He began by entering consciously, making the transition from waking awareness in bed to the dream state without losing his sense of self-aware identity. He began driving a car and was tempted by a sexy hitchhiker but instead asked for this dream to be an expression of his highest potential. The car left the ground, soared into the clouds and passed a variety of symbols from traditional religions -- a Star of David, a cross, etc. As he flew higher, the car disappeared and then his body disappeared and he became only a point of awareness, entering into a vast empty space. Astonishingly, he remembered, "This is where I am from, this is home." The space was filled with love and he began singing, in ecstasy, "I praise thee O Lord," although he also recognized that he was celebrating himself as the Lord. There are some obvious metaphysical implications and lessons in this dream. He realized that evolution has designed our brains to respond to changes in the environment, especially those changes related to getting what we want or don't want. The thing that is most real or most fundamental must be something that does not change, that is, in fact, eternal. Yet our perceptions are not designed to even perceive it. We can't see what is most real and that is consciousness itself, which is timeless and deathless. This had implications for how he views death. At death, "Stephen" may no longer exist but that self-aware consciousness (the "I") will. He now no longer fears death. He also recognized that he had come out of that eternal state for some purpose, and that answer boiled down to the manifestation of two things: love and light. These were also the two most fundamental qualities of the void state. Russell asked how Stephen reconciles the two views, one of the unbounded, timeless awareness and the other of a time and space-bound Stephen. He responded with a metaphor, likening it to snowflakes, each of which is unique but is made up of the same element of water as all other snowflakes. Eventually each melts and returns to the same primal elementary form. Our substance is one though our forms are separate; this is not a paradox, just two different levels of organization of being. One big puzzle this leads to is how the unbounded awareness gets attached to brains, which then clearly shape our consciousness in remarkable ways. Drugs and injuries, for example, both affect this outer consciousness but presumably do not touch the unbounded awareness. Russell thinks that part of the problem derives from using two-dimensional logic when we really need four-valued logic. Undoubtedly, many of the answers to the questions we are asking lie in a multi-dimensional space. Just as there are inevitable distortions when attempting to put a three-dimensional globe onto a two-dimensional flat map, so we end up warping the very questions we seek to answer by translating them down into logic and reason. They become fraught with paradox. We can't have accurate global maps, only local ones. Lucid dreams can thus be a training ground for addressing fundamental questions of identity, reality, and self. The idea of subtle bodies arises quite naturally in this context, for many of the formulations used in describing lucid dreaming involve subtle bodies that are allegedly responsible for what we experience in those states. Is there something to this pre-scientific understanding? In a dream, we experience a body in a parallel fashion to the way we experience a body right now. Is there a reason for believing in a subtle body that is separate from self-representation in the brain? This also connects to the lore about subtle physiology: flows of prana, meridians, chakras, etc. Are these systems a pre-scientific understanding of the nervous system or do they hint at some independent reality?
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