[Jordan HillMember]

Hi John-

My understanding is that when Culadasa talks about “falling into the trap of subtle dullness,” he does not mean the inevitable wrangle with subtle dullness that you described when you mentioned dealing with it “as we shut down to external stimulus.” That, as you say, is inevitable, and it is not a ‘problem’ when done consciously according to the stages (i.e. making a point of WORKING WITH and overcoming subtle dullness at stage 5). What he’s referring to is when someone doesn’t recognize the presence/dangers of subtle dullness and falls into a trap where they mistake meditation sessions that are very stable but filled with subtle dullness as more advanced than they are. The stability from stable subtle dullness can fool one into thinking they have attained something like stage 6 or 7, and the pleasure from subtle dullness could be mistaken for the arising of piti. As Culadasa points out, this is a dead end from the perspective of Samatah-Vipassana practice, for without the overcoming of subtle dullness and increase in introspective awareness, there’s not much further the mind will be able to go when it comes to insight (and concentration, I imagine).

What he talks about “mastery of this stage might be skipped altogehter,” I believe he means that someone can still progress in developing stability of attention by overcoming subtle distractions (so move into stage 6 territory and beyond) without having overcome subtle dullness, even if this would ultimately prove to be a dead end, as described above.

I hope that makes sense! It’s approaching bed time and I’m mildly sleep deprived due to my 8 month old daughter, so do let me know if anything is unclear (or incorrect :).

-Jordan

[Jordan HillMember]

I agree– a lot of the discussion of rebirth never sat too well with me (beyond a metaphorical interpretation). Culadasa’s take on the matter is one of the aspects of his teaching that very much appeals to me. As he’s put it before, given interconnectedness, every single being (past/present/and future) could be considered a “past life” for each of us.

Also, while this doesn’t address the interesting point you raise about interpretations of “rebirth” relative to the terms used for stages of enlightenment (7 times returner, once returner, etc.), I did just want to share one interesting point about the terms in Culadasa’s teaching. The ways that I’ve heard him discuss the stages, he seems to make a metaphorical interpretation of their titles. He talks about the 7 times returning of a stream entrant as referring to the idea that someone in this initial stage of enlightenment is likely to “return to samsara” multiple times by acting out of habitual patterns rather than the insights that they have achieved. By the time they become a “once returner”, this single return could be interpreted as one last intentional dive back into samsara in order to rustle up, confront, and uproot craving as fully as possible (which is entirely, according to the Suttas at least).

-Jordan

[Jordan HillMember]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for posting your question! First off, I definitely agree with Blake’s perspective. To add to it, a personal note: I have had (and often continue to have) a noticeable, often annoying and distracting, tightening in my throat during meditation. In fact, my mind/body seems to have developed a strange association so that sometimes during the day when I step into a mode of mindfulness, my throat will tighten! That’s gone on for probably a couple a years now and has, in the last 6 months or so, largely subsided (or at least I’ve come to be less and less bothered by it and so it’s easy to ignore)– only to be replaced with other kinds of neck pain during meditation (though that has also subsided in recent weeks). I had read in one place that throat/neck pain that doesn’t have an obvious physical cause is pretty common (in that book, it connected it to the Body and Mind stage of insight, I believe), and Culadasa verified that this was the case– just something to meditate on through.

That said, it sounds like you’re definitely on to something with buffing up on the introspective awareness and toning back the attention. As Blake said, too much attention can often connect up to added tension in the body, whereas the nature of awareness is that it is more open, relaxed, and joyful. Also, the whole point of focusing closely on details in stage 4/ stage 5 is to increase the power of consciousness such that introspective awareness can get stronger and more continuous. So it sounds like stepping up the awareness at this point is exactly the right direction to be going.

Good luck riding through this plateau! Like Blake, I’ve definitely spent (and continue to spend) plenty of time in one stage, making incremental improvements but no big climbs (and the climbs often come via retreats for me, anyhow).

-Jordan

[Jordan HillMember]

Howdy Matthew!

So glad the WILD technique worked for you. The experience you described (having the lucid dream a few dreams in after going back to sleep) seems pretty similar to my usual experience. I’ve also found that after having one lucid dream, there’s a much greater chance of having others right afterwards.

An interesting phenomena which is apparently quite common for lucid dreaming is the false awakening– you think you wake up from the lucid dream, only to discover that you’re actually still in the dream. I’ve had this a handful of times, and sometimes it led to a continuation of the lucidity while other times, funnily enough, it broke the cycle– I thought I woke up and even when things were quite clearly bizarre the lucidity awareness didn’t carry over.

As for the pills– they definitely do shift the mind somewhat. I’ve only experimented with them a few times and found that sometimes they worked great and sometimes they just funkdified my dreams/sleep. In general there seems to be a balancing act of when to take them, since if you take them early on (which I think I’d recommended) you run the risk of not being able to fall back asleep (since one of the pills is designed to generate a certain type of alertness, helping with the lucidity). If you take them just before sleeping, I had the experience of just going into dreams that were a bit weird and vivid but not lucid. I haven’t played with them enough to find that sweet spot for me– but the experience you described is exactly why it’s good to play around with this stuff when you don’t have to be up and alert at a certain point the next day! In fact, I’ve had very similar sleep interruptions to what you described just doing the WILD technique, without pills. I also have the sense that lucidity with the pills feels a bit different than lucidity without the pills…

I have been excited to try the pills again but never bothered ordering them, and the WILD technique (combined with all the intention setting) seems to work well enough for me that I don’t have too strong of a motivation to get the pills.

Two extra cautionary thoughts about lucid dreaming that’s worth mentioning:

1) First, it’s possible to become conscious during (or just stay conscious into) the experience of sleep paralysis that usually proceeds dreaming. I think it’s much more likely to be conscious during this strange period when using the pills. My experience of it is generally one of strange and intense ‘hallucinations’ including sensations rushing through the body and auditory hallucinations (once I was sure I heard Bono, from U2, singing somewhere in my house! If only…). It’s actually much like a pretty intense (but not overwhelming) experience of the energies that arise in meditation with the beginning of Piti. Some people, however, can also have the sensation of something sitting on their chests and suffocating them or of trying to move their body and being paralyzed. This has given rise to the images of demonic attacks with a demon sitting on the chest and such. It can be frightening if someone’s not prepared for it, but if you know what it is and can just relax through it, allowing it to do its thing, I imagine it would pass pretty quickly.

2) Secondly, on the waking up side, I had a friend who would have his mind wake up while his body stayed in sleep paralysis. He would then be a bit “stuck” until he’d roused his body (usually by exerting a great deal of will to wiggle a pinky, and then spreading out the movement from there). This happened to him often enough that he was turned off of lucid dreaming altogether. I haven’t ever had that experience and imagine it’s a bit rare, but in the interest of full disclosure it’s worth mentioning.

This is once more getting me amped up about lucid dreaming (yay sleep paralysis!) so I’m hoping to go for it during this long weekend.

Happy dreaming!
-Jordan

[Jordan HillMember]

Hi Paul-

The correlation between mindfulness and lucidity is a really interesting one. I’d love to hear from very experienced meditators about their thoughts on it. I know Culadasa has told me that while on retreats, when his mindfulness has gotten extremely strong, he has had the experience of pretty much being lucid throughout his dreaming, automatically. In fact, he said that as soon as dreaming began he was lucid and even had the sense of having been aware during the preceding deep sleep cycles, though of course there was not content from those to really pin any clear experience onto.

For myself I have had spontaneous lucid dreams at the end (and day after) of retreats as well a fair bit of success with intentional lucid dreaming during retreats. I do imagine, however, that there are slight differences from mindfulness to lucidity– even if it’s just contextual. For instance, with mindfulness practice, I find that it’s much easier to mindful in certain activities that I’ve already developed a mindfulness association with (driving and showering, for instance)– whereas I might be doing something else that’s equally as “simple” and solitary and have a much harder time being mindful because my mind hasn’t developed an association yet between the activity and the practice. Given that dreaming is a very specialized state of mind, I can imagine someone developing skills being mindful in daily life and not in dreaming, or vice versa.

Interesting topic to explore– I’d love to hear your thoughts and those of others!

-Jordan

[Jordan HillMember]

“Sangha, I tell you, is the whole of the path…”

[Jordan HillMember]

Yup, I’ve noticed the drop in peripheral awareness with too much attention on the breath. One way I’ve found to play with that while also keeping the mind interested is to move back and forth, intentionally, between a close focus and a broad perspective.

In general it’s clear that there are pretty reliable cycles (in my mind at least) of intention– set an intention, things start out pretty clear, then the intention fades, the clarity fades, and something else comes along to whisk the mind away. Depending on the state of mind, that cycle could be 5-15 seconds long. So I sometimes try to pre-empt and stretch the cycle out a bit by playing with zoom.

So: zoom in on the detail of the breath with the intention of only staying there for, say 20-30 seconds (not that I’m timing it– just a felt sense). Then, before a distraction can sweep things away due to loss of peripheral awareness, I’ll purposefully zoom out so that peripheral awareness becomes strong again and detail of breath drops a bit (though I do try to maintain it along with the peripheral awareness to build conscious power)– and I’ll hold that for 20-30 seconds, on purpose, before (say) subtle dullness can creep in and cause problems. And so on…

Beyond even just getting to practice alternating scope and avoiding some of the pitfalls that present themselves as the result of this “cycle,” I’ve found that by giving my mind a ‘time limit’ for a specific flavor of practice, it’s more engaged and interested– ie the intention seems stronger. Even if it’s not just scope of awareness I’m playing with, the same principle applies– going from, say, noting relative length of different parts of the breath cycle (as you mentioned Blake) to close watching of breath sensations, to a wide peripheral awareness centered on the breath, to following the breath, to noticing specifically temperature sensations of the breath, and so on.

Has anyone tried practicing in this way? I find it helps if my mind is a bit unwieldy, though I do wonder if the busyness of it may interfere with some important aspect of what is (hopefully) being cultivated in practice… Thoughts?

[Jordan HillMember]

Cultivating lucid dreaming (plus some resources):

Years ago I read a book called something like, “The Lucid Dreamer: A guide to the traveler between worlds.” It was actually pretty formative for my spiritual path overall. Not sure how helpful it’d be for you, but I know it impacted me a lot back 10+ years ago. Another great resource is Stephen LeBerge (sp?), whose THE lucid dreaming scientific researcher.

So first, some thoughts on techniques for generating lucid dreams. Fundamentally (and not surprisingly) it really boils down to intention and mindfulness! The stronger the intention to lucid dream throughout the day and prior to sleep (or during awake periods in the midst of sleep), the more likely it is to occur. And the stronger one’s mindfulness (say on a retreat) the more likely lucidity is, since lucidity is really just mindfulness– being aware of what’s going on, which in a dream is partly an awareness that it’s a dream.

There are lots of techniques for increasing the chances of lucid dreaming, but what I’ve found for myself is that they end up being really just vehicles of intention– by using the techniques throughout the day, I’m reinforcing the intention to lucid dream that night. That said, if you don’t remember much of your dreams it’s probably helpful to do some groundwork by dream journaling. Just developing a better connection between waking and sleeping consciousness is a major step in the right direction.

The next most common technique I know of to work on lucid dreaming is to do state checks– throughout the day, check in with oneself and ask if you’re dreaming or not. The goal is for that to be such a habit that it might happen in a dream, and then boom. Another trick is to choose some common object of awareness (one’s hands, or doors) and use those as a cue to do a state check. Same thing applies– if it becomes habit, it may happen in a dream. There are other interesting ones which I can go into at some other point.

Lama Surya Das recommends what is essentially intention setting before going to sleep– repeatedly saying something like, “May I awaken in my dreams and know that I am dreaming.”

By far the most successful technique that I’ve found is to set an alarm for about 4-5 hours after going to sleep. When it goes off, I’ll get out of bed, go to the bathroom, get a drink of water, and then sit for 20-30 minutes. Throughout that period of being awake I’ll frequently do state checks. Then I’ll go back to bed and try to maintain as much mindfulness as I can while falling asleep– ideally watching my mind slip into sleep, my body slip into sleep paralysis, and then transitioning right into dreaming (which is why this technique is called WILD– wake induced lucid dreaming). I’ve had the experience where this leads to an out of body experience combined with lucid dream. The tricky part with WILD is that it tends to lighten one’s sleep significantly, sometimes completely interrupting it. So I generally only do it on nights where the next day I could sleep in (or else it just wouldn’t matter if I didn’t have a good night sleep). To help in the going back to sleep process, it’s helpful to time the wake-up and return to sleep for a time when it’s still dark (NY winters should be easy for that :).

An interesting version of WILD involves some herbal augmentation. A friend got into lucid dreaming several years ago and tracked down these amazingly effective supplements to enable lucid dreaming. Here are the details from him:

“It is pretty amazing how well it works.

The herb is galantamine (red spider lily extract). I get it from dreamamins.com. The amino acid is l-theanine (100 mg). You can get that from several sources. The brand I gave you is “suntheanine”.

It is suggested that at least a couple days of rest should be taken between uses to allow the normal balance of brain chemistry to be restored. Otherwise you can deplete some chemicals and/or desensitize receptors. However, this is debated. Pioneering stuff here.”

Basically you do the same thing as with WILD, except that you also take the supplements just after waking up. I’ve only tried them a few times but had some pretty good success (as did a friend of mine, who had no meditation or lucid dreaming background. First time I took them I had an out of body experience).

Another interesting “technique” to keep in mind for when one does awaken in a dream: A lucid dream can sometimes feel unstable, like you’re going to wake up at any point or lose the lucidity. One way to really anchor oneself in the dream is with rapid motion– spinning around in the dream, flying, or walking/running. This has become so habitual for me at this point that it seems as if “I” begin running in a dream as soon as I realize it’s a dream. Another trick I’ve tried which might sound weird is shapeshifting– at one point I found that turning myself into a spider (long and fascinating story about why I chose a spider– remind me to tell you sometime) anchored me strongly in the dream, but it may have just been because I was running around!

[Jordan HillMember]

Lucid dreaming and practice:

From a more psychological side, lucid dreaming is such a cool way of exploring one’s unconscious. From a Jungian point of view, you could say you’re exploring the collective unconscious and all its archetypes. That then shifts into a shamanic perspective in which lucid dreaming is essentially journeying in the other world– it can be a way of meeting allies, shapeshifting to better navigate different realms, exploring different realms, and then using the “map” one develops for typical shamanic purposes (healing, spiritual growth, etc.)

From a dharma point of view, I gather that in the Tibetan tradition lucid dreaming is used as a way of exploring emptiness. The way I do that is by noticing in the dream how incredibly rich and detailed the sensory phenomena can be, as a way of showing to my mind that it is indeed capable of creating/projecting an incredibly rich/detailed world in waking consciousness (which can be a hard truth to swallow at first, of course). Also intriguing (though I haven’t done much with this yet) is the no-self angle. In a dream, where is the self? If you know you’re dreaming, then you’re both the “you” character in the dream, as well as the dreamer, as well as everything else in the dream! As I’ve summed it up in the past, you’re the dreamed, the dream, and the dreamer. Like in waking life, too… Which I guess indicates that lucid dreaming is a great in-between way, so to speak, of exploring the fundamental truths of waking life. (Incidentally, an interesting movie to check out in this regard (somewhat) is “Waking Life”)…

[Jordan HillMember]

Nice– thanks George!

I also found that Thanissaro Bhikkhu talks quite a bit about this too– lots of online Dharma talks: http://www.dhammatalks.org/

[Jordan HillMember]

Here’s a book that’s downloadable for free– Daniel Ingram’s “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: an unusually hardcore dharma book.”

I must say that it is quite hardcore, in a sense. Controversial and critical of Western Buddhism, though making some great points and sharing some excellent alternative visions through it all. I’ve found it quite useful and inspiring.

http://integrateddaniel.info/book/

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