Lucid Living Topic

Quest for Lucidity
21

Lucid living means being HERE, nothing less, nothing more. Allthough we are always here, our awareness is not (especially when we don’t like what we see) and this can cause a lot of troubles. You have to pay attention if you cross a road with a lot of traffic, otherwise…

Easy said, but how are we going to get this monkey-mind here and now? Use of force won’t help you (could even have reverse results, suppression is a shortcut to anger). Still, SOME effort is needed. A complete and broad awareness of everything is too difficult in the beginning, some gentle focusing is a good first step. A very good technique in my experience is counting your breath. Breath is a beautiful mindfulness tool, it is the magic link between awareness and present moment. So count your breath (1-5 or 1-10 and then repeat) and watch it (don’t count like a machine!). If you count 1-5 you will probably notice that mind easily drifts of before you even reach 5! Nothing wrong with that, on the contrary you finally become aware of monkey-mind instead of taking it for granted (see the parallel with lucid dreaming?). Just return to breath, start again, never give up. Have courage, be patient, very slowly you will reach a more stable and broader awareness. Why? Well, if you see the same movie 1000 times, again and again, the movie will get very boring :wink: .

22

This is one of the best topics I’ve seen come to these boards so far… even before they switched over I think! Just reading it has started me thinking about some things that are blossoming into personal insight. :smile:

The strange thing for me is that it is a timely arival for such a topic because only recently have I begun to practice LL sort of on my own direction. It seemed logical to me to try to become more aware of what I was doing all the time and what was going on around me.
My thought was this… during a dream there is no sense of self. You are just as much a part of the storyline that your brain is coming up with as any other character in the dream. You go with the flow… strange things seem logical because you are part of the story. When you become lucid what you are in fact doing is allowing your sense of self to take over your point of view in the dream.
So often in my waking life I will come to and realize that I have been going along automatically completeing tasks in my life. You can drive for two hours and not once actually focus on your driving or even your own thoughts! So… it made sense to me to try foster that sense of being in the present during waking moments to strengthen it in my dreams.

What I do is to, whenever it comes to mind, allow myself to be aware of myself first. Am I sitting? Standing? Walking? What does it feel like? What am I thinking about?
Then, keeping that in mind I extend my awareness out to other things. The textures of objects around me… their color and the way shadows sit on them. I try to take note of how things feel and smell… etc. All the while trying to maintain a clear sense of self… that it is I who am looking out on the world and experincing it (this is what I think of as being lucid… understanding the world at the moment).
Then I sort of imagine that this moment is a dream. This is how real things are in a dream and I am present and in control, free to do whatever I like.

I don’t think that you have to find time to do this. Just do it. since you are increasing the amount of attention you are paying to the world you can do it while driving, reading or even in a board meeting (ugh that kind of rhymed). :bored: It may be hard to get that all working in your head at first because you aren’t used to doing it but you will be able to handle it for longer and longer periods of time. It will also occur to you to do it more often and I think this is what will foster the awakening of your sense of self during the dream with greater frequency.

23

LostBoy:

I agree, and I think that’s the entire point of the excersise. I guess you could consider it a form of workout. Most people (Well, me anyway) have trouble lifting weights for extended periods of time. After time though, this of course gets easier.

It’s the same principal with LL. After a while you might be able to remain in that state for hours at a time. After that, I think the next step is to get the mind so used to it that it does it automatically.

That’s my goal anyway. LL, for me, gives me better control over what 'm doing, and I find I don’t make any small mistakes due to an absent mind.

24

Everybody:

Thank you all so much. My original intent on posting this in its own topic has come to frution and I have all you to thank for it. All your ideas and very interesting and wonderful.

Atheist:

I agree very much. I, too, have meditation for about a year. And with all things, you must start out slow. This parallels (like LostBoy said) with just about anything. Lifting weights, exercise, etc. The fact is, it IS an exercise. It’s well known that mental exercise is almost identical in every fashion to physical exercise…look at learning! You start out with something slow and make it a part of you, eventually, it will grow. This is especially true with mental exercises.

I believe all these RC’s and xILD’s (where x = M,D, etc. ) :smile: all boil down to this: Lucid Living. They are all very good techniques and with good practice, they will help increase your LL and thus, your LDs.

So why stop there?

That’s what this topic is for. Since LL (and LD’ing in general) is a slow process, if we start our ‘training’ using LL as well as other techniques, by the time we start having LDs, we will have a great foundation which to start our goal upon (LDs every night).

I hope that everyone can get a chance to see and understand the benefits of such things as LL. Especially for us LD’ers. It’s importance and effects are astronomically important.

“All roads lead to LL, in the LD realm”.

Thanks again!

25

Indeed.

26

Maybe it would be a good Idea to start LL not by concentrating on everyting around you but just on on thing. It is easier if you are just starting it. I was trying to use all my senses while eating an apple.

27

Spot on Apollo. I think thats a great way to start and when I am doing it during the day, I usually build my attention as well. I’ll pay attention to how I feel first then usually start watching something (people, plants, patterns of sunlight) as I keep myself in mind then I’ll begin listening to whats going on around me… etc.

When you are beginning you might focus as much as you can on just eating an apple but also make sure you are keeping yourself aware that it is you doing so and how it feels for you to be eating… not just what the apple looks, smells and tastes like. Its that presence of self that creates the lucidity I think.

I try to pay attention to as many things as possible now but a good way to do it at the beginning would be to just pay attention to the details of one thing. Then as you get used to holding all of these details in mind add another things until you have your five senses (or six if you’re able to do that. :smile: ) all working at once. Sounds good to me.

28

Oh yes, investigate! Try to find out the exact boundaries of self. What is “in” and what is “out”? I don’t mean philosophize about it, I mean experience without any presumptions. What is “you”? Where does “self” begin and where does “self” end? Taste the apple: is it really “me” tasting some object “outside me” called “apple”? Don’t be satisfied with the easy answers that pop-up in the head, doubt is your best friend. LL is the perfect place where we can test all our deepest assumptions about self and reality.

29

Ha ha… XILD. Xylophone Induced Lucid Dream?
Hey, people have come up with weirder ones.

30

I think this topic should be a sticky. I know we’re developing a lot of them up there but it seems sticky worthy to me. I think its a valid type of excercise to help people attain a greater degree of lucidity and it would be helpful perhaps to have a permanent location for it.

31

in the guid to lucidity on “bird’s lucid dreaming website” they define what you call Lucid Living to be “aware of your awareness”. I think this text summarise some of the thoughts in this topic on a good way.

consciousdreaming.com/lucid- … m.htm#five

I’ve just begun my ‘quest for lucidity’ by every now and then see if i am aware of my suroundings and if i’m aware of my awareness.

I think it could be quite good to begin with this, and then when your frequency of awareness checks becomes higher you could try to have longer and more aware periods.

32

Yep, and Bird pays also attention to the topic in his “Ultimate Manual”: chapter XI. “Waking World Applications: Lucid Waking”. Even includes the famous “meditation upon death”-exercise for the LL-hardliners :biggrin: . Good stuff.

He calls it Lucid Waking, but I’m more fond of our TTM-forum acronym Lucid Living, because it transcends all separations, it is total, all-inclusive: LL encompasses Lucid Dreaming AND Lucid Waking and every other thinkable (and non-thinkable) application of awareness training.

33

Greetings Everybody -

First off, I’m VERY happy to see that this has become a Sticky Topic. It was slightly my original intention (thus the name, Lucid Living Topic). As has been discussed, I believe this is the basis of all lucid dreaming and needs to be addressed and talked about by all of us.

Fixos: Thank you SO much for the link. The author has hit on MANY things I firmly believe in. Especially the part about meditation its relation to lucid dreaming. If you haven’t read this yet, I strongly enourage each and everyone on this board to puruse and/or read it.

LL has, essentially, the same goal and results as LL. Meditation is a natural state of being and has been a time-tested method of the discipline of increasing awareness, which has benefits unparalled by any other mental exercise.

One thing that has greatly concerned me is the whole RC regimine. I agree that RCs are essential if not vital to lucid dreaming, but it’s very hard to understand when to do them. That is a whole other topic, but in relation to LL, I find that more and more of my RCs come from the fact that I get that feeling that I might be dreaming. Those who have had LDs can understand the rush you get when you think you might be dreaming (before the BIG rush of realizing you’re dreaming). For example, I see something odd and get that feeling that I might be dreaming, the pit in my stomach. I then perform a FULL reality check (see the link posted by Fixos on what I mean by FULL). This is my goal for RCs. I want to relate my RCs to the actual possibility of dreaming instead of randomness. I still check them randomly, but I want to lessen that and increase my RCs to actual PROVE I’m not dreaming.

I hope that makes sense, but I have been doing consistent reality checks for a year, and until I started practicing LL, I had never actually done one in a dream. I recently have had my first experience of doing a reality check while dreaming. For some people, just doing RCs randomly will help spill over into the nighttime, but not me.

Well, I would be really interested in hearing everyone’s ideas on RCs and LL. Basically what do you think should change about RCs in relation to the LL reality? Anything? Nothing? Everything? Also, for those of you who have seriously delved into this practice, have you noticed an increase in RCs in dreams?

As always, thank you so much for listening and sharing.

34

Hello everyone, I was just reading through this topic, and thought I’d share with you all a website that has really helped me to come to a clearer understanding of what reality is, and how it works.

nehrer.net/

Hope it helps,
Simon.

35

long time no post in this tread. If no one have something new to add here it would be nice to hear the progress of everyones attemp in lucid living. Me myself just found out one important thing i was missing in my attempts - to listen. To listen to everything around you the same time as you look around and take notice of your surroundings. It’s very hard to hear things before you see them (xept for cars and stuffs like that) and it’s also very hard to concentrate on all on the same time. But, if you really try to concentrate on both sounds and visuals i found that it was more easy to stay in the state of awareness without your thoughts flying away for you.

I’ve also found a nice list on the things to focus on when being as aware as possible. I hope this list will help some beginners atleast (it helped me). Hopefully it will bring something to more experienced Lucid Livers too. I found the list on this web page/web book:

home.no/lucid/The%20World%20of%2 … glish.html

  1. Look sight all around. Try to perceive the surrounding world, wealth/riches and variety of its forms, color, motion, space.

  2. Hearing listen to the diverse sounds, including the simple miracle of speech and the magic of music, to their loudness, to timbre, key.

  3. Touch become acquainted with the objects/subjects by feel/to the touch (smooth they, rough, dry, sticky or moist), by weight (heavy, the lungs, continuous or hollow), they do cause pleasure, pain, by heat-, cold and so on. Focus attention also to your health into the given moment and compare it with the fact that you felt in another time: fatigue either cheerfulness, freedom or stress/voltage, pain or comfort, etc.

  4. Taste try to the taste everything that you want: different products and substances or try to recall and to visualize entirely their taste.

  5. Sense of smell try to recall and to visualize as much as possible the smells: the excited body, the earth/ ground, incense, smoke, perfumery, coffee, pommel, alcohol, sea.

  6. Respiration focus attention on your respiration. Minute ago you, probably, were not aware in the fact that breathe, although, executing this exercise, inhaled and breathed out once fifty. Detain respiration by several seconds. Breathe out. Now deeply inhale. You see that realization of its respiration gives to you the possibility to change it by random pattern.

  7. of emotion focus attention on your emotions. Recall how differ anger from gladness, tranquillity from the excitation. Recall other emotions, the it is greater, the better. Try to determine how actually they they are perceived?

  8. Of thoughts Sosredotoch’tes’ on your thoughts O than you they did think, executing this exercise? About which you do think now? By how a real do seem you thoughts?

  9. “4” try to realize the fact that your world always contains your “4”. On William James’s observation, the basis of the process of recognition is the fact that precisely I see, I hear, I perceive, 4 dumayushch. You are not that the fact that you see, you hear, you think or feel - you only take in this. In other words, you are the one who realizes. You always in the center of your multidimensional universe of recognition, but you do not always clearly realize yourselves. Repeat briefly entire exercise again with the following difference: controlling its recognition be aware in the fact that observing - these are precisely you. (“I see the light/world of…”).

  10. The realization of realization finally, realize your realization. Usually consciousness is focused on the objects, which are located out of us, but in this case it auto can be the object of knowledge. From an ordinary point of view we seem ourselves by the self-contained, sole center of consciousness, in our internal world. However, mysticisms assert that we all, in the final analysis, are one, infinite consciousness, which there is a source of life. this knowledge is difficultly to adequately express by words.

thx for listening (reading) :content:

36

Speaking of using all the senses when practicing LL, I recently have noticed (no doubt due to my meditation regimine), that when I have those LL moments, that all of a sudden, I become simultaneously aware of all my senses at once.

Unfortunately, some more than others.

This is what I’m currently working on. When I practice LL or have LL moments, I try to notice which senses are being more in tune than others and work on an all-around consciousness involving each sense equally. I try to work on experiencing the same object/situation/whatever with as many senses as possible and notice the differences and similarities between each sense.

It’s amazing how much we ignore what our senses tell us and retreat to the small part of the brain which makes us think and plan.

It’s amazing and beautiful to notice and enjoy the simple sense of our senses.

37

Concentration is a funny thing.

While the subconscious mind is quite able to multi-task, performing all kinds of necessary tasks at the same time, the conscious mind can really only concentrate on one thing at a time.

It’s like Windows (sorry to get technical here). It may look like you’re running Internet Explorer, Outlook and Media Player all at once, but in fact that’s not the case. The CPU is still only ever doing one thing at once, it just juggles it’s time around all these different tasks.

I believe this is how the conscious mind works as well. While you are practising LL, you may not realise it but you are only probing 1 sense at a time for input. The trick is to spend as little time on each one as possible, and essentially try to merge them all into what appears to be complete awareness.

Feel free to comment any way you see appropriate :wink:

38

Atheist -

I agree completely. I’ve always seen the computer as a natural extension of the human mind. When the computer was designed, it was designed with a specific purpose: to help in human tasks.

What was the easiest way to design an extension to our minds? Why simple model the mind! That’s where Von Nuemann got his inspiration from when using the design we’ve been using for decades.

Concentrating on one thing at a time is just what we do, but as you said, it’s a challenge to be able to hold onto a thought consciously. If only we can learn to include all of our senses as one big thought/experience. That is my goal. Chaning a concentration on smell, sight, etc., into a concentration on sensory experience. If I can attune my senses simultaneously at any time, I can quicker and more accurately notice where there might be errors in the physics and experiences of the world around me, leading me to better chances for lucidity.

That is my hope, at least. :wink:

39

The next thing I am writing, is totally off-topic. I am sorry, but I just had to write it :shy:

JNoise, I do not agree with you on that computers are built up the same way as the brain. You see, our brain is constructed with lots (I don’t remember the excact number, but I think it was millions of them) of neural cells, which each contains a given piece of information, and they are connected to each others through assosciations. Ie “ice” is connected to “cold”, “hot” is connected to “fire”, etc. When you are to process a bit of an information, it goes through the network. The neurons which is strongly assosciated with the information you process, will be highly activiated, while the neurons which contains information which is not as related, will be less activiated, and the neurons which are not related at all, are not activiated at all. For instance, if you were to think about “nature”, “Microsoft” won’t be the first thing that would pop up in your mind :smile: It means that the information which is prosessed is sent paralell to many parts of the brains, and the prosessing uses many neurons which have many states of activiation. Another thing to mention, the neuron connections which you do use often, are stronger that the connections you seldom use. Well, that was at least my apptempt to explain how the brain is constructed. Hope you got it :cheesy:
And what about computers then? When they are going to process a bit of information, it goes through one straight and simple circuit. No assosciation or paralell treatment of information. It just goes straight through the system, from A to B. Every time you process the information, it goes excatly the same way through the computer. And the information which is processed, has to be completely logical, since the computer categorizes everything into “true” or “false”. That’s why computers are so good about maths, but not good at all when it comes to thinking creatively, since it can’t assosciate things, just divide them into true or false. But there have been attempt to build “neuron networks”. It can be a program that is run on a computer, or a computer which is built up as a paralell network just as the brain is. These networks have proven to not be as good at maths, but excellent when it is going to solve tasks which needs it to be creative, “think” like a human, and assosciate in stead than dividing everything into categories. That is probably where we have the computers of the future.

Sorry for writing a hole lecture about brains and computers, but I just wanted to put things at the right place :wink: Hope you got at least something of what I wrote. The information to the stuff I wrote, is from many different articles I have read the last few years. I am sorry that I can’t find any documentation on the internet related to what I just wrote. I tried a search, but I couldn’t find anything relavent. Just try a search for anything like “neural network computer brain”, and maybe you will find anything interesting :smile:

40

LucidityX1000 -

Wow, thank you for all that really awesome information. It gives me a lot to think about.

Unfortunately, I didn’t explain myself very well. I guess the reference to the architecture might have given you the wrong idea.

I actually totally agree with you! What I was getting at, was a few levels above the processing and moving around of neurons and electricity in lieu of thoughts and tasks. I was merely making the comparison on a very basic level, which I believe goes down to the structure of the Von Neumann theme.

Computers would be no good (in reference to their current technology) if they were not modeled off of the human brain. We could go on and on about future technologies, such as holographic storage and anti-electric computer technology, but I’m talking about an old system that dates back to the early 19th century (and even further, if you do your homework).

I won’t get into any specifics since it is off topic, but I hope that clears up some of the miscommunication. It’s merely my interpretation as well.

As far as it relating to Lucid Dreaming and Lucid Living, I wanted to make the observation that I think the way a computer processes a task (input, output, decision making) and the way a human processes similar information (again, on a VERY high level, not detailed) is very similar in some big ways. Basically, I am making a sort-of metaphor about being able to hold the brain into one thought at a time, sort of like the CPU is really only processing one piece of information at a time (alright, let’s not get into discussions of pipelining or multiple CPU and/or networked infrastructures).

That’s about it. Thanks so much for the great information and discussion!

So, any more ideas about Lucid Living? Let’s keep this topic alive.