My friend Matthew Joyce sends the following, which I am happy to post.
Hi Frank,
I’ve been really enjoying the material that you and Rita have been covering. While you’re on hiatus so to speak I was wondering if you’d be interested in posting the attached on your blog. It’s my riff on your material that came through when I woke the other morning. I was going to post it as a comment, but realize it’s a bit too long for that. So I thought I’d offer it to you as a potential guest post if you do that sort of thing. It won’t hurt my feelings if not. Anyway, take a look. I’d be curious what you think.
Lucid Waking
by Matthew Joyce
Our dream world and the outer world are the same in ways most people never suspect. In a dream you are all aspects of the dream. You are the main character, the supporting characters, the scenery, the force that drives the action, the opposition that creates the plot, the director, and the audience or the observer who watches the dream.
In the dream the participant is highly invested in the situation just as in waking life, while the observer remains detached and unaffected by the outcome. For the observer any outcome is acceptable because it remains untouched. Its overall attitude is “Let’s see how this plays out.” Yet the observer is also compassionate and cares for the participant, wanting the best outcome. The participant may be participating in a pleasant scenario, a confusing one, a frustrating one, or a nightmare. But no matter what happens, the observer remains OK. From the observer’s point of view all is well. All is always well, even if it doesn’t seem that way from the participant’s point of view.
You, the participant, generally only realize that all is well until you wake up. At that point you recognize the dream for what it was—an experience of a small piece of your much larger awareness. However, by not realizing you were in the dream and not recognizing that you had the power to change it, you have lost that opportunity to create something new. That opportunity is gone forever. Nonetheless, the potential skill of lucid dreaming remains with you always.
As the dream world is to the waking world, so too is waking life to the greater reality of All-D—all dimensions of space, time, and consciousness. We exist in far more dimensions than our waking life can conceive of. And we generally only access those dimensions and levels of awareness that are always available to our Higher Selves when we die and drop our physical forms. But it’s possible to access those dimensions and perspectives while still alive.
And in the same way that we can explore the greater reality of All-D while awake and in physical form, we can also use the technique of lucid dreaming while we are awake. That is taking control of our lives (the waking dream) by recognizing we are all aspects of our reality in the same way that we are all aspects of our dreams, and then changing the reality to suit our desires,. In other words, we can alter our waking physical reality in the same way we alter a dream. Because once we recognize that we are not just our limited waking selves but also integral parts of our Higher Selves within the All-D, then we can also realize that the same rules of lucid dreaming apply to lucid waking.
The secret to lucid waking is to marry your participant and observer awareness together in the same way that you do in a lucid dream. In a lucid dream you first recognize that you are dreaming, which is an awareness of the observer, and then you, the participant, decide to act and change the dream to your liking. You can marry your waking observer and waking participant in the same way by bringing your awareness to the mental gap between any given stimulus and your response. This is called mindfulness, which is a foundational technique for mastering your life.
When you are mindful you take stock of all you are aware of in a given moment and make a conscious choice about what you want to do next rather than simply reacting, acting in an unconscious way, acting out of habit, or acting out of expediency. Your awareness of the mental gap between stimulus and response creates the opportunity for your Higher Self to provide guidance and help you take action that serves the greatest and highest good. The more often you live in the gap of the now moment, the more often your Higher Self can guide your life. And thus your waking life can become an expression of a life lived through you by your Higher Self.
Very helpful analogy. Thank you.
Great stuff, Mathew, really adds to the discussion/learning process here for me! Zen masters have been saying such things for 1500 years … in their own way. “Their own way“, filtered through three previous cultures (India, China, and Japan), is the problem: there’s a lot of ‘stuff’ to get through (as in any religion) to find Reality.
It helps me to see/hear contemporaries find and express this knowledge in modern times; thus I get the best of both worlds:
– the certain knowledge that these truths are not new, but have been known (by some) for millennia,
– such modern expression of these truths, added to those of Frank, Rita, John, and the others here, helps me live them in 3D life.
Based on my experience with guidance (‘Higher Self’) in the last year, your last sentence rewrites (for me) as: ‘And thus my waking life becomes a life lived in closer and closer cooperation and sharing between me and my Higher Self.’ Larger-me provides the guidance and general direction; smaller-me works to manifest that in ‘our’ daily life.
Jim
Jim, I quite like your rewrite. Consider your amendment accepted. 🙂
Matthew,
My thanks also for sharing ths with us. It’s helpful to me to pick up other perspectives often providing as you did more pieces to the puzzle. Language is interesting. As you say, we don’t want to act in an “unconsciousness” way or strictly out of an established habit pattern without being mindful about it. Yet, in the sense of Jung, it is our “unconsciousness” that we are tuning into, or through which we reach our Greater Self.
Similarly, we are encouraged to meditate to clear our external input and clear the mind, yet one way our Greater Self communicates with us is through our mind and thoughts; at least, that’s how it works for me. Then it becomes a matter of “sorting out” thoughts: those that are “reactive” to the external situation emerging from our habit pattern, and those that are perhaps giving us “second thoughts”, coming from greater wisdom and broader perspective.
I find both of these different thought origins require some discernment and even debate as to which to act on.
I have been experimenting lately with documenting what occurs me personally in my “external” world, and asking myself the question, “If I was manifesting that experience, for what purpose would I do that?”
For example, last evening my wife and I found ourselves with some friends as well as two people we had never met over diner in a casual forum and the subject of current politics came up. Admittedly I am not into politics. What was interesting was in this relatively civil forum (compared to what is going on in public), very opposite points of view could be aired and discussed, even understood, with respect. A larger perspective that we all could endorse became manifested, even though it was never acknowledged per se in the conversation. (When perceived cause and blame are removed, there surfaced a high degree of commonality.)
There was a lesson there for me.
I am still processing the purpose of my very high golf score yesterday, but I’m sure it has to do with very much what you are bringing out in this posting: which part of us we let be in control at what times. In more slang terms, “Where our head is!”
John
John, I agree about communication coming in a variety of ways and about the importance of discernment. I’ve been working for some time to notice the valence and origin of my thoughts. I’m at the point where I can pretty much tell when they’re coming from my self and when they’re coming from my Self. The challenge is I often don’t recognize this until after they’ve arisen and in many cases been accepted and acted upon. Fortunately, with practice it’s getting easier check in, to open and allow my Self to come through, and to trust in right action more often as I gradually grow more comfortable living from a larger perspective.
Matthew ! Thank you very much indeed.
To me it could not have been said better.
It is wisdom=Sophia.
Hm, well, here I the other night experienced a lucid dream sequence. And by reading what Matthew wrote here (it occurs to me how related this is) in comparison.
In short the dream: I was participating within a conference, and I was one of “the Speakers” at the Conference. MY “theme” was about T(H)EO-SOPHIA !!! And I had written a whole BUNCH about “the theme of reference”.
But when I stood in front of the public….I began with a QUESTION facing the participants there and asking them:” Is there anybody here who wants to stand up and tell me what THEOSOPHIA really means ?– Then, one of my old girlfriends (she is a good friend in my waking life as such, and she is very active in “the alternative-materials”) stood up and came forward, and stood by my side, and she told the public: “Teo-SOPHIA”= wisdom is the same as CLIMBING SEVEN MOUNTAIN-tops (or the peaks of the hills), before we reach ancient knowledge.
It is witty…the example about “the hill-tops” as rather funny…because “the hill-tops” or mountains are MY favorites (projected objects) expressed as objects outwards.
BTW: I am printing out every thing to remember.
(John`s likewise, besides Frank`s of course). I have lots of printed out material in the sample-maps.
B&B, Inger Lise.
P.S. Wonderful spring-weather in these days, but still a bit chilly.