Search the Community

Section E A (master) mechanic, called Shi, on his way to Qi, came to Qu-yuan, where he saw an oak-tree, which was used as the altar for the spirits of the land. It was so large that an ox standing behind it could not be seen. It measured a hundred spans round, and rose up eighty cubits on the hill before it threw out any branches, after which there were ten or so, from each of which a boat could be hollowed out. People came to see it in crowds as in a market place, but the mechanic did not look round at it, but held on his way without stopping. One of his workmen, however, looked long and admiringly at it, and then ran on to his master, and said to him, 'Since I followed you with my axe and bill, I have never seen such a beautiful mass of timber as this. Why would you, Sir, not look round at it, but went on without stopping?' 'Have done,' said Mr. Shi, 'and do not speak about it. It is quite useless. A boat made from its wood would sink; a coffin or shell would quickly rot; an article of furniture would soon go to pieces; a door would be covered with the exuding sap; a pillar would be riddled by insects; the material of it is good for nothing, and hence it is that it has attained to so great an age.' When Mr. Shi was returning, the altar-oak appeared to him in a dream, and said, 'What other tree will you compare with me? Will you compare me to one of your ornamental trees? There are hawthorns, pear-trees, orange-trees, pummelo-trees, gourds and other low fruit-bearing plants. When their fruits are ripe, they are knocked down from them, and thrown among the dirt. The large branches are broken, and the smaller are torn away. So it is that their productive ability makes their lives bitter to them; they do not complete their natural term of existence, but come to a premature end in the middle of their time, bringing on themselves the destructive treatment which they ordinarily receive. It is so with all things. I have sought to discover how it was that I was so useless; I had long done so, till (the effort) nearly caused my death; and now I have learned it - it has been of the greatest use to me. Suppose that I had possessed useful properties, should I have become of the great size that I am? And moreover you and I are both things - how should one thing thus pass its judgment on another? how is it that you a useless man know all this about me a useless tree?' When Mr. Shih awoke, he kept thinking about his dream, but the workman said, 'Being so taken with its uselessness, how is it that it yet acts here as the altar for the spirits of the land?' 'Be still,' was the master's reply, 'and do not say a word. It simply happened to grow here; and thus those who do not know it do not speak ill of it as an evil thing. If it were not used as the altar, would it be in danger of being cut down? Moreover, the reason of its being preserved is different from that of the preservation of things generally; is not your explaining it from the sentiment which you have expressed wide of the mark?'

Those 'blue' people wouldn't happen to be able to shoot liquid blue plasma/laser light out of their eyes and mouths would they?? I met a couple in a dream. One was Chinese and the other was almost certainly 'Hindu'. They were very annoyed at me and I got a terrible fright but then I remembered I was only dreaming them so it didn't matter.

Ramacharaka's comments on #18: "Seek the way by retreating within." 'We have just spoken of this trust in the Something Within. This precept emphasizes this phase of occult teaching. Learn to retreat within the Silence, and listen to the voice of your soul - it will tell you many great things. In the Silence the Spiritual Mind will unfold and pass on to your consciousness bits of the great truths which lie buried within its recesses. It will pass on to the Intellect certain fragments of truth from its own great storehouse, and the Intellect will afterwards accept them, and reason from the premises thus obtained. 'Intellect is cold - Spiritual Mind is warm and alive with high feeling. The Spiritual Mind is the source of much that is called "inspiration." Poets, painters, sculptors, writers, preachers, orators, and others have received this inspiration in all times, and do so today. 'This is the source from which the seer obtains his vision - the prophet his foresight. By development of his Spiritual Consciousness, Man may bring himself into a high relationship and contact with this higher part of his nature, and may thus become possessed of a knowledge of which the Intellect has not dared to dream. 'When we learn to trust the Spirit, it responds by sending us more frequent flashes of illumination and enlightenment. As one unfolds in Spiritual Consciousness, he relies more upon the Inner Voice, and is more readily able to distinguishy it from the impulses from the lower planes of the mind. He learns to follow the guidance of the spirit, and to allow it to lend him a helping hand. 'To be "led by the Spirit" is a living and real fact in the lives of all who have reached a certain stage of spiritual development.'

To clarify a little, I came across this physical entity called "Tao Bums" a year ago as my real helping teacher clarifying my way through all you good people's opinions and experiences. No other physical teacher that I noticed manifested through my 49 years in this reality, (I apologize for not crediting all the other countless & nameless entities who certainly helped me up to now for the record ) Anyways, a year ago I acquired Sifu Terry Dunn's Flying Phoenix CK series and started practicing them until now, and added another set from Sifu Chris Matsuo's Quan Yin Magnetic CK 6 moths ago,and been doing them both daily, steadily but not excessively. I have meditation experience for about 20 years, never used any drugs. and have a decent life allowing cultivation. I can cope with my pseudo-projected nightmare creations as well as some outside entities both in dream and physical realm, a golden light coming out of my hearth takes care of those, washing them out or blasting them by strong positive emotions triggered, whatever this means . This white fog stuff feels very PHYSICAL like I am about to literally die, It also comes and spreads if I allow it when I lie down. I guess it is my fear of death that I have to confront, so I asked your opinions before I put my feet in it. I understand from your advice that I am at a road sign, and will continue my practice as well as keeping an eye on this stuff. I guess I am not in any serious situation so far. Thank You All for your kind considerations, Cihan

I thought that I would realy an interesting story about black metal. Back in around 2003, I was training my short power and doing wing chun alot! At any rate I was doing no spiritual meditation or anything of the ilk. I have met, Ihsahn the vocalist for Emperor in my dreams. I never knew the correct phonetic pronunciation of his name until the first of the three dreams came. His name is pronounced, ISH AN, not the way it was spelled and I didn't know this. However in the dream I was in a forest calling for him phonetically like " EYE SHAN!" While I heard "ISHAN" repeated back to me form what looked to be the Carpathian Forest. Mayhem and Emperor are my two favorite BM bands.

What you create with your EGO-MIND. I will offer you a little experiment to play with to prove you how powerful our ego-minds are: 1. Morning. 1.1 I am a spirit in a body capable of experiencing dimensions beyond physical existence. 1.2 I have the ability to separate from my body, return safely, and remember. 2. Evening. 2.1 Every morning I faithfully write dream key words in my notebook. 2.2 I recognize each morning as a fresh opportunity to hone my astral memory. 2.3 I attract dreams that help me achieve my goal of conscious out-of-body exploration. However you can repeat all these phrases throughout the day as many times as you can; you are basically conditioning your mind in order to consciously operate in the yin phase of reality. Trust me, after just few days you'll realise that your mind starts to create realities beyond the physical one and the line between yin (astral) and yang (physical body) will slowly fade. I would also suggest using your mind to actively scan your entire body: skin (surface and deep inside), blood, internal organs, bones, tendons, joints, muscles, marrow, hands, limbs and the head and look for any signs of discomfort or points of rapid pulsating energy as they are blockages. Once you start working on them (dissolving or watch them and let them go) then Qi will start to flow naturally. This scanning activity and clearing of Qi blockages will accelerate the OBE experience. We create reality.

Well there's a problem here as we need to differentiate between one shared reality and a shared group reality! For sure the world functions reasonable well as we all accept the objective world. Now I'm not denying that isolated groups can have a different view of the world and that this view may even have mystical other worldly elements but is their reality more real or just different? In the mystery schools they often allude to the evolutionary streams which the sparks of consciousness travel as they fall. These streams are related to plants and animals so perhaps we should bear in mind that an individual totem as well as a tribal totem will play an important part in this "shared reality". Basically elements of their conscious experience are specific to them as a group and whereas an outsider may experience the prescribed effects of a substance but not understand them as being meaningful. I do believe that we share a holographic consciousness but that there are layers. So we can move from our ego-centric consciousness to a group consciousness and then to a planetary consciousness and so on. But lets get back to the question of whether these elementals are individual entities or just thought forms created by the individual or group. Whether beings of light, Buddha's or demons I still think they are figments of our imagination! Of course Jung would argue that they can be helpful as manifest aspects of our consciousness and perhaps even bridging the conscious and unconsious minds. So perhaps these ethereal beings serve a purpose by setting up a kind of dialogue between the dream world and the waking world? In that context I don't see a problem but it's when people give them sentience that problems may arise, we're talking split and multiple personalities together with psychotic behaviour. If there's nothing wrong then don't mess. Of course people have and will experiment with altered states but I think along with all the other mystical baggage it's not really of any value. What killed the cat?

Into the Lion's mouth Out goes another youth's dream Super Wizard Queen

Interesting.... A dream? A Story? A reality unknown?

Everything- chill out. Don't put so much pressure on yourself to perform. You're giving yourself performance anxiety, and are messing yourself up. Then you're messing yourself up for messing yourself up, and causing a downward spiral. Chill out. Ever hear that story about the student who asked the teacher how long it'd take for him to be enlightened if he meditated for an hour a day, and the master said "ten years", then the student says what if I meditate for two hours every day, and the teacher goes "twenty years", and the student goes "three hours?" and the teacher says "thirty years"? It's like that. The more you freak yourself out about it, the further away it's going to get. The more you try and tighten your fist around it, the more it's going to escape. It's dreams for fuck's sake, they're ephemeral Try to ham fist your way through it and you'll never get anywhere. thelerner- I know what you mean about the tiredness and stuff. I think it's nerves, really. B.K. Frantzis talks about nerve stress in his book "The Great Stillness". He talks about it in terms of sex, where back in the day even farmers working 12 hours a day could still have sex all night, but in the modern world of 9 to 5 people have ED or can't go on for as long because even though they are working less, everything combined has literally fried their nerves. Same thing happens with sleep. If you fry your nerves through the day, and then on top of that stress yourself out over dream recall, you aren't going to get your rest, and the rest of the next day you'll be tired, even if you objectively got 6 or 8 or 10 hours of sleep. So take it easy. Don't freak out too much about dream recall. To all involved, enjoy the experience Dreams are fun. They're natural. Enjoy it. Play with it. If it happens, great. If not, whatever. Move on. There's a lot of pressure to perform, because if you fail one night, that night is gone, so you really want to make each night count. But when you do that, you set yourself up for failure.

Hey Everything, I can relate to this. I've had some pretty cool experiences with sponanteous composition in dreams. The music was still only as good as what I put behind it, but the chord structures were good foundations nontheless. Do you improvise? I've noticed that a lot of piano players are not comfortable improvising as they were classically trained. This might be essential to being able to wake up and continue on in the same groove, figure out the chord foundations, and get the feel of it. Recording is generally better than writing for this, imo, but recording can also disturb the flow sometimes, so just record the basic and then put more feeling into it when you jam it out so to speak. Again, the melodies are usually phrases that you would naturally put over certain chord structures, so if you can figure out the underlying transitions then the melodies might be revealed and then some. However, doing this consistently is something else entirely if you want to get into that. When I was playing a lot I would dream more like this. One simple practice to have a sort of dream dialogue is to hold an unresolved feeling almost as a question to your subconscious as you're about to fall asleep. Sometimes dreams will turn it into images and scenarios which illuminate the issue and hopefully provide some solutions upon analysis of them. If you have a feeling, and you've been playing a lot, you might dream up a melody.. My dream interpretation skills are usually not too bad, so feel free to PM me if you want a second or third opinion. Also, the deeper the sleep the more memorable the dreams usually. There is a tea by Algonquin Tea called Lucid Dreaming which has sweet-gale, used by Native Americans for lucid dreaming. I suspect it gives a deeper sleep, at least that's what I seemed to notice. http://www.algonquintea.com/content/teas/lucid-dream-tea.shtml

What you write really resonates with me. I've been working on dream recall with the idea of becoming increasingly lucid. As I get better w/ recall I find I can't sleep! I get better and then my regular life starts to suffer as I'm over tired. I've gotten to the point where I remember 3 dreams, but I'm dead tired. In my case I may be doing 2 things wrong. First I'm messing with REM sleep, waking up in the middle of dreams in order to have clearer recall. Second, my pre sleep programming is causing anxiety that keeps me from sleep. I think the answer is to give up on early dream recall and lucidity during the first few 90 minute REM cycles and concentrate on the magic hour, the last 90 minutes of the sleep cycle. Wake up early preferably through self command or quiet alarm. Get up focused, back to sleep. Hopefully I've already gotten 5 or 6 hours. This is focused practice. Maybe done in another location, sleeping in a different slightly uncomfortable position. Special care taken on waking, to write up my dreams. One method of remembering my dreams has been instead of groping to remember on waking to retell myself the story from a different point of view, like a third person was telling me the dream. I call it Restory to Remember with the idea that I'm pulling it out of short term memory into long term. I've gotten a few good nights of sleep. I think my new strategy will be to do less work and preparation at night. Have my ipod nano near my pillow and softly awaken me 90 minutes before I'd usually get up, 5:30ish. Go downstairs, focus, tell myself what I want to accomplish, have the dream journal nearby. Get back to sleep.

I'm so left brained on the natch that lucid dreaming is nearly impossible for me - I've tried over and over for years, since I first started Castaneda maybe 8 years ago. First of all, I've discovered that I'm just not capable of doing it right before I go to sleep. I've tried and tried, I've looked for my hands in my dreams, just like Castaneda. I've not been able to get it. Except recently, I've discovered that it also happens in the morning! I've recently been able to catch myself before opening my eyes in the morning, and I catch myself and make myself stay right there. I find that if I crack open my eyes just a tiny bit, just to let a tiny bit of light in, that the lucid dreams will start! I'm thrilled to have discovered this. I have to tell you what I lucid dreamed this morning, only for a few seconds. It's like my face was looking down at the ground, about 2 feet away from it. The ground, as you can imagine, was as real as can be, since this was a lucid dream. I was moving along the ground, almost floating, when suddenly I went over a cliff which appeared to be about 1000 feet down. It was like in a cartoon for a moment, I stayed up in the air just like the Roadrunner before he looks down. Then it became like a slow motion bungee jump down to the trees and rocks below, which I could see getting closer and closer. Then I 'willed' myself to come back up on the bungee cord. The funny thing is, there wasn't a drop of fear attached to the huge bungee jump. In my particular left brain case, this is real progress! Castaneda's chore was to learn to control and investigate these dreams at will, taking off from one lucid dream-bubble to another, to another; and then coming back on the same path. I would love to do the same.

I've been doing similar, but not during dreams, but deep meditation on the cusp of dream. Therefore you do not have to be dreaming or lucid dreaming to be able to do creative writing. Its just hard to reach that sweet spot of deep subconciousness where the verses pop up instanteously and easily. Too much intent or desire will spoil the broth, too little and you will not get anything done. I think the trick is to be composing during waking hours so the intent is there, and not having to be consciously wanting it to happen (because that will spoil the broth) when you are deep in meditation, and it will bubble up naturally. Its not easy to be able to meditate down that deeply either, it takes loads of directionless relaxing practise. Another thing is that you have to very familiar with the instruments or language you are going to compose with, a mastery. I can do songwriting verse, but cannot translate the instuments because I am not an expert at translating music to componant parts, only get the basic sounds and rhythm. Amazing enough, not Mozart by by a mile though.

My opinion: you're trying too hard. I'm a musician myself, although guitar is my main instrument, not keyboard. When it comes to writing, I find I write my best music when I'm not really trying. For me, it's more about feeling the song out than consciously trying to write something. If there's an emotion or feel I'm going for, I might set that as an intent; but writing for me usually consists of playing with the sounds until something sticks - a lick or progression will catch my ear, and I'll jam on that for awhile until the rest starts unfolding. Writing music in my opinion is best done when you remove yourself from the process. The music can write itself if you let it. I might have an easier time with this kind of writing because I never learned much music theory. I'm not Eric Clapton or Joe Satriani, but I enjoy the music I write, and most of the people I play for seem to enjoy it too. Don't take it so seriously! Play around a bit. Beef up your technical skills if you want to open new avenues of exploration, but don't let the theory trip up your creativity. I've tried translating music from dreams into waking life, and it's never worked out well for me. Something that sounded absolutely awesome in my dream made absolutely zero sense musically in waking reality. Take that dreamtime creativity with a grain of salt - the rules are completely different over there, and the symbolic nature of events shouldn't be taken lightly either. Yes, I believe dreams can be a VERY powerful source of creativity. Perhaps learning lucid dreaming techniques would really help out your songwriting! But stressing about it is only going to get in your way, regardless of what you decide to do. And I think learning to develop the creative process in waking life will serve you much better as a musician than pining for the limitless power found in dreamtime. Just my two cents. Well, maybe five. It's a long post.

Imagine a magical hat some where on a table. You can pull anything you wish from this hat. Only at night. As soon as you reach day, the hat and the conjured items dissapear. It happens all the time so that you want to live at night and sleep at day, but then the hat only appears at day and no longer at night. Thats how fking frustrating the creative power of our dreams are. I noticed that during the day my creativity is limited by 1. my memory to recall my creative thoughts, images, sounds I imagined during the creative process 2. having to interupt the creative process all the time because it takes forever to translate the creativity into reality. In dreams everything manifests instantenously. It takes forever to compose a music, poem, painting, idea, book, whatever, in the waking hours, plus you tend to fail or give up while so caught up in the process of translating. The translating process in dreams becomes instant. You think about a story and it appears in your mind, the movie plays out in 3d and the background music is perfect all the time. Sometimes I'm so frustrated about not being able to get lucid, I want to stop sleeping untill I can acces the creativity I have in my dreamworld while still remaining consciouss. Funny thing is, when I get sleepy, I loose consciousness. I actually stopped have faith that it is possible to lucid dream all the time. All the lucid dreaming teachers and so called authorities on the subject cannot even lucid dream themselves. It seems that all the succesful lucid dreamers have shifted into the 5th dimension. There's no one on earh that can teach me this, but me?. Unless you tell me otherwise! I tried allot of things, but never drugs. I really don't care for lucid dreaming though. I only care for the creativity I have during sleep! I've never been able to acces it while awake Is a musician, actor or comedian, scriptwriter destined to use drugs? Like Charlie Sheen said, Yes I'm on drugs, but I'm still a winner. Then again, you do have those 100 year old people who finally became enlightened but their brains disintegrated so much that they coulden't teach others how to do it anymore. I compose music in the waking world just as a hobby and I suck at it. The music fragments I've recalled and translated onto the keyboard are my best musical compositions even though they're like 3 seconds of length each, plus I did not recall it precisely. I can put some examples on youtube if you request it. Sometimes I feel I have great ideas and while trying to translate a part of these musical thoughts, it just floats away and its forgotten. Today I've had a lucid dream where I started improvising on the keyboard and recorded it to prove how good of a pianist I am to a projection of mine. This music was so incredible, I could retire a musician right now if I were able to acces such creaitivity I have in dreams all the time or atleast able to become lucid for just 40 minutes a night and remember what music I played or ideas I created. With all my intense effort for years, I've reached two weak lucid dreams of 10 seconds each a week. By the time I manifest a piano, organ the dream has already fades away. In my dreams I don't have to play piano well to improvise great. I just trance into my music consciousness like I always do and start translating. In the real world it takes 1 hour of intense focus and translating just for a small part. In the dream, I can press record and just play the piano without thinking about pressing the right key. The musical creativity is so strong, I composed 3 minutes for a piano piece instantaneously and played the recorded music. It was better then anything I heared from chopin. When I let the recorded music play, I actually remanifested what the music sounded like and made it perfect, just by thinking about it without even touching the keyboard! I became a real music god! When I woke up, I tried to recall something, but I've forgotten everything! My memory is real bad when I'm awake aswell. I've recalled allot of dream music fragments, never cared to record them since it was 6 notes at most. I did try to reconstruct from what I had recalled, but it took too long and I never been able to create music of quality similar to the dream music I just made up in few seconds. Besides, reconstructing from 6 notes? I might aswell start at 0 notes. So the dream music is real! Its not beyond the regular physical audio. Just waiting for another lucid dream to arrive is no longer acceptable. I will have to seriously train this in a structred way and be more persistent in trying out many practices. As you can see, I can just stop my hobby and focus on becoming lucid in dreams and train dream recall. There is no more point in composing music while awake when in my dreams I do it 18374774738281991199283847 times faster and compose 2848575748829291903948488585748839292 times better music. No words can describe the creative power I have in my dreams. Ofcourse I probably woulden't arive there if I never created music while awake aswell, but still... Now that I have discovered this, doesn't that make dreaming one of the most important events of the day? I can't just be content with the creativity I have in the waking world when there is such power within me that I'm not yet able to acces. One dream is equal to 3 years of intense work. In the waking world I can process information at the speed of a donkey, in my dreams I process information faster then the speed of light. The focus has shifted toward the way of internal strength for me today. Perhaps it would be unwise to even waste such creative powers on music... Thats how freakin powerful it is! Either that, or I give music oo much importance to even mention it... Well, thats me! WHY ON EARTH IS THERE NO ONE WHO USES DREAM CREATIVITY AS THERE MAIN SOURCE FOR IDEAS?!? Or are they just not telling anyone about it? Fcking egotistical bastards, you know I love ya'll right? Tell me how to do it! xD If everyone could freely use their dreams to do what they wished, and later recall exactly what they did, we would have atleast 5 milion Johannes Bach's walking around on this planet. How many are there currently? 0... Still good composers alive, but I imagine them to be 50 times better if they did acces their dream creativity. I must either arrogantly conclude that my lucid dream self is the reincarnation of a musical god. Either that or the whole world needs to fcking wake up to way of internal power! If I could just recall one complete musical piece of my lucid dreams I could proove this, damnit. If a musical failure like me can do that, how many creative technological inventions would be created in one day if all scientists had acces to their ineternal creative powers? Whats going on here? Am I the only one who have experience this internal creative power?

Have you ever had a dream where you were in your own bed and it seemed so real, yet you discovered it was fake. Then things became scary because you did not fully accept the fakeness as it was equally real as the real world you've come to know. Some call it an oobe experience, since the dream is in your own bedroom. Others call it a lucid dream where you're on the edge of becoming lucid. The scary uncertainty of reality is what lies in between all realms, the gateway. it is the void and source of these worlds, the potential. You can create your reality by accesing these uncertainties, use the gateway as a portal to travel where you wish. You accept that your location is fake, you open the gate of uncertainty, expect to walk in where you want to and you'll arive there. Sounds metaphysical, but its not. In lucid dreams you can use doors to function as portals. What seems like metaphysical now, is real physics of the dream realm. This uncertainty is not that though. The. Uncertainty of reality is accesable in all realities. Dreaming or awake. The thing is, in dreams it is very hard to accept that everything is fake and when you do, you wake up and forget how you did it and what the fake world was like. When you have enough lucid dreams, you realize that lucid dreams can be as real as your waking reality. Then you try to accept that your waking reality is fake, to acces the gateway of uncertainty. This is even more difficult. Your ego can make up 100 years worth of ideas and thoughts that proove that e erything is real. Once you do wake up to the fake nature of reality, it feels enlightening. You become everything and nothing at the same time. You can be a pencil and you can be a chair, yet stuck in my body I was on the verge of waking up. Afraid to let go of my body. I remember the experience like it happened yesterday.

Hahaha. What is real? Remember Zhuangzi's tale of the butterfly. Real is returning to the Source, the final awakening, until then enjoy your dream. ................ Good techniques are offered in this page: http://obe4u.com/?page_id=14

*excuse me, I ment to post this on general discussions* It seems that our whole system in this world is designed like a mousewheel. The good guys are naïve and are kept busy by running in the mousewheel, but they have no freedom to actually run for them selves, into freedom, or for others, by aiding the people to evolve. I once owned a two mice that ran on the mousewheel allot. They fought often over who could run on it. Today I had a dream of these mice and woke up dropping a tear. In the dream the mice where running on the wheel and getting out to see if they arrived somewhere else all the time. Never did they give up. I saw this and became real angry and tried to break the cage to set them free, but the cage woulden't break and it hurt my hand. I screamed to the mice to tell them to get out of the cage, expecting them to hear me, but they did not hear me somehow, being so occupied in the illusion that they were going somewhere else by running in that wheel. It is hard to even point out to naïve people how they're enslaved. Their decision space is so small, we cannot easily increase it. I can not even increase my own decision space, I´m more on the naïve side myself. If the depression causes mania and the mania causes depression, I'm the depressed guy. It seems that depressed people and maniacs hate eachother, yet they need eachother to form a balance. Even though it seems like a horrible thing to say, the majority of the people are worthless units of controllable intent. Only by enslaving many can you create value for yourself. Thus, you have to rule out allot of competition. And so the slave managed prison was created to use the power of the slaves to lock up potential competition for these maniacs who rule all of the world. We can try our whole lives to help people evolve and you will receive nothing in return. In fact, you will be punished for it indirectly. Think out of the box will bring along a life full of hardship, where you'll have to make allot of difficult decisions. In this whole journey, I wonder no longer why so many people have become the bad guy, as in maniacs. I wonder where all the maniacs actually are! I think most of them are in prison, a matter of bad luck. This system has been designed by the maniacs like a game similar to that of gambling with social aspects. Considering how low the average wisdom of the people are and how naïve the average person is, we need allot more maniacs running free out there to balance things out! This game has become unfair. The maniacs with most freedom are in minority, thus they gain allot of power on their own and they have more reasons to walk that road. All the maniacs or bad guys are few and they're supressing the naïve and good guys all for them selves! Have you ever seen a depressed person in one room with a maniac? Its hilarious. Have you ever seen 5 depressed people in a room with 1 maniac? The maniac goes frenzy and seems to be on the verge of exploding. Too much power in one body. In nature, another maniac would come along and take some of the belongings of this almighty maniac. This natural competition would rule out all the irresponsible maniacs and leave the wise maniacs in charge. In our society, our nature has been emprisoned. The criminals are being put in jails, by the enslaved police. Yes, enslaved police! This is enslavement with self managing capabilities. The police work to pay their own bills and they function as an anti-virus program to rule out all the potential competition for minority maniacs and lock them up in jail. That leaves only few maniacs who proffit from the lack of maniacs running around in this world. The emprisoned are the key to liberation of all the people. With all maniacs having equal competition and all depressed sad faces having a personal opressor, the worlds balance would be restored. There would be no more depressed people and no more maniacs. With a constant wheeding out of "bad guys" there is no balance in the archetypal population of this human civilization. Too many good people is not balanced. To few bad at the same time makes for even more disharmony. Now tell me, why and when did we actually start calling the maniacs "bad guys" and the depressed people "good guys"? They both have their part in nature. Currently, maniacs are few, thus they thrive and we are jealous of them. No need to be, because there is actually allot of maniacs in prison that can restore the balance. Who put them there? The good guys did. They are indirectly contributing to their own enslavement. Who's going to release them? "Not me! I'm the good guy!" everyone says. If only they knew... What most people see as good, is only bad. What most people see as bad, is only good. This is ment literally and still applies to our modern world.

I've long been perplexed by this shifting pathway; and, walking up the sliding, translucent, perpetually-rearranging blocks I often glance back with a sense of uneasiness and impatience only to be immediately calmed by the view. For although the path ahead of me rearranges itself unexpectedly before I can set foot upon it, the path behind me has become stoic, shimmering in the rays of sun that pierce down through still clouds, each willful step solidified into a million crystal-cubes. I wipe my forehead and drink from my canteen. I glance down at the dustless step under my feet, listening to the faint mechanics moving within, then shift my gaze to my bare toes. I wiggle them. They feel fine. DATE: 01/01/0001 I woke up in the pitch dark last night not knowing where I was. I cried out. It wasn't until sunlight faded in that I regained my composure. Despite the scare I'm going to continue walking. I've decided to add dates to my journal. If for nothing else then my sanity, I feel like I've been here for years... I know I'm ascending but not to where. I think I know why but it's a kind of silent truth; I can't put it into words. However I can articulate the immense remorse I feel when the stairway's cubes shift to become a descending path. It's an obsession. It feels like I've lost my way somehow. I just now realized: I have no idea how I got here. Date: 04/04/0001 I've been sitting here for a long time trying to work out how many days it's been. Why I forgot to document it, I do not know. Time seems to slip away or vanish here. Like a dream. I think it's been three months. Gone in a haze and somehow it doesn't even bother me. The days seem longer as of late. Brighter. There are less dips in the path though the inner workings of the cubes has grown to a deafening din. They shift in a DNA-like helix before me, only stopping the second I intend to step on them. I still can't remember how I got here. Can you tell me shifting stairs? Date:05/02/0001 Breakthough! The cubes seem to be in tuned with my mind-state... It's bizarre... The less I care about the dips the less they occur. I was lost in a dip for days... Obsessive depressed at my lack of progress and only falling farther. It was only when I let go of disappointment and entered a state of indifference that the path shifted. My mind now settles mostly on the nagging question of how I got here. And the more I think about it the more violently the spiral meshes. It's loudest when I try to ignore it. I must plug my ears just to hear myself think. Date:06/07/0001 I remember little of yesterday, save that I walked easily in silence. The sun was warm. The blocks slow and silent. I felt the breeze with my skin hairs. I remember the sensations... The details of things... I don't believe a single thought perturbed my climb. Date:06/08/0001 Rain is soaking my book as I write this. The staircase spirals downward at an even steeper angle. Illuminated with lighting flashes. It was so nice yesterday. Maybe I was wrong about my mind-path link. My doubt and disappointment seem to grow with the storm. I just want it to be like it was before. Date:8/16/0001 The geometric twister spirals down and up in a seeming inner battle with itself. I haven't been walking. Just sitting here thinking. I know I should give up this useless debating and get moving but the intensity of the stairway's dance is hypnotic. It feels familiar. I feel warm sitting in the rain watching. Date:08/31/0001 The storm is gone. Lazy orange skies. I feel better than ever before and feel no fear in saying that. The steps lead up. Fine. Beautiful. They may collapse any second. Fine. Beautiful. Each thought passes through me without snagging. I hope to see a bird. Date:09/24/0009 I've reached the summit. It's flat and wide. A platform of translucent squares above the clouds. My mind is pure. Sun reflects off of each cube. -- Some cubes have started to fall from the edges, tumbling away into the fog below. The rubic-serpent that was my staircase is gone as well, whisked away into the fog without me even noticing. -- It's silent. Only one cube remains beneath me. I remove my bandana and ring it out over the edge. I sit down and sip from my canteen: orange juice. I've never felt so unable to articulate something as pure and true as how I feel at this moment. I feel no desire to even try. This will be my last entry. All I will say is that I'm not afraid, everything is as it should be, and I no longer need to remember how I got here. I'm here... It's... Breathtaking. Oh my, you have to see this.

No one gets a free ride in a world free from destruction and death if even one soul has to pay for all the sins of humankind. Especially if that one soul is an archangel. Look at the world now. It is still the same world as before despite the recent upgrades. In fact, you can even say the level of corruption in this world is worse than 2 years ago. Do any of you really think that humanity should get a free ride from the 2012 Armageddon? Dream on. Humanity will never change until they have experienced the worst death and destruction beyond their wildest nightmares. Only then would humanity change. Otherwise they would forever be mired in the mara's game of sex, procreation, wealth-building, power-grabbing.

This blog I found has some general information on dream yoga: http://www.dreamyoga.com/ I don't know what you ultimately want to acheive with these practices, but this is the main point of these practices: "The goal of dream yoga is to achieve enlightenment" - Tenzen Wangyal And from a review on Norbu's Dream Yoga: "Dream Yoga is not just about awakening in the dream state but also bringing it together with our non-dream awareness as well." I haven't read these two books, but I've seen these get recommended a lot: 1. Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light (Revised edition) by Chogyal Namkhai Norbu 2. The Cycle of Day and Night: Where One Proceeds Along the Path of the Primordial Yoga : An Essential Tibetan Text on the Practice of Dzogchen by Chogyal Namkhai Norbu - From a review: "In this translation of the Longde Series of Dzogchen Teachings, Garab Dorje (Ancient Dzogchen Big-Wig)shows how to maintain contemplation Day and Night. Wonderful introduction, excellent translation of the Text, amazing commentary to follow; Norbu makes the Evening, Night, and Morning practices simple and easy to understand" I second Balance's recommendation for Tenzin Wangyal's book The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep

That's interesting Mark. I know that if I travel a lot (not vacation, where it's the opposite) I prefer to stay in places that pretty much look the same all over, to avoid that 'Where the hell am I?' moment that can really give me a start upon waking. When dreaming, there are also points at which it's not obvious to me that I am dreaming. So I sort of 'wake up' inside the dream and go 'phew it's a dream, this is ok then'. Sometimes it takes a bit of effort, a struggle ensues to 'wake up' inside the dream. So I'm wondering if we tacitly 'know' we are dreaming and just go ahead with it (because otherwise we'd wake up).

I've been working towards it for sometime... spurned on by the wise words of Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche who said (paraphrasing) "If you can't become aware during sleep, how can you possibly hope to become aware while awake.." .. I found the comparison of the dream that most of us live and never wake from to being asleep and not realizing that we were dreaming to be pretty compelling.... but alas, I continue to simply enjoy the unusual beauty of my dreams instead of waking to the revelation that I am dreaming ... All in good time.... This is Wangyals book ( http://www.amazon.com/Tibetan-Yogas-Dream-Sleep/dp/1559391014/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320204414&sr=8-1)... I found it to be tremendously informative... But the only success I really gained from the practices within the book was to have dreams that reflected the areas in which my mind was placed before drifting off (you rotate your intent throughout the night by waking periodically to reset).... These days I use the kunlun dreaming practices, but my experiences have been similar. The quality of the dreams change, but I still find myself unable to bring awareness into the dreaming.

The more lucid and aware you are in real life the more lucid your dreams will be. As for waking up in dreams i found many useful techniques in The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep...though i personally never went that deep into the practice the book is definitely fertile ground for practice.