Row, row, row, your boat gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a
dream. Dream, row, row, row, your boat gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a dream. But
Row, row, row, row, your boat gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.
Hello, everybody. I'm just going to jump in here and say hi. You. So good to see everybody. Gilda Barry, Bobby, it's Matthew, hi. Matthew Max. Elaine Beth, Anita, Eileen, Kitty, Joshua, Joseph, Ross, Adam Laurel, oh my gosh, so many of us. Evelyn, Theo, John Tony, hi. Whitney, oh my gosh. This is really becoming a really beautiful little Sangha. We've got going here. Karen Dory Scott, Michael James and Adam Richard Paul, Christopher Yvonne, this is awesome. Nancy, oh my gosh. I I'm excited, but I also feel a little bit of a little tenderness and sadness knowing this is our our last evening together. And I wanted to end on a slightly silly note with with that song, because, you know, one of the themes that's been coming up for me this week with my practice and with all the clients I've been working with is how serious we get with our spiritual practice, right? And we need to be dedicated. But if you think about Gosh, all of the most committed, practiced, awake beings I've met are border on silly. They're so playful and they're so joyful. And I think as we end this six week training to for all of us, to encourage ourselves, to bring some playfulness, some levity, some joyfulness, into these really amazing, profound practices, and to remember that yeah, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. And so today, we're really lucky. We're going to be closing out our experience with Andrew. And I will be shortly handing over to him to just take us on a bit of an exploration around you know what it is to go beyond the basics of lucid dreaming and the implications, the possibilities, whatever has been on his heart and mind around this. And before we do that, I just wanted to create opportunity for us as shared learners and space holders and CO creators that we've been to to really reflect and digest some of the experiences we've had. I've been so moved every week, hearing more stories, more synchronicities, more lucidity, more dream recall, just more awareness and waking state. And I think that's why we're doing this work. And it's so encouraging to see, you know, wherever we are in our practice, just the commitment, the interest, the dedication, so taking a minute to digest and savor and appreciate that. So I'm going to lead us through a through a reflection exercise, which is really around this idea of that picture I had up, which you might be like, Oh, why. Why this? So this here, you know, the cosmic, galactic Rose of much beauty and sumptuousness. This is really just the the prompt around the exercise we're going to do today, which is Rose Thorn bud. And you guys may have done this as a conversation or check and exercise if you haven't, it's a great one to use when you're in connection with your family. But really this is an encouragement for us to feel into and reflect where we've experienced growth, and where we've had some trouble, and where we're having some, you know, blossoming in our lives. So I'll lead you through that. It would be great if you had a pen and paper ready or something to write on if you're doing your computer, I'm going to pause and have you take a couple minutes to write down your answers to the reflections as we go so our last chance to kind of check in with ourselves before we move forward. Ah, so just, let's just drop in together before we do that, and you can just find a comfortable position. And either, you know, closing the eyes completely, or just bringing the gaze down, just encouraging your awareness to turn back inwards, just encouraging your awareness to drop back into your body just for a few breaths. Sarah, I invite you to with loving attention, no judgment, just notice where you find yourself. Notice any sensations in your body, whether of relaxation or a little bit of tension. Notice where you find your breath, maybe already deep in the belly, maybe some excited breaths in the chest. No need to change anything but just a few breaths to just attune to where you are in this moment.
And as you're attuned to where you are in this moment. Just start tonight with the heart, so maybe bringing your hand up to the heart and just taking a breath into this space, remembering that this is our real power center for these practices, having our hearts online, having our hearts connected, this is such a big part of how power is a sustainable, thriving, lucid dreaming practice, and maybe remembering the exercise we did a few weeks ago, just feeling into those five dimensions of the Heart, breathing into the width of the heart as you're breathing in feeling your heart expand outwards, connecting you to all the beautiful souls in this group. Right now, every little square on your screen is a human being with so much in common with you. So breathing in connection, breathing out connection, and then remembering the back of the heart, that backwards dimension of the heart, deep peacefulness, deep connectedness to truth, plugging into that incredible, unshakable, undying, unborn awareness that we are all expressions of.
Then breathing into the incredible depth of your heart the compassion that incredible bitter, sweet care, the poignancy of love and life and being so tenderly connected to what it is to be a sentient being on this planet at this time, and even if it's a little achy sometimes like, wow, what. What an incredible power to be connected in this way. So breathing into the depth of your compassion and
then with the next breath, breathing up to the upwards dimension of the heart, remember this is where your inspiration lives, idealism, optimism, breathing up, you feel almost connecting all the way up through your head, ah, brightness, the joyfulness of your beautiful heart, and then the final dimension, breathing forward into the courage of your heart, the boldness, the integrity your moral compass, your willingness to take aligned Action, taking a breath into that forward courageous dimension. And and then just feeling into where you are in this moment. Just sense. Is there a quality here that you need a little bit more of? What's your last week been like? Could you use a little more connection, optimism, courage, compassion, peace and just choosing one of those dimensions of the heart, we're just going to take a few breaths into that for yourself, giving yourself what you need.
Beautiful. Now you can kind of just gently wiggle your fingers and toes and come back to our shared space together, staying connected to your heart. Ask you the question of, What is your what is your rose in your lucid dreaming practice right now? And by Rose I mean what is fully in bloom? What is like that big, beautiful rose, but like blooming in the center of the screen? Maybe it's like, wow, I my dream recall is so rich. I've had more beautiful dreams, and I have for a while. Or maybe it's that you have a sense of hopefulness and awakened a sense of curiosity that you weren't sure it was going to be there. Maybe it's the bloom of lucidity itself, but just feeling to like what is truly the rose that's blooming in your practice, and just taking a minute to write that down, you've got more than one go ahead, but really appreciating the goodness in your practice, you
uh, sometimes it's really beautiful to appreciate a process goal we can get so outcome dependent with lucid dreaming. Did I get lucid? Did I not so thinking about maybe something, an attitude or a perspective that you've taken that's fully in bloom? These are sometimes the things that are most Powerful for supporting us.
And now, just thinking throughout the last six weeks as you've been practicing, as we learn, as we grow, we have these amazing blooms with these blossoms, these roses. And as that song by poison says, Every Rose has its Thorn. And so thinking, you know, where in my practice right now might I be experiencing a little constriction or a little challenge, maybe a little bit of fear or doubt, like we talked about last week. These are not bad things, if we relate to them correctly, they can become the amazing gateways. They're the clues right to what's going to unlock the next level for us. So taking a moment to really sit with Ah,
where's the thorn in my practice right now, and take a second to write that down as well. I
thorns can be simple. It can be like, I got lucid, but my dream ended in three seconds. Ah, it could be, you know, I'm still finding I have a little bit of fear in my system about being in the lucid dream. Okay, cool, just wherever you find yourself.
Beautiful, yeah, lack of discipline, honestly, payment. That's for a lot of us, right? And you know what the answer to that is? A little more fire. Now. Lastly, just feeling into, what about a bud? So wherever you are in your practice right now, even if you're just beginning, it's like, what is something that's just starting? And this could be that, wow, for the first time ever, I'm using a dream mission, and I'm really excited. I've got my dream mission worked out, and I feel really clear about what I want to do when I get lucid. Or it could be something like, you know, having done the first experience a lucid dream, you're now really excited about exploring a new Dream Yoga stage, or it could be the dream journal that you've started, and really feeling like I've had nearly six weeks of journaling under my belt, and wow, what? How that's really coming into being just writing down what is your bud? You and
then just take a second to look at all of those, your rose, your Thorn, your bud, and really expressing gratitude for all of those knowing that you know with lucid dreaming we talked about at the beginning, this is a ongoing relationship, an ongoing process. And wherever we are, whether it's our first day of practice or 20 years in, we have these different things happening in our field, things that are going beautifully, new challenges that are coming up, things that are starting anew, and so setting so much gratitude and appreciation for all of the opportunities and the experiences we have while we do these practices. And then to extend that a little bit more, thinking, wow, like with all that benefit you've experienced the last few weeks, taking a moment to share that and dedicate that benefit to all the sentient beings out there in the world. May any of the good that we've generated here together, any of the good we've generated in ourselves, all move towards the peacefulness, to the happiness, joyfulness, the freedom of all the kings. What an incredible opportunity we've had to practice, and what a precious opportunity you have to continue to practice. If anyone would like to share their Rosebud Thorn, you're welcome to share it in the chat. It's a it's a really cool way to reflect on things that you've experienced too, because in six months time, you're going to look back at your Rosebud Thorn and be like, Huh? That was really different, sure I am now. And it's a way to kind of appreciate where we are in all of its good and the thorns, and also track our growth without becoming too too grabby, right? So again, playfulness, joyfulness, beautiful. Now, before I hand over to Andrew, just I want to share a quick reminder about the retreat that we're doing. I know once we start, we're going to go into an epic portal of discoveries. So really, really excited that Andrew and I will be able to meet some of you in person, as we shared. You know, this is Andrew's only lucid dreaming retreat next year, and so it sells out every year, but it's sure will this year. And blue spirit, which is an amazing location, there's a possibility we might be able to get some more room. So wanting to offer it to you guys first. And I know a lot of you keep asking me for a link, I keep sending it to you guys, but I also understand that it can be tricky to trick you find it with all the emails. So let me. Let me just chuck it in the chat so that at least everyone here will have it, and I'll make sure I send it out again to tomorrow with the replay, beautiful. Ah, so with that, I'm just going to check in and see if Andrew. I know Andrew is in Mexico right now, and he's he's navigating the interesting infrastructure potentialities of of Mexico and Wi Fi. So I know Alyssa. Would you be able to tell me if he's or Andrew? If you're here, would you just turn your mic off and let me know?
Oh, there we go. Yeah, cool. Can you hear me? Okay,
yes,
yeah. Are we ready for the transfer?
Yes, I'm just trying to find you. I can't see you maybe. Yeah, I'm part
of the, I think, general population, I guess,
if you want to pin Oh, here we go. I've got you. Are you on? Andrew holla, check is that where you're yes, there we go. Well, hi, Andrew, I'm glad, I'm glad you found your way to us.
Yeah, hi Mia, hi everybody. Yeah, I'm in Mexico. My first real vacation in 18 months, maybe. So I'm a super high end kind of dealy. And of course, internet connection is fluctuating. So that I talked about diamonds a couple of weeks ago. Remember those little diamond entities where they're playing with me a little bit, which is kind of fun. So hopefully it should work. I did go to the front desk. They said they hired it out. There was a kind of a resort wide problem, so hopefully got it. So thank you so much. Yeah, what a delight I have been here. I wasn't able to attend a number of these sessions live, but I listened to every single one on the recordings. And I mean, super impressed. What fun, right? Fun. And so my little riff tonight, as Mia mentioned last week, is to expand a little bit about the extraordinary depth, capacity and scope of these nocturnal meditations. My languaging. You know, this is part of a night school I mentioned this six weeks ago, and lucid dreaming, it really is the center course. But there are, there are four other programs courses in this curriculum. And so I want to just say a little bit about these four liminal dreaming, Dream Yoga you find a little bit on that sleep yoga, and then a little bit about Bard yoga and how all this fits in to give you a sense of the unbelievable potential that awaits you every night, this massive untapped reservoir, this natural resource that really goes unrecognized, untapped, and being aware of the potentialities perhaps can inspire us to engage in the deeper exploration and so conjoined with this little survey, I want to also say a couple comments about ways to continue, because the single biggest issue with this practices is discouragement, recidivism, right? You know, I've got this down, and then that's like drought, nothing happens. Or you don't, you feel like nothing is happening. Well, I want to talk to you a little bit about there is something happening, whether you know it or not. And so I'll be peppering in some comments about ways to just be inspired to continue, because it's worth, it's absolutely positively worth the efforts, the set of practices has been just monumental in my own life. So I want to share some of that inspiration with you and work with like they say in the classic giant Chinese text, you know the art of the war. Know thy enemy, right? So what are you up against when you're engaged in these practices? Some pretty oceanic forces, kind of the massive forces of the dark side, so to speak. So what are some of those forces? Well, I'm going to point out a couple of them. The first one is elucidated by Jeff Warren, who's a really interesting character. I like him a lot. I interviewed him back five, six years ago, on the nightclub platform, so you can check that out. And this is from his book called Head trip, where he has some really interesting things to say. So here's a quote, dreaming, and lucid dreaming in particular demonstrate. It demonstrates that our brains are built to be submerged in dream models. Dreams seem real because to the brain, they are real. We have both an amazing world building capacity, and critically, a world immersing capacity. This may be one reason why films and books and art are so effective. We humans are hardwired for narrative immersion. End quote. This is an amazing statement. I mean, basically what he's talking about is we're hardwired for land lucidity. We're hardwired for this narrative immersion, and part of the reason is because that's what ego is. It's nothing but a narrative. Literally, it's nothing but a construct. It's a storyline scripted by a really crappy author with an even crappier ending. It's called death. So we want to rewrite the story, re script it, and have a happy ending. So that's a little bit about what these nocturnal meditations can reveal for us. But this is no small thing to understand. You know, the kind of multi factorial aspect of all these forces that really are working against us. That's why there are so few people on the lucid dreaming, let alone the nocturnal meditation track. Fewer people stay with it, fewer people matriculate, graduate. And so what does that really mean? So let's talk a little bit about that. But this is important, because these narratives play out across a bunch of different levels. And what Jeff is talking about here that this multi billion dollar success story of the entertainment industry is representative of this. It reveals fundamentally, and this is important, the moniker for Dream Yoga is literally in the classic texts, the moniker is the measure of the path. So in spiritual context and psychological context, dreams are truth tellers. They're remarkably revelatory mechanisms. And so what this practice does for you, and having a little bit of humor and levity around this is actually quite important, is sooner or later, these practices will reveal your passion for ignorance, your passion for sleep, right? Ego is okay. It's like, Ah, you can rouse me during the day with your psycho spiritual, whatever it's but it puts a big Do Not Disturb sign, because this is where ego goes to recharge its samsaric batteries every night. This is where ego goes in moment to moment. By the way, iteration of this is distraction. This is where ego goes to get a little hit to maintain its life blood every single time we're distracted. And so if we understand this, then we can smile at this revelation. You know, when you just say, I know my life is too busy. I can't do this. I'm not smart enough. I don't have enough time. This isn't for me, all the infinite narratives. There's a storyline that ego constructs to kick you off this path. And so understanding this and what's being played out here can really help us that we have, on a very deep level, we have this kind of bipolar conflict of interest going on, and this is where it's helpful to understand the spectrum of our identity. This is, this is quite important. It's been super helpful for me doing this for decades now, when sometimes master this, I'm a master of Dream Yoga. And then Mia can attest to this drought, like nothing, you know, it's just like nothing's happening. And so I've worked and tried to understand, like, what's going on here, and I'm going to share, I think some models it may be helpful to you. So basically, you never give up, like the Dalai Lama says of anything of value, you never give up. If you have the right view, you will continue to work with this, because you understand what's going on and you understand what you're working with, the risk reward, much more reward than risk. But these practices are absolutely positively, just like the Surgeon General's warning for cigarettes, these practices are absolutely hazardous to your egoic health,
right? Ego doesn't want to go here. So if we understand that, part of the reason for the difficulty in non cities that the developmental issue, and that we exist along the spectrum two axes, but we'll just stick with the one axis, from beast to bada, from psychotic to Mystic, from dirt to divinity, ultraviolet to infrared to ultraviolet, we exist along the spectrum, and so part of us in the spectrum of our identity, and this is what we work with, by the way, in stage five doing yoga, the more nuanced expressions of working with Stage Five is identity transfer and identity transformation, understanding the flexibility of identity, right? Remember, Blessed are the flexible, for they never bent out of shape. I like that one. So part of us, the ultraviolet part, the upper frequency leading the evolutionary edge. And I'll say this at the very end, some neuro anatomical support for this takes a course like this, wants to wake up, wants to attain lucidity, wants to advance on the path. Yay high five. In the Buddhist tradition, this is abides by this maxim of what to accept and what to reject. Well, you accept this voice. You listen to this voice that says, Yeah, I want to attain lucidity. I want to do this practice. You listen to that. Well, then guess what? You still have the devolutionary tale that wags the dog. And this is a part of you back down here that says, I'm not smart enough. I don't have enough time. I can't do this. Blah, blah, blah. Well, what do you do with that? Well, you listen, but you hit the mute button, right? You don't, don't pay attention to that. Just realize that's a habit pattern, karma that has not been purified and exhausted yet, and so that's going to continue to rear its head until that habit pattern, that karmic residue, is kind of purified. So understanding that is really important. We have this unconscious conflict of interest. Part of us really wants to do this, like, Man, this is so cool. This is the best thing in town. But then, boy, the forces of the dark side ego saying, Nope, not for me, not for me. And so if you understand that, you go, oh, there's that voice again. There it is. You know what? I don't have to listen to that voice. There it is. But I'm gonna put a little my mute button on that. So that's really important understanding this is this non lucidity is a developmental issue. There's lots of reasons why this practice is somewhat challenging. It's designed to frustrate the machinations and the strategies of ego altogether. And this translates as literal frustration, right, right? I mean, anybody who's done this, right, you're gonna up and down like the stock market, and just like any good investor knows, what do you do? Stay the course. Don't sell out. Stay the course. And eventually, slowly, this is a non linear process, by the way. This is the other thing I'll talk about. This is somewhat linear. If you look at a really broad spectrum, you know, if you take a big look over many, many years or decades, but day to day, week to week, month to month, this is a highly non linear dynamical process and understanding that is also really important. This will help you relate to like, why am I knocking it out of the park? Wow, I had the best lucid dreams and then like nothing please. Well, I'm going to say a little bit more about why the nothing is the diamonds that I talked about in class one are going to come back to play here because they're messing with you. They're messing with you. And understanding this will really help so liminal dreaming the first of the five I retrofitted this in my curriculum about five years ago when I came across the work of Jennifer duper, D, U, M, P, E, R T. She's also interviewed on the night nightclub platform. She wrote this beautiful book by that title, liminal dreaming. I like it a lot. It's basically her languaging for what's previously instilled in the academic scientific community called hypnagogic or hidden, the pumping dreaming spaces, the pre and post spaces. You know when you hit the pillow before you fall asleep, you're in the hypogogic leading to sleep, leading to the God of sleep. When you wake up and before you enter the world, you're in the hippopotic space. And so liminal dreaming, the word literally means threshold. It's a super interesting place where you can explore using your meditative faculties, your mindfulness, this kind of witnessing faculty of the mind, super interesting place to watch how the mind goes online and offline every single day. You can eventually actually realize what I just said 10 minutes ago. This is no exaggeration. You are a storyline. You are a magnificent creator. Moment to moment, more effective than Shakespeare, really. Ego is the world's fastest construction company. Moment to moment to creating the sense of self moment to moment, because you can't have self without other. Is co creating the seemingly external world. I mean literally, lightning speeds. You open your eyes, there's no dimensionality, there's no color, none of that exists in the world. You actually bring that forth the minute you open your eyes. So if your entire perceptual apparatus is geared towards this internally, you know, this is the process of what's called ahamkara Eye making, eye making. We're always making ourselves up moment to moment with liminal dreaming, which also doubles and as a magnificent lucid sleep onset practice. You can watch this construction deconstruction process. You can literally watch yourself go online in the morning. You can watch yourself go offline every night. This is an amazing thing, and actually see how this happens. So so much more to say, but for the purposes of time. I'm going to leave it there. Mia, guess one last little thing, one cool thing about this is helps you liminal. Dreaming helps you understand the liminal experiences which we are in. A liminal experience post election right now is when you're neither here nor there. It's like a Bardo experience to help you understand liminal places like hallways and funeral homes and empty auditoriums and places where you're just a little bit edgy, you're not quite here. And then liminal beings. Liminal beings like artists and LGBTQ individuals, meditative masters like Trungpa, Rinpoche, Siddhas, mystics who just don't fit the standard mole. These are liminal beings. So understanding liminal principle as it's expressed in the dream and sleep arena helps you understand liminality altogether. Super cool. So lucid dreaming, that's the next one. Of course, we've had six weeks on that. I'm not going to say a whole lot, because we've had quite a bit of magnificent discourse on that. This in my languaging, just to kind of put it in Contra distinction to Dream Yoga, because, you know, that's the third so we have lucid, liminal dreaming, lucid dreaming, and then Dream Yoga. So in my languaging, just to show you how they centrifuge out lucid dreaming, arguably debatably more psychological in nature and more about self fulfillment, fantastic, but it does have limits. I mean, whether you know it or not, and whenever intention is involved, even in a dream, habit, slash karma, is created. Let me say that again, whenever intention is involved even in a dream karma, habit is created. So this is either good news or bad news. Really good news if you use that intention. And this is the motivation thing. The bottom of Mia is entire platform which is so skillful, it's what motivation so if you use it properly, this is a really big thing, but a lot of the lucid dreaming peeps don't really you know that you don't find this on the fine print, right? Oh, fulfill your wildest fantasies and the privacy and Sanctuary of your own mind. Well, that's all well and good. They don't say, using the principles of neuroplasticity, that what you do with your intentionality is going to change your psychophysical makeup and your structure. So these practices are not karmically tax free. That's both good news and bad news. So intentionality is super important. So lucid dreaming, psychological self fulfillment, Dream Yoga, more spiritual in nature and about self transcendence. It's no longer interested in psychological processes. It's more interested in transcending the self sense altogether. So nine stages there are increasingly subtle, increasingly more refined. If you pay attention to these nine stages, each and every one of them is fundamentally progressive stages of meditation on emptiness. I'll say more about this later. This emptiness thing, because everything in Buddhism Really circumambulates Nothing. It's not nothing. It's no thing. It's the openness that Mia was talking about. Openness is a synonym for emptiness, and this, really, if there's a one colossal, mega contribution of the Buddhist tradition, arguably it's the unbelievable, magisterial teachings on emptiness, huge. And so I'll see more about this, because this is what the practices lead to. The fruition of Dream Yoga reads leads to the realization of the discovery of the empty nature of reality. What does that really mean? More about that in a second. So each one of these stages becomes a little bit more interesting, more sophisticated, more refined. That's what the nine stages that you guys had a survey. Mia mentioned those a couple of weeks ago or so. I can't remember exact week, but here's what, here's what happens here that's so incredibly cool with the dream, is that dream is a code word, lots of code language. DREAM IS code word for manifestation of mind. You're always in a dream. Always under dream. And so there are three types of dreams in the Buddhist tradition. There's the archetypal nighttime dream. Now that's literally, in the Buddhist tradition, called the languaging. Is so interesting. It's called the double delusion, or the example dream. Now, how interesting is that? Well, it immediately suggests, well, what's the primary delusion? What's the real dream? Well, this,
this so called waking reality. This the thing that you, that you take to be so real, it's actually a dream. We just haven't woken up to it yet. This is, by the way, precisely what the Buddha did. He's the ultimate lucid dreamer. You can look at him that way. What did he wake up from? What did he wake up to? Well, he woke up from the nightmare of a solid, independent, reified, literalized reality, what we take to be our reality. That's a nightmare. He woke up from that. What did he wake up to? A reality that's dream like in nature. It's fluid, fleeting and substantial and permanent, ie empty. So it's so interesting, we've got it all bass ackwards, right? The things that we actually think to be real, from the Buddhist perspective, that's actually the definition of actually being asleep. So this is what he woke up from, the nightmare of a reified reality. He woke up to a de reified reality. And you're going, okay, Andrew, okay, you're getting geek speak here. Get real. Why is this important? Well, I invite you and do this query. Look very closely your experience and see if the following is not true, you suffer in direct proportion to how solidly you take the contents of your mind and the contents of your world. This is the in darkened view. This is what creates depression and everything that's just like super So, sorry. This is in darkenment. And so these teachings, they may seem philosophical. Nothing here is philosophical or theoretical. We may not have experienced it yet, but there's no theory of philosophy here. What did the Buddha say? Ultimate lucid dreamer, I teach one thing and one thing only, suffering and the end of suffering. So Dream Yoga leads you to the end of suffering because it works through these progressive stages of meditation on emptiness at nighttime, but passion up. You know that term leading to the realization of a de reified empty reality. This is what enlightenment is. And so what happens? Thoughts still appear, the world still appear. Trump still appears. The election still appears. Everything still appears. Well, that's the same, but your relationship to it is radically and irrevocably changed. You see it as a dream. You see it as a display. And so you're no longer lost in the non lucidity of the otherwise catastrophic nature of what's happening in the US these days, right? You still see it, you still feel it, that you feel it more. You feel it more because you're awake. They're more awake, but it hurts you less. Let me say that again, you feel things more, but they hurt you less because you're no longer mistaking them to be real. They no longer have a place to land. They pass through you like a harmless neutrino. So this is a big deal. I mean, this is not only what the nocturnal meditations are about. This is what the entire Buddhist path is about, is discovering the dream like nature of reality. So we get the first dream, lifetime dream, second dream, this and what we're doing, what we've done with Mia these last six weeks, my languaging, this openness, is kind of my playful languaging, interstate commerce between two previously disparate states of consciousness, mixing metaphors, hacking into the nighttime dream, harvesting insights from the nocturnal arena, trafficking them right, installing like these undercurrents of wisdom that pop up during the course of the day, and then replacing a vicious circle with a virtuous circle. This interstate traffic works in both directions. We work in the day to bring about lucidity at night with everything you've been working with with Mia. But unlike lucid dreaming, Dream Yoga is don't just keep those insights tucked under the blanket, the Comforter of the night. No, bring them into your life. This is the role of illusory form that she mentioned. Bring them into your life. Let your insights. And I'll say much more about this in a second. This is the big deal. Let the insights from your nocturnal experience illuminate and ring about lucid living. Lucid Dreaming leads to lucid living, huge, colossal. But wait, if you order in the next 20 minutes, there's more. It's not merely bi directional. It's tri directional. This leads to the third type of dream, death, literally called, literally called the dream. At the end of time, you want to know where you're going to go when you're done just you're going to transition from one dream to the next. Trust me. Send me a text, FedEx. I don't care how I get it, you're gonna figure this out. Manifestation of mine, that's all the dream is. You're gonna die. You're gonna transition into the dream at the end of time. This is what Bardo yoga is about. I'm gonna say a little bit more about that, but this is amazing. So here we are, you know, studying the dream stage. Oh, this is so cool. Lucid dreaming, so cool. Oh my gosh, it's amazingly cool. But it is amazingly profound, because it works on a tri directional way, lucid lucidity, which is code word for awareness, but doesn't improve with awareness. A lucid dream is a weird dream hangs back into life to bring about lucid living, a lighter, more playful, just childlike, not child is childlike wonder at the beauty and the majesty of the world, and then it pings forward to bring about lucid dying. So this is stealth help quality, right? You're here learning about lucid dreaming. You're getting a lot more than you bargained for. Listen to this course again with this lens. Oh my gosh. This course is helping me to live a lucid life. Oh my gosh, there's more this course is helping me how to prepare to die lucidly conscious dying. So this is a big deal, and understanding this then goes, You know what? I'm going to hang with this. This is totally worth it. Look how much I'm getting out of this, right? There's so much going on here. So with a little bit of facility, Dream Yoga then becomes a platform, we just talked a little bit about this, to what's called Sleep yoga, deeply connected to the highest stages of what's what's in the Hindu traditions called Yoga Nidra. Nidra literally means sleep. The other term in Buddhism is luminosity yoga. And this is beyond profound. So now, now we're entering graduate school. Super subtle. This has not been scientifically proven yet, but they are working on it, and I'm working with these labs. Tom Metzinger, one of the world's leading philosophers, who's also a neuroscientist, doesn't exaggerate when he says, when this is substantiated, and they're already doing papers with he and Melanie Boley and a couple other scientists, this is going to be a revolution in the mind sciences. You mean, you can be sound asleep with an EEG, an fMRI, and be completely lucid. Yes, you can. And so, you know, proving this is going to just really rock the boat in the neuroscientific community that's already doing it. And so here, this is important. This is basically follows this maxim that awareness of absence is not absence of awareness. Let me say that again, awareness of absence is not absence of awareness in deep, dreamless sleep. Well, most people just blank out. They just like nothing's happening, nothing absent. Well, with the lucidity brought about by lucid dreaming and dreaming yoga, eventually, guess what happens? You actually realize this kind of tacit awareness, this 24/7 level of awareness, the light of the eternal mind that never turns off. My Chris, my friend Chris Wallace, the Kashmir shaivist Guy says this beautifully. I love this quote, There is no darkness within. There's only light unseen. Fantastic. There's only light unseen. So we're turning on the night light actually not turning it on. It's always on. We're recognizing it with these practices. You don't think this is going to change your world, right? And just to show you how far this goes, just to show you how deep it is, I don't believe I mentioned this six weeks ago. Ramana Maharshi worked with this a lot. You had a very beautiful line here, that which does not exist in deep, dreamless sleep is not real. There's a Mind Bender, bad which does not exist in deep, dreamless sleep is not real. So if you're lucid to it, you are the most in contact with reality in the deep dreamless state. So this is the big deal. So the fifth practice, because I want to get through and talk a little bit about some encouraging news, how to keep going, so we can still have some discussion. The fifth practice, of course, is Bardo yoga, excuse me, the death preparatory practices. It's a very deep, intimate connection between sleeping and dreaming and dying. For example, in Greek mythology, you know, the god of death is Thanatos, the god of sleep is Hypnos. They're not just brothers. They're twins. They're twins, so when you're working with really subtle dimensions of the mind, well, guess what? You're working with a similitude, a concordant expression of the dimension of the mind that's revealed when you die. And so here's the logic, dreamless. Dreamless means formless, right? Formless means deathless. Let me say that again, dreamless means formless. Formless means deathless. So by becoming familiar with the very definition of the word meditation and the Tibetan language to become familiar with by becoming familiar with these super subtle dimensions of your mind, now you are absolutely positively preparing for the dimensions of the mind that the world wisdom traditions say will be exposed and revealed to you when you die. So every night is a pop quiz for the final exam, right? And if you can do this, if you can maintain lucidity here, right? This is no this is no small thing. This is a total game changer.
So this is a big deal. This is like getting a postdoc. This is where, where things really become profound. And here's the other thing I just came across this this week. What is inner and outer? This is relation to the Bardos. What takes place in the Bardos is that what is inner and hidden in life becomes outer and manifest in the Bardos. What is inner and hidden in life becomes outer and manifest in the Bardos. You're turned inside out and upside down. Well, does this sounds just a little bit familiar. This is exactly what happens in a dream. One is inner and hidden in the day, becomes outer and manifest in a dream. So this is why the Bardos are talked about, is the dream at the end of time. And so if we can attain lucidity here, Whoa, now you're talking about real conscious time. So I just want to, I'm going to say one or two things. I don't have time to unpack all these teachings. But again, I want to just show you how far this goes. There are three death Bardos beyond the scope of what I can say here. Painful Bardo of dying. This is a concordant or a similitude experience every night of what happens when we fall asleep. Luminous Bardo of dharmata. This is a concordant experience, similitude of what happens every night when we fall into dreamless sleep. Comic Bardo of becoming is a concordant experience of what happens in the dream state so every single night. And this is what Mia and I are going to unpack in Costa Rica. Big time. We're going to be working with contemplations, using liminality and some of these other practices to show you, first at the level of the map, and then through direct experience. You can see this for yourself. You can absolutely positively see this little microcosmic tour of the Bardo cycle every single night. This is a big deal. This will create tremendous stability in your own experience. You will no longer fear death. Death is then determined to be what it is. It's just the death of ignorance, the death of illusion, where wisdom is revealed. And so I just want to say share two brief quotes here, because obviously this is a colossal topic. But two things, one from the Dalai Lama, a well trained person can recognize a strict order in the four stages of falling asleep, and is well prepared to ascertain an analogous order in the dying process. And another one from Bucha Rinpoche, wonderful teacher the energy governing each element ceases to be functional and is absorbed into the energy of the following element. This is what happens when we die, because earth dissolves into water, into fire, to wind, into space, back to Bucha. This process of absorption of the four elements into each other does not only occur at death. It also happens in an extremely subtle manner when we fall asleep. So if you become sensitized to this, even at the level of the map, in the liminal space, you can start to see what are called these, these death signs of the dissolution stages. You start to see this every night when you fall asleep, and then using the processes of inference, inference is just a handshake with reality. It's using the process of inference, then you can very, very assertively extrapolate and infer what's going to happen when you enter the dream at the end of time. So this is a big deal, because the biggest problem, just like in the movie. Sixth Sense, when I saw this movie with Bruce Willis, what 30 years ago, I said, Oh, my God, this is an amazing Bardo film. The biggest problem in the Bardos is not realizing that you're in them, just like in a non lucid dream. And so look, guess what happens if you don't wake up and either ride your mind or take control of your dream. What controls the contents of your dream experience, your habits, your karma. This is why Trungpa Rinpoche said so beautifully. You know, when he was asked dozens of times, what is it that reincarnates? What did he say? Your bad habits. That's bloody fantastic, right? You don't wake up and take control. What takes control your habits? Well, at the dream, at the end of time, it's exactly the same thing. 100% you don't wake up, become lucid and take control. What controls your Bardo experience? What controls your after death experience, if you don't your habits, your karma. It just makes so much sense. So like Kabir said, right, what is found now is found then this applies both to the dream and to death. So here's really good news Guru Rinpoche, the great master who brought Buddhism from India to Tibet also wrote the Tibet Book of the Dead. Now, these are archetypal numbers. Don't take them literally. Nothing is literal. Here. It's archetypal. He said that if you can maintain lucidity, which in the dream state, seven to nine times. And that's an archetypal number, it means some level of regularity, you're going to be fine. You're going to tame lucidity on the Bardos. You do the Bardo yoga practices and you go, wow, I am good to go a little bit outside our scope, but we can talk about here. But again, exactly what Mia and I are going to be talking about in Costa Rica patterns. These, these five nocturnal meditations follow this pattern of transcend, but include. This is a kind of a notion from Hegel, the great idealist philosopher, lucid dreaming transcends, but includes liminal dreaming, dream, yoga, training, those and on the way up. And so understanding This then helps you realize, Wow, this is why they get more subtle. Little farther up you go, and this is also where they get more profound. So that's also helpful. Again, the fruition of all this, again, is this incredibly important point of de reification, de literalization. The reason we suffer so much is we take things so bloody literally. You can take things very, very seriously, like what's happening with the world and the election. Take it very seriously. Does not logically entail you need to take it literally, that's a mistake. So you develop these kind of X ray eyes that allows you to see through these things. They no longer get you down. So a couple things, again, for inspiration around this, like I mentioned this in class, one, I just want to see a couple more things that may help you understand some of the challenges and the delights, and basically, some comments about how to negotiate, how to play with this dimension of your being that I have found to be super helpful. So like, I never give up. I like, is that even on the event horizon, there's no way I'm going to give up. I just have a better sense of what some of the rules are. So with the right view. Around this practice, there's no such thing as a failure. This is really important. There's no such thing as a failure in the world of these nocturnal meditations, failures with the right attitude, with the right view. Just show you where you're stuck. Hence the measure of the path. If you're having problems with lucidity, it's revealing something. If you're having problems with Stage 2345, or whatever, in Dream Yoga, it's revealing. So you can have a really you think, Oh, I've got this emptiness thing down. I understand emptiness, right? And then you come up to the dream wall, and you can't walk through it. It's showing you. It's a truth teller. I've got this emptiness thing down, and then you bump your dream nose against the dream wall. Well, you may have understood emptiness at a conceptual level, but you have not embodied it. And so this is so cool in 2030, years of studying emptiness, well, guess what? I used to be able to bump up against the wall. I knew it. I knew I'm dreaming. This is a dream. This is a dream. I can't put my hand through the wall. Ah, I've done this so long now. I walk up, I put my hand to zip right through the wall. So it's a measure of the path. It's a good thing. It's showing you things. But the important thing here is failures. There's no such thing a failure here, it's just showing you where you're stuck. The issue is, how exposed Do you want to be? How revealed Do you want to be? How much do you want to know about your mind? That's the question, right? How much truth can you handle? Dreams are truth tellers. They will show you. So the other thing that's really important to understand here is you can have a lucid dream and not know it. You can actually have a lucid dream and not remember it 100% a little bit outside the scope. But this is the difference. Ned block talked about this, the difference between access and phenomenal consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness is you have the dream. Access Consciousness is you don't have access to it in memory. You don't remember it. And so this is like, Okay, well, like, why should I care about that? Well, check this out. When I first mentioned this, I don't know how long ago, in a week, week long program I did, this gal came up to me and she said, Andrew, you know, I think you finally explained something to me. I've been finding myself getting better and better at this particular discipline. I don't remember what it was, and she goes, when you said that you can have a dream and not even know a lucid dream, all of a sudden I remembered, oh my god, this is what's going on. I'm getting better at this discipline in my life. I have no idea where that proficiency is coming from. It's coming from the fact that she's having these lucid dreams and they're not made available to her Access Consciousness. So this is super helpful. There is more going on than meets the eye here, whether you know it or not, you are putting heat into this system. So even if you're doing there's like, nothing's happening. Nothing's happening. Well, yes, something is happening. Think of your mind, you know, big vat of water,
if the vat of water is really cold and it's really big, and you put it on stove and the heat is barely on, well, it's going to take a while to come to a boil, a phase transformation, which represents lucidity, right? Well, you keep going. You keep putting the energy in. You may not know it yet, but you are heating up. You are heating up your mind, your substrate, consciousness, is changing, whether you know it or not, and sooner or later, through pure causality, really physics of mind, your mind will go, come to a boil. You will have a face transformation. And that's what lucidity is. So this, again, is why you never give up. Something is happening, whether you know it or not. So this next thing I'm going to riff on, and this is probably the highlight of what I want to share with you, this has been a really big deal for me in the last couple years. So this lucid dreaming thing is magnificent. The nocturnal meditations are crazy profound. But what do we do with the rest of our dreams? What about all these other dreams you know, which constitute most people's lives? What do we do with those? Well, Mia has talked a little bit about this. I'm going to throw some specific darts here and talk to you about some things, about altering your relationship to your dreaming mind, ie, your unconscious mind, obfuscated mind altering. Your relationships to the depth your relationship to the depths of your being, is part of what I playfully call your temple reconstruction project. We essentially evicted from the temple of sleep going back, I mean, to the Dark Ages. It's super interesting to track this. Historically, dreams used to be so treasured and honored and the polyphasic traditions until the until the appropriately named Dark Ages came along, and texts were deliberately mistranslated and and the demonic nature of the dream became demonic. Good, good, thanks to hate, to say it Christianity, they were threatened by the power of the unconscious mind, so dreams became demonized. Don't listen to your dreams. They're the work of the devil. Don't even go there. The diamonds transformed into demons. They were literalized. And so basically, up until Freud and Jung and everybody else, somewhat generalization, but close enough this temple reconstruction project came about. And here's the key. There's the kicker, we engage in our own temple reconstruction project every night, when we go to sleep, when we engage in these sleep hygiene practices, when we do everything that Mia talked about, we're constructing our temples. And one way to really construct this temple is not do it alone. Call for help from your unconscious mind and be humble and open to the the enormity and the power 95% of what you do in this life. Just think about this number, minimum. 95% minimum is dictated by your unconscious mind. This is what it means to say free will. You don't have free will, not even close. We're buffeted around by the contents of our unconscious mind, whether we know it or not. So what we're doing here is we're bringing these contents into the awareness, changing our relationship to them. But here's a couple of things that have really helped me, and then I'm going to share a magnificent quote that when I came across this, it just blew me out of the water. It helped me understand things that I've been trying to understand for a really long time. So here's a couple things about I mentioned this on night one. You know when you're going to date? Mia talked about often, you know the excitement of going to the date. You know going on a date to meet your unconscious mind. Well, here's some things that will help you relate to these dimensions, these feminine dimensions of your mind, in the more elegant way, by opening to, respecting, honoring, viewing the dream and the unconscious mind as a sacred dimension. If you do this and you flip and this is, this is where we're going to see this is a, this is a very insidious limitation of metacognition and lucid dreaming. Altogether. I'm going to point out to you there was a game changer for me. So the idea here a couple things. So we complain, right? We often complain that dreams are vague, right? Well, what if their vagueness is actually their meaning? What if that's actually being portrayed here we may talk about, and not so much complain about, the pixelated, discontinuous, non linear, incongruous, Mercurial, empty nature of the dream. Perhaps that's their meaning. So this is what? Oh, wait, here's another, yeah, here's the last one. We strain to catch these dreams, right? We wake up in the morning. We strain to recollect, we strain to capture these dreams. I'm not dissing this at all. This is the important thing. I'm not criticizing in the slightest, any of the lucid dreaming strategies, not in the slightest. I'm trying to create a larger context to understand where some of the issues of non lucidity, lucidity come from. And then what do we do with all these other dreams that don't want to come along and play by these traditional rules? So we strain to catch our dreams, but maybe their Evanescence, maybe their fleeting dimension, is actually what is being portrayed their meaning. So the what I'm going to be getting at here is part of real nocturnal practice I've come to see is surrendering to the majesty of what's being portrayed in the dreaming mind, altogether. And here's some supporting statements. This is from
Patrick Harper.
It's no wonder that we forget dreams. They resist recollection because they do not wish to be pressed into the ego service to be literalized and therefore demonized. It's fantastic, fantastic. So when we're relating to this unconscious mind, this underworld, in a certain way, this is what I've discovered, in a certain way, one way to work with them is to listen to what they have to say, even in a non lucid capacity. It's as if these these phenomena of the dreaming space, they're looking for equal opportunity. They're looking to be heard. That's why we have Recurrent Dreams. That's why we have all these psychological dreams. There are dimensions of the unconscious mind that want to be heard and listened to and abided by. So basically, the fruition here that I'm going to read this amazing quote, is dreams perhaps invite us to view the world through dreamy de, literalized, de, reified, demonic eyes. This is a big deal. This is entirely what the practice of a loose reform is all about. Illus reform. You could say it's the sixth nocturnal meditation, but it's actually not our nocturnal meditation. It's the daytime practice to see the world as a dream. It is so central, this is so foundational, that in the classic meditative text, illusory form is the main practice Dream Yoga, and then also lucid dreaming, by definition, is a supplemental practice to a loose reform. Working with a dream like nature of your world is the main practice. Well, hey, this is relatively easy. I can work with this by reminding myself this is a dream. By doing state checks that Mia was talking about, all these things, I can start to see this is the real message here. So here's this quote. This is just when I read this. I'm telling you, it blew me away. Patrick Harper, i Yes, so he's talking about dreams altogether. This presupposes that we recognize, accommodate and revere our dreams, for if they can only know themselves through us, it is only through them that we can know our deepest selves, so we open this bi directional thing. So here, here's the quote. In the old days, dreams were held in high regard. We tended, we have tended to suppress them. And it's a dismissive statement, right? When we say, Oh, it's just a dream. That's a pejorative statement. We have tended to suppress them, be suspicious of them, scanning them for signs of madness. No wonder they come with difficulty with distortion. It is our turn, perhaps, to abandon our egoistic daylight world and go to where they are in the dark, even if we have to bend over backwards. For dreaming may be the only method of initiation left to us. Each night brings a little death by which we acclimatize to the other world, rehearsing the journey that all souls have to take in the end, dreams may also so I'm popping around between. He's written four magnificent books, so I'm popping all over the place with his work. I love this guy. Dreams may also be vague and fleeting because of the strength of our daylight outlook. This is what I call the Wake centric it's not by languaging the Wake centric approach, which is site centric, photo centric, wake centric, all in the service of what egocentricity. So here's the developmental issue, coming back in right ego is only fully operational and online in the waking state, and what does it do? Then colonizes and dismisses other states of consciousness they can't fully experience. This is why we have this dismissive relationship to dreams. Back to Patrick, our waking consciousness so contained within our heads, so ego centered, so flood lighted, makes the dream seem dill, dim and ill defined. It naturally flees from the light and from a consciousness that would grab it, badger it for subliminal messages, interpret it, handcuff it and interrogate it for its secret. If, however, we were to cultivate a more demonic or mercurial open consciousness, right? We could slide more easily into dreams, adapt to them, changing shape if necessary, and so return to wakefulness with a full memory of our other worldly sojourn. So I'm going to interject one thing here. One of the fruitions of this practice. This is summarized in a great statement by one of the greatest mahasiddhas in all of Tibetan Buddhism, Milarepa, when he said, not seeing day and dream as deferring, this is as meditation, as mastered as it can be. Let me say this again, not seeing day and dream as differing. This is meditation as mastered as it can be. This is where we're trying to go to, this ultimate democratization, the ultimate equanimity for the awakened ones, there is no difference phenomenologically between the waking state and the dream state, none. And so they slide through between these two. And so we can bring, to a certain degree, our waking consciousness into the nocturnal arena, but this is a major limitation of the lucid dreaming curriculum. I'm going to say more about this in a second. Why not bring more of the dream mind, the dream, diamondic reality, into this world, to see this world as a dream. This is a magnificent, enhanced relationship to the nocturnal mind, and in so doing, by honoring and respecting the dream world in this level, you don't think it's going to respond, you don't think it's going to open and embrace you, because now you are meeting it on its terms, not on this kind of Apollonian Promethean thing, which I'm going to get to in a second. So back to Patrick, hope you're hanging with me, because to me, this is a big deal. Back to Patrick, we might even learn to let the dream surface while we are awake, precisely the role of illusory form where dreaming goes on all the time. It's nothing other than the soul's imagining we associate with night and sleep only because that is when our guard is down and we let the dreams in, or let ourselves be taken down into the dream, right into the underworld, into the unconscious mind this last and then I'm done with him. If we allowed the dream back into daylight hours, the hardness of our literal reality would be emulsified the diamonds gods, indeed, these one other would be released from the prison of literalism, emerging from rock and forest to repopulate the landscape and reinsole the world. This is just a fantastic statement, right? The world then becomes sacred and demonic and alive, just like in the primitive, you know, polyphasic traditions, where everything is alive and animistic and breathing and sacred, instead of this flat land reductionist thing that we have on the west, it's just killing the planet, right? So the idea here is honor. It be more respectful, be more opening. And here's the critique. Here's the critique. This, to me, has been huge, as dazzling as lucidity truly is. Don't let your quest for lucidity, and therefore metacognition, pin down your dream world. It's hard to put, to put pin down mercury, by the way, you try to put your beat on it, your finger on it squirts out to the side, instead of trying to colonize the dream world with waking consciousness. And this is a major near enemy, a lucid feet flip the trajectory and invite dreaming consciousness to colonize your waking life. Open the doors of communication. Don't try to superimpose in this Apollonian Promethean way. These are the gods. Apollo and Prometheus are the principal gods of science associated with metacognition. What is a lucid dream? It's a metacognitive dream, fantastic. But the near enemy of the Apollonian and Promethean way is the rational, linear, logical, scientific mind going in hyper drive and trying to colonize everything, which is exactly what happens in the near enemy side of working with lucid dreaming, right? So the idea here is you have to try, but don't try too hard. Ease up, lighten up. Have fun.
Release your grip. Don't come in with this kind of Herculean, egoic thing that I can knock this down. You want to have lucid dreams regularly, consistently. This more open embrace of the entire dream arena is what's going to get you there, trying to control. And this is where you see the control thing. Dreaming, Dream Yoga is about control. Isn't that well, yes, but here's the near enemy of this, trying to control every aspect of your unconscious mind in the logical, rational, linear and masculine way. Remember, this is the one I mentioned the first class. This is going to backfire. Robert Wagner talks about this beautifully. The sailor cannot control the sea. The sailor cannot control the sea. Learn to ride the waves. Don't freeze them, just so you can walk on them right? Here's where this thing really clicked into me. I've been a massive fan of Carl Jung for the longest time. I thought he was like a mega genius, and I still think he is. But I now, I now see that is his whole thing. This is really stained me, in a way, his whole drive of individuation, in terms of bringing all the aspects of the unconscious mind into the Light of Consciousness, as if daily consciousness and metacognition are somehow superior to that. I see this as actually a real problem right now. So relax, open, relax this Apollonian way, allow yourself to surrender. But so here's the kick. I'm not saying at all the traditional rational, linear, lucid dreaming techniques. I'm not saying don't do them. I'm saying 100% do them. They work, absolutely work. But do they work all the time? No. Why? Because of this, it's as if the dreaming mind, in a certain way, is flipping you off, almost literally, double entendre intended, if you go in with this hyper masculine this is what I mentioned on the first night. I'm going to take this over with my rational, logical, egoic mind. Get back to me on that. Let me know how it goes. Now here's the kicker, sometimes it works. If I'm in a sleep lab and I 100% have to have a lucid dream. I do this. I do the kind of traditional approach, and it works, but it doesn't work all the time. And so this larger approach has been super, super helpful. You want to have lucid dreams consistently, meet the dream world on its terms. Yes, dance with it, bring in the metacognition. But don't think that that's somehow superior. Don't think that's that that somehow is going to solve all these issues. So the idea here is that the journey fundamentally becomes the goal here, and therefore, right, you've already achieved the goal because you're on this journey, the journey becomes the goal. This is a very non traditional thing. Everything about this, not everything, but so much about this is so untraditional, the journey becomes the goal. So therefore, everybody listening to this course, you've already you've already reached the goal, because you're on this journey. And so the key then is you continue with the light and a deeper understanding and homage and respect to this massive dimension of your unconscious mind. Don't try to conquer it with your Herculean, you know, logic, rationality, metacognitive thing, right? Dance with it. Play with it. Bring in some light of America, of awareness. You know, Apollo was, it was the god of light and the sun. It's amazing, but how much light and sun can you bring into the darkness? Why not discover the light that's already hidden within the darkness? So last thing, and then I'm done. I know I'm riffing a lot, but I want to share this because I got so excited about it. Here's the thing, one last thing, and I'm done. So here's, here's one thing that's super, super helped me. This is the work, very briefly. This is the really inspired to me when I studied Thea de Chardin, wonderful, wonderful, incredible, sophisticated thinker, to paraphrase his extraordinary body of work, evolution hasn't stopped. It's only moved indoors, right precisely where we go every night if we don't violate the natural curfew of the night with what artificial fight, we're invited inside. We're invited interiorly. We're invited brought in. So this is where evolution is actually taking place, and here one of the one of the principal factors. Here's an amazing statement from Matthew Walker, neuroscientist out of UC Berkeley. I highly recommend this book. Why we sleep? He only devotes three pages to lucid dreaming, but there's a paragraph here that's definitely worth sharing. This is this is a hardcore neuroscientist. He's not a spiritual guy at all. It is possible the lucid dreamers represent the next iteration in Homo sapiens evolution. Will these individuals be preferentially selected for in the future, in part, on the basis of this unusual dreaming ability, one that may allow them to turn the Creative Problem Solving spotlight on dreaming, I'm sorry, over dreaming on the waking challenges faced by themselves in the human race, and therefore advantageously harness its power more deliberately. So the idea here is MIA talked about this very briefly. This is really, really pretty interesting. Take your eyeballs right now, right if you could do this and look straight up, you're to take your eyes and look straight up, you'd be looking at the, basically, the frontal cortex, literally, not metaphorically, literally leading the edge of brain evolution. Well, she mentioned this term, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the orbital frontal cortex and the pecunius, precisely, is those aspects of the brain that come online in metacognition when you're having a lucid dream. Where are they? They're here. This is why, when an ape looks back, when an ape looks up their forehead slope back, they're looking into space. There's nothing there, because they have not developed these metacognitive faculties. So basically, lucid dreaming is literally represented in the frontal edge of human and neuroanatomical evolution, which is no small thing. Understanding this, then therefore understands the pioneering role of what we're doing here, right the cutting edge aspect of what's taking place here, this perhaps can inspire us to keep hacking in the underbrush.
Because, how does evolution work? It advances like the tide, mixing metaphors, right? I'm at a place here in Mexico where these amazing tides, amazing teacher, these tides, when they come in in the morning, they advance and they receive. They advance and they received the advance, and they received just like our lucid dreaming. And so if we understand that, this is when we stumble and fall and hit the ground and come back up and wonder what we're doing. And you know, we're we're hacking through the underbrush, and we're doing it together. And then, most importantly, perhaps, we're doing this for the benefit of others, so that artists can then follow perhaps in these pioneering footsteps, and their enemy here, of course, is developing some elitist attitude, but realizing that what we're doing here can really help not merely ourselves as we grow up and evolve, but it can also help others, that we can therefore use this as A way to be of benefit to this world. And this is anybody who's done anything with me over the last couple of years. This is my rant every single session, right? If what we're doing here is not a benefit to the world and to others, it's irrelevant. It's just a feel good strategy, especially now when the world is on fire, take these principles of lucidity, bring them into your life. Bring them into the world which is in such desperate need of awareness, slash lucidity. And then what you're doing, whether you know it or not, is you're working with a very powerful, magical induction technique, technique which is the power of compassion. You do these practices, not just for yourself. You go to bed, you work with this every night, doing it for your family. You go to work for all sentient beings. It vastly opens and expands your event horizon, and you realize, you know what? This is not easy. Sometimes it's not a lot of fun. Sometimes, like nothing seems to be happening, but I'm going to keep going here, because I'm not doing this for myself, and you start to open up that way. Well, guess what happens when all these external, non human intelligences, if you believe in that sort of thing, these agencies, come down to lend a hand, because now you're actually is Ram Dass said, you know, you're a servant of peace. You're working on behalf of other sentient beings. So to me, I think it's a marvelous way for me to end up my little riff. Hope it didn't go too long to realize he recontex. Everything here is about opening the aperture of our awareness, opening our event horizons, looking at dreams in a new way, looking at our minds and hearts in a new way, looking at this world in a new way, and doing all of this really in the service of others. And if you do that, mark my words, little magic is going to happen in your life. So I know we're going to have some official Q and A here, but I wanted to say this because, again, I'm tickled pink that I didn't get shut out. It's the best power we've had in three days I've been here. I wanted to say what a massive gesture of gratitude to Mia and Alyssa, of course. I mean, Alyssa just makes everything happen. But I listen to every one of MIA presentations amazing. I mean, just so impressed. I learned a lot. She's just a total rock star. It's a delight to get to know her work a little bit more to spend time with her. So thank you, my dear, for such a magnificent job. It's been a delight. And then, really, thank all of you. You know, the wonderful couple 100 people that we have going through this program without you, and none of this would be happening. And so this is the other thing that that we need to be aware of. Mia did say something about this last week that this, this educational kind of pedagogical thing that's taking place here. There's magic happening between all of us, whether we know it or not, space time, their constructs, space and time doesn't really exist at these dimensions. So all the stuff that we're doing here, the kind of the support programs that Mia is going to be continuing with, what we do a nightclub, what we do in the Costa Rica program, we're working with this underlying connective tissue of consciousness, where at this deeper dimension of mind. We're it's all the same. We're all we all share the same fundamental bed of mind. We just forget. So with all that said, deep out of gratitude to all of you for being here, little magic takes place on a course like this, and this magic does not end. It can continue. And we'll create platforms where we can continue to do this so we can open it up for Q and A, sorry if I ran a little bit long, but I just got a little excited, and I just wanted to share some of my passion these days. So okay, feel free.
All right, I'm gonna unmute you. Lori, Oh, where'd you go? There we go.
Hi. Andrew, hi. Can you hear me? Okay, cool, yes, um, want to thank you for tonight. Every time I listen to you, I learn something very valuable. So thank you. And also a huge thanks to MIA for offering this course. I've been at this lucid dreaming game since about 2017 with with limited success, but through listening to Mia through these past five weeks and putting her techniques into practice. I'm just so thrilled to say that I had the most vivid, powerful, lucid dream I've had in my life. So thank you, Mia. I thought I'd just quickly share what worked for me this time around, and it has to do with my dream signs and when in my dream, when I realized I was lucid for the very first time, I tried the dream sign of blocking my nose. And what was interesting about that was I could breathe with my blocked nose, but my mind rationalized it and discounted it and said, Oh, well, you've just got a cold. Your nose is stuffy. You're not blocking your nose hard enough. You can't be dreaming. And I slipped back into non lucidity. And then the dream continued. I tried another dream sign, and in the past, I've used the hand flipping dream sign, which has worked for me once, but has never worked for me ever again. And Mia suggested try a technique where, during the day, you're looking at your hands, you stop, you pause, and you really, really look at the detail. And sure enough, I tried that in my dream, and boom, I became lucid. I had Cher come into my dream. She told me I was lucid. And I said, Yes, I know I'm lucid, but I don't know how to get out of it. And she said, Well, come sit next to me on this couch and we're going to talk about it. So I walked with her over the couch. Dream went on for a little bit, and then I popped out of the dream, and I was in my bed with my husband next to me, and I thought, Well, I'm just going to check to see if I'm really awake, and I plug my nose again I could breathe. And I thought, oh my, oh, OMG, I'm still asleep. So that's the first time I've had a nested dream like that. And I noticed my husband next to me in the dream. He was he was getting kind of agitated, and I saw Jesus. I just leaned over and I said, it's okay. It's okay. You're in a dream. I popped out again. I'm in bed again for a second time. Close my nose again, and I could breathe, and I realized, okay, now I'm out. I'm back in the waking state. But the question I have for both you and for Mia is, have you ever been in a dream where you've wanted to get out and you've been able to get out? Do you think it's a good idea to have an exit strategy?
Yeah, I can start with them. Make sure you share this dream with others in your experience. That's why share came into your dream, right? So sure, yeah, an exit strategy is always helpful. But I think what what's even more helpful is and you can do that. Exit strategies are not that difficult. You know, hold your eyes very, very still. Mia talked something a little bit about this last time. If you hold your eyes really, really still, you dream eyes, you're going to hold your physical eyes still. That's going to stop the REM that's going to kick you out. But what's more important for me is an entry strategy. Because just paraphrasing something that Trungpa Rinpoche said that can can apply here, when you're doing deeper stages, you know there is no way out. The magic is to discover that there's a way in. And so you may find that the real exit strategy is actually to go in and transform these particular experiences that may be bringing about this feeling that you somehow want to exit and somehow get out. So I would perhaps, depending on the strength of your lucidity, use this as an opportunity, maybe stage four Dream Yoga or whatever, to actually reverse your new normal kind of exit strategies and allow yourself to go back in and see what remains to be taught. Because fundamentally, again, understanding the dimension structure of your mind, your mind is good. Your mind, the mind structure all the way down to the base, is really divine and perfectly pure and good. And if you understand that and open yourself to it, boy, the treasures were just revealed. This is part of the initiation practice that I was referring to. Patrick Harper, you know, the kind of the willingness to stay with it. So Mia, do you have anything to add to that?
I just just pop in and say practically. Lori, if you use the emergency compassion response you were developing. So whatever it was that stimulated the strong sense of compassion and strength that can be if you're training that, whenever you feel discomfort, start with that, and that'll help retrain your default response. So instead of jumping out, you're like, using that to lean in, using that to lean in, and that'll help retrain that habit.
Yeah, because I wasn't I wouldn't say I was scared or I was frightened when that thought came up that, oh, I don't know how to get out of this, but there was, there was a sense of concern that if something should happen, I don't have an exit strategy here.
And if you, if you are confident that you can be with anything that comes up because you're holding the right perspective, then you won't have that concern, right? You'll, you'll be like, I'm here, and like Andrew said, The only way out is through and in deeper, deeper, deeper into our experiences.
Well, thank you so much both. This has been just an incredible six weeks, and thank you so so much. I bow to you both.
Oh, fire away. Joel. Unmute
yourself, buddy. Joel, George,
there we go. Am I unmuted? Yeah, yeah, we
can hear you. Yes. Okay, there
we go. Sorry, okay, a couple thing. So let me formulate my question here. This is still asking me to unmute here.
We can hear you, okay.
Now we hear you were on. Now you're off. There we go.
There we go. There we go. Technical difficulties, here, sorry, okay, I just want to reiterate I too have this has been profound for me as well. I also had, I guess, one of my most, yeah, probably my longest and most impactful lucid dreams, and it came from being very intentional. Some sitting meditation in the morning, lots of moving meditation, tai chi, walking meditation, and paying very close attention to reality, no podcasts, no music, none of that strong intention. And had an amazing, long, lucid dream, okay, but then because of that, and because in this is related to some of the stuff you said, like, like, ego has snuck its way in there, and now it's, I think what's happening is, like, now, because of that, now I'm trying to force it or something, because I'm like, Oh, I that was it. I would just was super intentional. I like, every second of the day, not quite, but I was, like, really paying attention to reality. And Sam, now I think that. And then I've been in a drought for like, two weeks. And so I'm like, I did this meditation, like, Okay, what? What's happening here? And, like, the answer I got was just like snapping out of, you know, just like becoming awake during the day. Spiritually, awake is a choice. Lucidity is a choice. And I'm like, it's, it's rubbing up against a little bit of some of the stuff you said. You know, choice is not the same as free will. It's not the same as forcing the unconscious. Like, I'm not trying to control the unconscious, but I'm just trying to become awake in the unconscious and but somehow I know that ego is slipping in there, and like trying to force stuff because of that, that experience I had two weeks ago, ego is now just like, okay, just it can happen every time you do that, every time you just be very intentional about paying attention during the day. So my question is, is lucidity just a choice? Just like snapping out of my, my, you know, being lost in thought like, because it's the same thing as that it should be. So I don't know, some some feedback on that, because it now I'm a little bit frustrated. Yeah. Totally, that experience. Yeah. So there, that's my question. Carmen, welcome
to the Mercurial nature of this path. And exactly what I was talking about, Joel, is, you know, the the kind of masculine, egoic we all do it. It worked. What's going to work again? It could. But one of the best things you can do is, is what they call self, liberate the antidote. Just let it go open, release it open, and then hit the Fresh Start button. In terms of being a choice depends on the spectrum of your identity and where you are when you're during the day, living during the day, lucidity, code words, other synonyms, through lucidity or mindfulness, awareness, have that choice. And therefore, again, one of the principal ways what is found now is found. Then the main reason we're non lucid. One of the main reasons we're non lucid, to the contents of our mind at night, is because we're non lucid, not aware during the day today, that's what it comes down to. So lucidity is a choice at that level. You have the capacity to do that, but unfortunately, we still have these unconscious, very powerful non lucid drivers buried in the lower spectrum of identity that will continue to derail you from that. So on a conscious level, yes, it is a choice. And on a conscious level, you still have these patterns that are operative. And so if we understand that, we smile at it, we handshake it, we establish a friendly relationship to it, not an adversarial one. And then eventually, this is the part of the psycho spiritual path. Is one of progressive purification. You know, you'll find yourself becoming more and more mindful, more and more lucid, and then eventually that will naturally continue so somewhere in there, understanding the spectrum of our being and how this plays out at conscious and unconscious levels. Okay,
real quick. Explain self. Liberate the antidote again. Real quick. Let go of that
exactly just, you know, you very often, what you'll find there, there's, there's so much to say. You know, there's two ways obtain lucidity, the path of effort and the path of fruition, path of openness. So most of what's been emphasized here, which, which is spot on, is the path of effort, traditional causality. Do this, you'll get that it follows every rule of discipline and training. But what's truly unique, and this is another reason why the nocturnal mind does not play by the standard rules. Believe it or not, lucidity is the natural state. The state of mind is aware and always lucid, and so a more fruitional, if you know the term social, more fruition approach is what relaxation and relax into the nature of your mind. Welcome to lucidity. And so what do we do? Are they? Are they opposed to each other? Not at all. One's a relative approach that we engage in a course like this is fantastic, but the other is a little bit more traditional. This is totally, by the way, Dream Yoga not lucid dreaming. You will not find this anywhere in lucid dreaming. But this is what makes Dream Yoga unique. On one level, the only thing you have to really do is do nothing. Just do it. Open, completely relax into the nature of your mind. That mind is always already lucid. So we dance between those two. Sometimes we bring in Apollo and we do the the more effortful, effortful approach, and then other times, that's the self liberate. The handle part is you just let everything go. You just simply open. One way to talk about a lucid dream. It's an open dream. Meditation is habituation to open us, and so as we become more fluid with opening, this is why meditators have more lucid dreams. And in mind of an advanced meditator, all their dreams are lucid because they're completely open to the contents of their mind. So for us, we play with both of them. Do the role of effort, do the role of openness, dance with both actors.
Ooh, that was good. Okay. Thank you. That's gold. Appreciate it
cool. I'm gonna, I'm just gonna take one or two more, if that's okay. I'm gonna turn it over to Mia, because I'm actually in a situation where I need, I need to run, but I do want to take, if it's helpful, I guess it's Tay. Is that right? Tay? And then Erica, and then I'll hand the baton back on to my esteemed colleague. Hey, bud
Hippocrene. I just missed about that anyway, yeah, so I'm wondering about like, Dream Yoga stage five, yeah, because that's kind of where I am in my practice. I've been lucid dreaming 15 years plus, not counting my past lives, where I trained in the Mystery Schools, ancient and Atlantis and that kind of stuff. Yeah. So I lot of past life work as well. And then the other day, actually, on Africa day, I had this experience where I woke up in some really deep, deep Tantras. It was interwoven with Bardos, and then emerged with like 36 billion limbs through hypnopompia into the waking world. And the 36 billion limbs was every human on this plane of reality, and then it was like a sense, similar to moksha, whereas an amalgamation of all of these recollections of past lives. So I'm wondering, after that have been almost consistently just deity dreams, either lucid or non lucid. So I know the non dual practices, yet I'm just I'm wondering about, like, how I acknowledge like the Advaita and like that, yeah, the oneness and the connectivity. You then in a dream, I'm still with that sense of oneness when I experienced like Zeus, like I saw Zeus, and then like Zeus, is Zeus, and I'm I, I still accept that there's this kind of like oneness here. Is there any suggestions or advice? I mean, when interacting with deities and going to other locals and things of that nature, how we kind of bridge this individual and collective connectivity?
Well, I think I will love you. Asked you your own question. I mean, first of all, very cool. Tap yourself on the back one or two times, and then let the whole thing go. I think, you know what I'm hearing from this. The most important thing is this kind of cross pollination, or the ability to take this Hitchhiker's Guide to the cosmos. And I would do it in a witnessing capacity. So it's not clear to me whether you're doing this in the context of full lucidity, or you're doing this in other words, you're completely aware that you're dreaming when this is happening, or you're retrofitting a sense of awareness retrospectively. So that's one thing that's not clear to me. So when you're going through this experience, are you aware that you're dreaming when you're having it, or is that retrospectively fitted after you come out of the experience when you wake up?
No, no. I get fully, fully lucid, and then I go into the clouds, and then I'm chilling with the gods. It's still the gods of the gods I Mia. Then I have, like the deity form amongst the deities, I'm still aware that there's a kind of non duality and that they are, yeah, it's like juice as juice is omniscient. I'm not omniscient, and I accept that, in a sense, yet then I still kind of just the the separation and the connectivity between the self and the other within deity, dream, yoga, five, sort of,
yeah. I just get, I guess I need a little bit help with of understanding a little bit more clarity what, what the actual question is, how to relate to all this, or how to bring it within the context of stage five, because you're, I mean, super cool stuff, but I'm hearing like three or four different embedded questions here, and I'm not sure which Dart you want me to throw at? Is it like five years? Yeah, within
dream stage,
I'm sorry,
yeah, exactly, in dream stage of five, how do we bridge that conundrum between the individual and the non jewel? Because I have, like a form that she the deity forms of Shiva and other like forms manifesting as a deity. Then over success of lucid dreams, have acquired my own sort of deity form that connects with other deities as well. Yeah,
so if I'm understanding what you're saying is, you know, just being willing to be aware of this dance between the openness that brings about the sense of non duality and unity with every everything that you're feeling, and then, if I'm hearing you properly, then what takes place with this contraction when you come back into a self sense, and so your relationship of what you're perceiving to be your self sense With what you're perceiving in the display of your mind for the purposes of time, I might recommend, I think one, one set of teachings might be of particular interest to you. And now do a Shaiva Tantra. It's called the spanda, s, p, a, n, d, a tradition. There's a marvelous book here called there's many, but the one that really comes to mind, especially in relation to some of the deities you're referring to. It's called the doctrine of vibration by Mark. I highly recommend it, because your your your question and your statements. It's very rich. There's so much that can be unpacked here, but this particular doctrinal pulsation will, I think, will really help you understand what's taking place when you open to this magnificent, almost cosmic display of the mind. And yet, there's, there's this kind of pulsation back to a self sense in relationship to that contraction, I mean, to that expansion. So I'm not sure where else I can go further than what I just said without really going into the weeds with you, and for the purposes of time, I'm not sure this is the best format for that, but in terms of material that can help you understand the spando spando Karakas, the doctrine of vibration, is definitely what popped into my mind in terms of what you're
playing with. Thank you so so much. Doctor of vibration and then
your big canvas, like, almost like the manda Lud I'm seeing over your shoulder. So you know,
sorry, Mia, go ahead. No, Andrew, I know that you had to jump off, so I just wanted to just jump in quickly and just see. Just say thank you so much for being here tonight and for taking us into just that bigger, more expansive context of these practices, I think for all of us, I mean, gosh, I've got pages of notes that I feel in my heart. Just a massive thank you for the gift you've given us tonight. So especially on holiday, I can't believe you're this is your version of holiday. You're still working out here, but a big thank you. I'll see if Eric and Doug saw want to ask the question, but I just everyone, please say a big thank you to Andrew, and we'll excuse him back to his beautiful vacation. Please enjoy your time, obviously in
extraordinarily good hands. I mean, Mia, you're such a rock star. Love you. See you in Costa Rica, if not before. So nice to briefly make contact with everybody here, super fun. And this is only a game in town, right? Doing this stuff for the benefit of when others is so delighted, so
beautiful, Erica, Doug, I'm not sure if I if I'm sure you may have had a question specifically for Andrew. I know Erica, your hands down, Doug, would you still like to ask a question else I can do my absolute best to see if it's of any if I can be of any use to you, and we'll take this as the last question. Hi, Doug, hi.
I'm glad you're going to do absolute best.
I was not my half best, I promise.
It's a question that of context, I guess I did a lot of this kind of lucid dreaming, astral projection stuff in the late 70s, early 80s, and got to the point where I could either be in the dream lucid or I could drop down and experience it at all as chemical, hormonal nervous system activity and play with Kundalini and everything. And essentially, spent a few months, I don't know, maybe years in Turia and having a lot of, I guess, advanced spiritual meditative experiences, because I was just meditating through the whole night and and so eventually, however, 24/7 consciousness just seemed to be a little bit tiring. And I'm wondering if there's a shift that one needs to make. I mean, I had a relatively immature ego at the time. Here I am, 40 years later, going back. But there's a part of me that you know, the unconscious going well, do you really want to go back there? You know, like, what? What are you actually going to get? And the only, the only thing that I'm interested in is, I, I suppose, making sure I'm prepared for the Bardo so I can navigate it more consciously. But, you know, in Turia and, and, because that's where Andrew seems to be pointing, you know, what's, what do you do once you get tour? That's a
great, well, I know that's a really great question, right? And it's funny, because I think when we are in this perspective, and we think about not just being conscious 24/7, but the infinity of time, like, when you really like sense into that, there's a, oh, my Are you? Like? That's why the Buddhists are, like, get me out of here, right? Is very nice,
some Oblivion, oblivion. But the
curious thing isn't, I will, I'll be clear, like, I have had practices with sleep yoga, but I wouldn't I've never achieved 24 hour consciousness. I'd have never been in that state. So I will share, from my understanding, from talking to others who have had more significant experiences, from the teachings that I've received, and from much wiser beings having also been curious about this. And what I have come to understood conceptually is that when you are truly in a non dual state, there is no exhaustion. The tired exhaustion we feel is an ago construct. It's that's a psychological tiredness of a self structure that's trying to be in a non dual state, and it's really popping in and popping out and popping in and popping out, and it's feeling tired if you were truly in a fully present, aware state, 24/7, time doesn't exist. There is no exhaustion. There is no tiredness. There is no 24/7, it is no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you know what I mean. So I think what would be, I think if you feel fear around that it might just be like Andrew said, like, Ah, look how the part of me that doesn't understand this would like to destroy this. It would like to make this exhausting. So I don't try,
you know, I think you're probably right, because the the non dual thing is not something I've ever spent a lot of time doing. And so I suspect that if I made that shift to to that the exhaustion would go away. But part of I also taught my son to lucid dream when he was 13 and 14, and by the time he was 16, he had mastered it. He could create entire worlds and realms and paint them and fly and, you know, eventually he meditated. But, you know, when I asked him later why he stopped, he says it just got tiring like, you know, there's just a tiringness to 24/7 consciousness, you know. And I think that's
what Andrew was pointing at today, which I love, right? Which is this idea that when we approach it from the waking state, ego's perspective of domination, of intention, of control, which, again, balance, because sometimes we need these training wheels to get into these states to groove these these practices. But you know, I was working with a client today who had the exact same experience. He's like, he's doing a lot of trauma healing during the day, and then he's going to his lucid dreams at night. He's like, I don't wanna, I'm like, do the non dual practices. Like, if you're a practice, you're experienced, you're a practitioner. Stop messing with the psychological content. That's what's tiring. If you're if you're like, really, at that stage where you've got enough stabilized lucidity that you're bored and tired and it feels exhausting, there's probably a great exact time to move into non trivial, non dual practices.
Yeah, okay, I really appreciate that. So thank you very much. I
wish you all the best. Doug, that's beautiful. All right, everybody. Well, I just again, thank you so much for your time, your care, your effort. For those of you who completed the feedback survey, just want to say a big thank you. I'll send out the link again. We really want to, I really want to understand my component, the teaching. Andrew is a rock star. We don't need feedback on him, but I'm learning. I'm growing, and I certainly want to make sure that in the future, as we do his offerings, we can tweak it to meet your needs so if you want to fill out the feedback survey please do that let me know what worked, what could be improved. And of course if you were interested in coming to Costa Rica I'll send that out as well be so cool.