While I am dreaming and find myself in precarious situations, then realize I’m dreaming and not to worry, all is good.
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Let alone the realization that every time we fall asleep we die…it is the same process, believe it or not. “Over there” is our real life, behind the dream. If everybody would realize that, nobody would die in fear of the unknown. The western culture has forgotten how to die properly, how to be prepared for the process.
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I suppose that explains why when waking up one realizes they’re not “dead “
. The brain is still in a state to decode the material world.
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What if some other being is dreaming and we are part of that dream?
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What if we can become / go back into that other being, realizing we are part of that dream?
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Row, row, row your boat
Merrily, merilly, merilly down the stream
For life is but a dream.
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What’s the difference between a nightmare and a dream? A nightmare is real. One feels the physical and mental pain.
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… from Descartes Deus deceptor to Hillary Putnam’s Brains in a Vat … nothing new under the Sun
… see Descartes (original analog Deus deceptor) in the first of his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy to Putnam’s more modern take on the same (basically) idea.
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… that you had a dream is True, as to contents of the dream … that is another question.
“Yet such a definition may perhaps be reached by considering the points of difference between reality and its opposite, fiction. A figment is a product of somebody’s imagination; it has such characters as his thought impresses upon it. That those characters are independent of how you or I think is an external reality. There are, however, phenomena within our own minds, dependent upon our thought, which are at the same time real in the sense that we really think them. But though their characters depend on how we think, they do not depend on what we think those characters to be. Thus, a dream has a real existence as a mental phenomenon, if somebody has really dreamt it; that he dreamt so and so, does not depend on what anybody thinks was dreamt, but is completely independent of all opinion on the subject. On the other hand, considering, not the fact of dreaming, but the thing dreamt, it retains its peculiarities by virtue of no other fact than that it was dreamt to possess them. Thus we may define the real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be.” - C.S. Peirce from How to Make Our Ideas Clear,
Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878), 286-302.
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Why does reading C. S. Pierce make pretzels of my thinking? Must be how the wires in my brain got all tangled up during my formative years.
Makes sense, however I am bound to think of Einstein’s thought experiments that began in his brain (whether or not it was always in a jar or vat or whatever) and ended up describing empirically some level of physical realities insofar as we can measure them objectively.
Fascinating stuff!
Sure, Neru – I am open to that possibility. But, I’m also open to the possibility that they may coexist no matter if we’re conscious or dreaming. For me, personally, though, I prefer to engage with our world during my conscious state, and then use my sleep time for restoration.
We do have a few friends who have tried lucid dreaming (through their own networks), and we’re still not convinced of any health benefits coming out of that practice. Have you tried it yourself?
I’m not sure that in a dream state it’s necessarily important for us to be able to correct things to our favour, if part of what’s going on is connected to memory processes. I prefer to use my conscious state to deal with life’s problems, and then my dream state to rejuvenate and recover and restore myself, without staying fully conscious and aware.
There is a lot of talk, these days, by health professionals about chronic sleep deprivation, and to me, this LD Culture that has sprung forth is fostering sleep deprivation by teaching people to be in a state where they don’t actually get into a deep dream where the important memory building processes happen. This is my concern about this – the remaining in a semi-conscious state.
Have you experimented with this yourself?
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Yes I have, but not willingly. I have had lucid dreams, let’s say twice a year, always with an important topic, but never induced or asked for… In one I was confronted with a dark entity which followed and chased me. This dream reoccurred over the years, but always as a nightmare, never as a lucid. In the lucid version I finally stood up against the dark entity and told it to let me go as I was not willing to give in to darkness. That was around 2015 and I never had a nightmare of any kind again since. I also had some lucids of a spiritual kind, where I met my Yoga Master ( he is also my Master in real life, I study Kriya Yoga with him). He took me on several pilgrimages in these dreams and I got initiated into spiritual knowledge.
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I can’t speak for anyone else but I have found myself thinking of that otherness, that external force, that one that might be a place we go to after our physical bodies die. But it is not for us to know, because if it was then in my humble opinion our creator would have given us that knowledge or foresight.
Maybe its part of the great mystery and if not then hey, you won’t be around to complain about it.
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We only don’t know because we have forgotten to see. A daily meditation practice helps us to tune in and take the blindfold off, but it is a long way and success is only granted in small steps. But oh, the sweetness of those small „enlightenments“ are worth the while. In my humble opinion and experience God is waiting for us to re-discover our connection to HIM
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I love this, the idea of tuning in. Four score and ten seems too little to even begin to grapple with these questions. Thankfully I found this community that are way ahead of the curve.
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Those bond conducting headfones suck and its not like this microwave conduction at all.
That is louder and more precise.
I tried those headfones and its super quiet and tinny.
I was hoping to get around my hearing loss from menieres disease. no bueno
For sure.
I know a lot of Christians will disagree but I like the saying from somewhere, God doesn’t want supplicants, he wants equals and company.
As far as daily meditation, it is a struggle, not even talking about quieting the mind, if one has been doing it for decades. It is a struggle even larger because sometimes you feel like you are not reaching anything and you are just getting nowhere and going through the motions. The qi is not there. But then when it flows, you feel the Connection! I just wish it wasn’t so rare.
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See, a lot of Christians have no clue about the teachings of Yoga. They say its of the devil, but they have never tried to understand it. Yoga is the merging of the individual soul with God. The Westerners have degraded Yoga to something you do for a lean body and because its in fashion and Madonna does it, too. Meditation is not taught properly, as the New Age Gurus are mostly full of themselves and ignorant.
Meditation is about quieting the mind, but it is a process. Quieting the mind is the endresult, it is the state of Nirvana or Samadhi, a state that is only possible when one has achieved mastership of the mind. We mere mortals have to learn to sit, breathe and surrender to the process. Meditation is trying to concentrate on one thing and holding that concentration. Your mind will start to move in different ways, it´ll tell you there are dishes to wash, a new series on Netflix that seems cool and so on…the process is to see it happening and bring the mind back to the focus point. Over and over again…for hours, months and years. The secret to succes is perseverence and surrender to what IS.
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