Lucid Living Topic - part II

Quest for Lucidity General Lucidness
21

I’m actually just reading the Tibetan Yogas of dream and sleep and I’m finding it very interesting. I also just finshed a book on ZEN and it dealt with what this thread has labled lucid living.

I’ve been trying it lately with not that much sucess in inducing lucid dreams (but there is no rush) but I do think that it works well during new or pressure situations.

Just a question for anyone (since a lot of the posts from this thread seem quite old) have you found lucid living a helpful wasy to induce ludic dreams?

ypm.

22

in this topic everybody’s tell his of her definition of Lucid Living, but i’d like to see some “techniques” to Live Lucid,…

yeah the thing that comes up in my mind is zazen-meditation, or mindfullness mediation in general, but i personally find it hard to practice it, because it’s difficult to see how much benifit you get from zazen.

i mean, if i saw progres, it would keep my motivation up.

Do you have any ideas to determine how aware you are? At what level your awareness is?
It would help me a lot to practice zazen again because then i can say: hey, look at that, i’m being more aware than last week!

23

Yes it helped me a while ago. Although it takes more time before you notice any difference (when compared to other techs), I think LL can have a deeper impact on the long term. I used the method of Atisha (it’s a very simple one: treat everything as if it were a dream) combined with attempting to live in the Now (by condensing thoughts and the perception of space-time in the moment itself). Although I only had a few glimpses of the Now, the practice itself had some beneficial effects: if you try to grasp the moment, you develop more awareness in carnal perceptions, and your worries disappear entirely. Even your thoughts diminish so you can start living fully conscious of your being at that moment (it also inspired me to make poems about it).
This exercise increased general awareness in my dreams, so I became lucid not by some dreamsign, but by the dream feeling itself.
I’m glad you asked that… it reminds me to practice it again :smile:

24

Hi mystic thanks for the response. I am currently trying to practice lucid living using the instructions from “The Tibetan Yogas of dream and sleep” and I agree with what you wrote about lucid living.

I think your explaination actually answers Isaac’s question, the reason that it is difficult to practice is becuase the progress seems slow, even though in the end it is probably the most rewarding.

One peice of progress that I have noticed in my dreams is an increased “mental” presense. I don’t seem to be as flighty or “fooled” by things, this has occured since I began practicing this in conjunction with meditation.

I’ve had two lucid dreams this month (not too many) and they have both been as a result of this. I also noticed that in the past when I became lucid I was usually excited and the dream woudl often fade. Since practicing lucid living I have been relaxed and more in control during my two lucid dreams.

Is this the atisha method that you use: https://www.osholeela.com/meditation/atisha.html

If you start practicing lucid living again be sure to post any progress here, I’m sure it will help isaac and I (and any other practitioners) to know what progrss “looks” like.

ypm.

25

I am still a little unclear on what lucid living is.

I can recreate the exitment of being in an LD by really looking at my real life enviroment, and pretending it’s a dream. I can look at it and say, it’s not real, but picture quality is real. I feel “all powerful”.

When you say “choose” to have an emotion, I don’t agree. What you are actually saying is “Should I choose to react and ponder upon this emotion?” It is a judgement of each emotion, and clarifying whether you want to experience it any longer.

Because, ofcourse, you can never stop yourself from feeling emotions.

Now, onto awareness. I thought the idea of the conscious was to be aware of a singal thing. It would be very very hard to take in all the information and consciously study it, compare it to stored data, and file it as you feel fit. Our sub-conscious does this for us. I don’t think that we have the mental ability to process that much information at once.

On top of this, you would have to take stored data, and reajust it to fit the new template that the current data could have created. This could involve reading, and gaining of vocabulary.

The subconscious could process this in one of two ways:

  1. Reanalyse all the data it has got
  2. Reanaylse data based on a list of data to eb reanalysed. So that when the data coems up it is reanalysed before beign submitted to the conscious.

This would contribute to the slow alteration of memory. It would also be extreamly hard to consciously do. You would have to do thsi data analysis, whiel still concentrating on all your senses.

However, it is possible to train yourself to focus on one sense, with information coming in from another sense.

Now which one is it that is lucid living?

26

ypm: no that’s not the method I used… I used this one:

(from kagyu-asia.com/t_7points_atisha.html )

Technodreamer: Lucid living isn’t about analyzing every perception coming from your senses (at least imo). In fact, true lucid living goes beyond the analytical mind. Instead of clinging to every perception, you have to let it all go through you. Don’t get attached, don’t analyze and try not to think about it, but become aware of it and just let it be. There’s no need to think about it. It isn’t about perceptual recognition but about letting it all go, accepting the perception as it is without trying to grasp it. Like a mirror, the things you perceive doesn’t affect you in any way, but are reflected back by your mind, which remains undisturbed by their existence.
Also, realize you’re not living in the future, nor in the past but that you’re here Now. I say realize, not visualize or think about… To feel your awareness is far more important than to think about it, because that would cause too much identification with the world and keeps the mind away from the Now. Realize it doesn’t help you anything if you keep distracted by your thoughts, which always reside in the past or the future, but never in the Now. The mind is always escaping the Now, thereby creating lots of distractions and mental suffering. In essence, lucid living is exactly about residing back into the Now, to find back that ungraspable stillness. And you can only do that if you let go of the future and the past, because staying there only creates a gap between where you are and where you want to be… If you can do that, you’re very intensely aware of and in peace with the world as it is Now, without any distractions from the analytical mind. I think this is the very core of lucid living… Although it may take years of meditation and practice before you reach it, the way along is also very colorful and rich of nice experiences, glimpses of what’s yet to come.

27

Ah!! I understand now. So if you were to be an expert in this you would even be able to see two dimensionaly!

28

Hey Technodreamer, what do you mean by see two dimensionally?

ypm.

29

Yeah I too don’t understand what you meant by that… LL isn’t about reducing your physical sight or anything. Instead, it should bring about more dimensions, more depth to your (inner) life.

30

Our eyes transmitted the data they recieve in two dimensions. These dimensions are Width and Height. Because of the way the eye works, it detects a projection of light on the retina. This is a 2D picture.

Dimensions typically go light this:
0D
1D=Height
2D=Height and Wdith
3D=Height, Width and Depth
4D (Yes, our world is 4 dimensional not 3 dimensional)=Height, Width, Depth and Trength

Theoreticly it goes on, but there has only been evidence to support the fourth dimension at the moment.

If you were to see the data you see from your eyes, as it is really shown, it should all be 2D. It is only a “filter” that makes it 3D.

31

But even then… the idea we have about “2D” is based upon a mental model we have developped in order to interprete the world in such a way as it is achievable by the brain. Lucid living isn’t about catching light when it touches the retina Now. It isn’t something you can perceive objectively, but an entirely subjective practice in which you work with your inner eye first. If you develop your inner dimensions to live closer to the Now (so this has nothing to do with light entering falling upon the retina), you will probably also notice changes in your physical perceptions. But these changes aren’t literally physical changes, but more changes in your shift of awareness which result in another perspective towards the world and reality; a perspective which keeps you more centered in the Now. It’s pretty difficult to explain it in words… it’s like the moment you become lucid during a dream: can you exactly describe that experience in words? I think words fail here… only a direct experience can tell you exactly what it is.

32

I’m confused :cry:

:tongue:

33

Lol. Sorry about my incompetence to explain it in a better way… :smile:

Read Eckhart Tolle - Practicing the Power of Now. He probably explains it more properly :smile:

But really, even if one finds the right words to describe it in the most accurate way, you have to experience it to know exactly what is meant. How to experience it? To shift your awareness to your inner self, observe the flow of your thoughts and to look upon the world as an observer instead of a participant. This way you automatically focuse on the Now, you don’t think anymore about the past nor the future, and every perception is seen as a timeless manifestation of the moment. The road is long before you can live your life fully in the Now, but even if you’ve just started practicing, you’ll notice various subtle changes. These include a sense of profound calmness and peace, a formless broadening of your conscious perception (though this experience can quickly destabilize you because if you don’t keep it central, a sudden rush of adrenalin can overwhelm you), a glimpse of timelessness (I often get this when I try to grasp the sound of rustling leaves, or raindrops falling on the roof),…

The only way to understand it is to experience it.

34

One of the things that got me interesting in lucid living (besides reading a book on Zen) was this Stephen Lebarge book (the new Lucid Dreaming book with the CD) where he talks about awareness.

He talks about increasing your awarenss throughout the day. He says something like “it’s not hear, smell, taste. It’s I hear, I smell, I taste.”

That’s sort of how I think aobut it, so much of what we do throughout the day is just areaction, we don’t even think about it and we do it. Lucid living is being aware of yourself throughout the day and what you are doing (simplified).

I hope that helps.

ypm.

ypm.

35

Hey guys, check out my thread about the stairway supplementary technique, its a version of lucid living that I’m testing out at the moment. :wink:

36

i think this “lucid living” is good, i did not have good control over dreams until i had somewhat good control over my everyday life, lucid dreraming requires control and no laziness, for example, you may want to go back to sleep instead of writing in your dj but you need to write, you should also cut out stupid indulgences in your daily life that make you weaker, for example, if you are fatty: lose weiught, if you are very shy (like i was): learn to get over it. als no procrastination and worrying about stupid stuff. the more you have discipline in real life: probably equals more control in dreams, but lds also can be inspiring, if you fly in a dream, you feel like you can push your limits in real life as well, they also teach you not to worry as much and take chances (like you would in a dream)

37

Great topic going on here.

I was thinking about lucid living last night (or Waking Life, as in the movie). I know that dreamtime consciousness often reflects waking consciousness. It’s a scary premise: Over the course of a day we have 10,000 thoughtless thoughts, often unrelated to one another. We’ll spend most of our time in hurried transition even as were doing something already (like grabbing a handfull of popcorn while not even finshed chewing the previous one and watching mindless television). It’s no wonder we have trouble staying lucid in dreams, we become slaves to the reality of the envirement, zombies if you will, just as in waking life. Is this the mental focus we should entrust our dreaming selves with?

Try and recall everything that happened in 14 hours of wakefullness yesterday and you’ll probably come up with whatever you recall from a typical dream in the morning. So much goes unprocessed, billions of details, nuances, sentances. events. I can vaguely remember what people were wearing, where they were standing, what they were saying. I am a waking zombie. No more lucid in life than as in most dreams.

It’s amazing how such a simple moment of looking at the world as if you were infact dreaming can slow everything down, and you can just breath. A little bit of wonder is introduced, colors glow, and what you hear is crisp, you can feel your pulse and your breath and the humorous realization of existing.

Waking life IS a dream too. The problem is it is a shared dream with too many people, too many rules, most of which are uneccessary. Plus the whole being mortal thing. However, it is tantamount to dreams as being a reality we experience soley in the subjective world of ourselves. Why not treat it as such? If for nothing else, the betterment of night dreams.

38

In my dreams I would find myself marvelling how real everything looked. While in the dream I find it amazing that my subconcious could create such a flawless reinactment of ‘the real world’ so when im awake sometimes i try to put myself in the same position. i imagine that everything around me could all be my own creation and how i wouldnt even know. Its a strange feeling, like knowing that in the spaces where i cant see anything there may just be nothing there at all unless i think it into existance.
This is my first post on this site in a year or so i think. Gona gte fully back into it for awhile again(lucid dreaming of course).

39

I may sound stupid but i’m just trying to clarify from what i’ve been reading on this, Lucid Living is trying to recreate whatever feeling you get when you’re in an LD in your waking. This could explain why certain people are just masters at lucid dreaming and never think anything of it, they have the feeling they get while in a LD all the time so its nothing too far out of the ordinary at least feelings wise for them.

If this is what LL is then it seems simpler them some of the other technqiues the only trick is learning how you feel in an LD and to do that you’d need to have a few.

40

Seriously one of the best texts written about awareness/ lucid living. It`s 8 pages long, but worth every second of your time :razz: