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We succumb to those senses , emotions and imaginations of ourselves that the world gives us. Although some look subjective , some look objective , their limitations on us are insurmountable ; which is sadly contrary to what most of us think that we , with some kinds of efforts, can someday be in charge of our fates . Can a 2-dimensional creature escape from its 2-D world by jumping overhead into an extra dimension and becomes free ? If it can , the world once blocked its movement and intelligence , once limited what it could see, what it could dream of ..now becomes free of limitations just because of attaining that extra freedom ; and , even its clock now ticks differently . What we need is an extra dimension to leave . This is why a Zen patriarch secretly whispers in his great works * , which seldom noticed by readers , that " Detachment is what the way should be " (" 離即是法" ) and Taoist alchemy always emphasizes the "pre-heavenly qi " ( "先天氣") , stuff from another dimension via the Magic Gateway . * ‹‹ 傳心法要 ›› Other sayings like " 離一切諸相, 即是諸佛 " , "一根既返本, 六根成解脫 " ,all talk about the same thing.

Haven't you heard that enlightened people don't dream?

Here is a Daoist slant on what that error may be from philosopher John Gray….. Chuang-Tzu is as much a sceptic as a mystic. The sharp dichotomy between appearance and reality that is central in Buddhism is absent, and so is the attempt to transcend the illusions of everyday existence. Chuang-Tzu sees human life as a dream, but he does not seek to awaken from it. In a famous passage he writes of dreaming he was a butterfly, and not knowing on awakening whether he is a human being who has dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is a human being. Unlike the Buddha, A.C. Graham explains, Chuang-Tzu did not seek to awaken from the dream. He dreamt of dreaming more lucidly: 'Buddhists awaken out of dreaming; ChuangTzu wakes up to dreaming.' Awakening to the truth that life is a dream need not mean turning away from it. It may mean embracing it: If 'Life is a dream' implies that no achievement is lasting, it also implies that life can be charged with the wonder of dreams, that we drift spontaneously through events that follow a logic different from that of everyday intelligence, that fears and regrets are as unreal as hopes and desires. Chuang-Tzu admits no idea of salvation. There is no self and no awakening from the dream of self: When we dream we do not know we are dreaming, and in the middle of a dream we interpret a dream within it; not until we wake do we know that we were dreaming. Only at the ultimate awakening shall we know that this is the ultimate dream. We cannot be rid of illusions. Illusion is our natural condition. Why not accept it?

i helieve your right about a lot of whag you said, except there are many spontaneous kundalini awakenings if you look far wnough. no matter what i have done trying to relax this energy has kept trying to come up, dreams of snakes are often a sign with the enery rising. the nerve problems happened after my yin drained so much, i eventually go VERY bad low back pains and a shock sent through my entire body. and i developed neuropathy. here is the thing about kundalini, it was an extremely powerful electromagnetic force. it causes waves of bliss, out of body experiences, it was extremely sexual energy in narure, it raised in a coiled path then tryed going up and down a straight one. like a ball trying to break through a block. i know kundalini awakening is rare but i wish some people would believe me. i even met a very prominent kundalini master that runs the reddit forum and he believes me. regardless it doesnt matter. you would think after 4 years this energy would stop trying to come up. its because you cant turn kundalini off, once this energy opens up it does not stop. thats why i never got a break or chance to relax, because im in constant fear of it and hate it and it STILL tries to come up. either drain myself and get more grey hair at age 30 and worsen my neuropathy or if i do semen retention and try to heal the devil comes flying back up. always followed with a dream of a snake, then intense bliss at the bottom of my spine and it tries to fly up again

“One of the most important allegories of Daoism is the ‘Dream of the Butterfly’ in the Zhuangzi. Sometimes it is supposed to be a representation of all Daoist or even all Chinese philosophy in the West. This allegory encompasses fundamental Daoist notions, such as spontaneity, ‘free and easy wandering,’ non-action (wu wei), natural self-alternation (ziran), the zero-perspective of a sage and the understanding of correlation between life and death.” Here is another Western interpretation from philosopher John Gray….. Chuang-Tzu is as much a sceptic as a mystic. The sharp dichotomy between appearance and reality that is central in Buddhism is absent, and so is the attempt to transcend the illusions of everyday existence. Chuang-Tzu sees human life as a dream, but he does not seek to awaken from it. In a famous passage he writes of dreaming he was a butterfly, and not knowing on awakening whether he is a human being who has dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is a human being. Unlike the Buddha, A.C. Graham explains, Chuang-Tzu did not seek to awaken from the dream. He dreamt of dreaming more lucidly: 'Buddhists awaken out of dreaming; ChuangTzu wakes up to dreaming.' Awakening to the truth that life is a dream need not mean turning away from it. It may mean embracing it: If 'Life is a dream' implies that no achievement is lasting, it also implies that life can be charged with the wonder of dreams, that we drift spontaneously through events that follow a logic different from that of everyday intelligence, that fears and regrets are as unreal as hopes and desires. Chuang-Tzu admits no idea of salvation. There is no self and no awakening from the dream of self: When we dream we do not know we are dreaming, and in the middle of a dream we interpret a dream within it; not until we wake do we know that we were dreaming. Only at the ultimate awakening shall we know that this is the ultimate dream. We cannot be rid of illusions. Illusion is our natural condition. Why not accept it?

Hippies? Haha, my friends Dad was a real hippie, went to Woodstock, protested the war and all of that. He had some good stories, still kept the clothes he wore during that time... The hippy culture appeared to have made some good social progress but also declined some social progress. Through the hippy movement, many new ideas were spread of course - peace, love, etc. And new ways of experiencing life were explored. I believe exploring things is a positive to a point. The hippies were instrumental in challenging the staunch conservative view of life that was widespread throughout the developed world. Unfortunately, the hippy movement was so counter-culture in the sense that they denied living in society on its terms that a lot of them devolved into criminals, prostitutes, drug addicts, etc. The ones who didn't basically get out of it according to my friends Dad. They all got jobs by the 70's. Haha, protest against the very fabric of society can only go so far for so long... Jimmy Page had a take on the hippies in SF - he said he traveled there thinking it would be like a cool collection of creative people sharing ideas and creating art together, but what he found was that it was just a bunch of people doing drugs all the time and riffing on nice sympathetic philosophies. Hippies pioneered free love - but it wasn't really love was it? The idea of having sex with multiple people together at times while on drugs - is more like a nice lustful pleasure to fulfill oneself temporarily. Actual love is more about commitment, support, embracement, and true intimate connection. It'd be interesting to look up the stats on single mothers and unwanted children relative to the availability of birth control... if you ask me - that was a double edged sword. More people felt empowered to live their live freely, but society probably felt the brunt of more unwanted/accidental children, who when not properly raised- hold high risks of becoming criminals. Turns out my friends dad's son - basically turned into a modern day hippy. He loved being high on psychedelics... so much so that he was at risk for needing mental therapy. He's a real nobody now - waiting tables and doing drugs all the time. Oh, what a life to be a hippy.... when you take away the drugs and attempts at living together what do you see? A failed system of life because they denied some truths about life and relationships that the conservative majority knew and embraced. Like - choices have consequences that you're responsible for that reach far into the future. Like, not everyone can live together forever - just not possible. The hippies were basically stuck in their own dream, some of them woke up...some did not. I mean to me - if you have to do drugs to open your mind, you're already behind. You've already committed to becoming a heavy user right away. Opening your mind is a noble and admirable thing to do, but giving drugs the power to do it for you is the absolute worst way to practice it...thats the beginning of developing an addiction.

To me the distinction is far less solid. Sleeping dream is a projection of local body/mind. Waking dream is a projection of non-local body/mind or absolute body/mind. I don't see one as necessarily more complicated than the other. It's just that the non-local projection of the body/mind it's much more difficult to see as illusory because we feel we are it, just as we feel we are it while actively dreaming during sleep. When we are able to readily wake up in the dream, or in a dreamless sleep state, and maintain that awareness in dream or sleep in a stable fashion, it has a profound effect on how "real" it feels both during the dream and during waking.

Not sure I fully understand your post allinone, my apologies. One point seems to be the importance of combining dream practice with foundational spiritual practices. I agree with that. Dream practice is a 24 hour cycle and incorporates morning, daytime, evening, and sleep components. In addition, it is meant to be one part of a more comprehensive tantric spiritual practice. You mention that "you require only the lucid dream xp itself not what you do there in or "meditate in dream." I do not agree fully with this point. As Ilya mentioned, the lucid dream experience can be very unstable and it is only through practicing with the lucidity that we can stabilize the practice, make it more predictable, and learn how to effectively manipulate the dream environment. We can learn to change things, make the larger, smaller, multiply things, visit places, seek teachings, and so forth. For the dream practitioner this is all very worthwhile and requires a lot of patience and practice.

Hi, anyone here knows if there is a Taoist version of Dream Yoga? Just asking. (Maybe we can compare notes; I'm into Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist spiritual practice)

I've been doing a lot of devotional practice to Paramhansa Yogananda. A few nights ago I had a really rough dream with some spirits who were not exactly friendly toward me. I just kept reciting things like Jai Guru and Jai Sri Yogananda, imagining Yogananda; and the power of saying his name dispelled the danger and the spirits couldn't harm me. Yogananda showed up and was doing using some powerful spiritual tool to give me energy so that I wouldn't be affected by the spirits. He also gave me a brief teaching, but I'd rather keep what he told me private. I will say that it had to do with the middle path being the best path to liberation.

" Oh, let the sun beat down upon my face And stars fill my dream I'm a traveler of both time and space To be where I have been To sit with elders of the gentle race This world has seldom seen They talk of days for which they sit and wait All will be revealed ... Oh, pilot of the storm who leaves no trace Like sorts inside a dream Leave the path that led me to that place Yellow desert stream Like Shangri-la beneath the summer moon I will return again As the dust that floats finds you We're moving through Kashmir ... " - Led Zepplin .

Hey all, I had an interesting dream last night, and thought it would be cool to start a thread where people could share their dreams and dream experiences. So here goes. Last night before falling asleep I quietly asked to meet any masters that could help me in my spiritual development. Just before waking I had a pretty vivid dream. I met a young middle eastern looking man (younger than me at 32) and instantly we recogmized each other. He said "you probably recognize me from the forums" (I believe he meant tao bums ), "I was the boy who stood all day long.". The standing was standing meditation and I somehow understood that this meant he was naturally talented with meditation from a young age. He said said he had a party to attend but invited me stop by giving me only a street address. I asked which number and he said to just listen for the party. I walk up and down this street in a not so good part of town and find a house with a party, but he is not there and I am not sure if I am at the right party or not. And then........well and then someone knocked on my door and woke me up So there it is. Much better than the dream I had last week where I experienced someone else getting murdered. Maybe more on that another time.

Ok so I wanted to give a better explanation about the dream and about what it meant to me. I remember it involved a very long hallway in a school that went on for as far as I could tell. When I woke up I told my gf about the dream and she googled a dream interpretation website and it said that the hallway tends to symbolize transition and the school the ego. This seemed to fit exactly how the dream felt. I feel like a lot of the insights I gained from the dream and other insights I feel that have been flooding me lately after restarting the Zhunti mantra are beyond words to describe but I can give some general explanation and I hope I don't loose the essence of the insights while doing so. So like I said in my earlier post the hallway is transition and the school is the ego. I had started doing the Zhunti mantra several years ago in order to improve my karma and life in general. It was at this time that I also began to realize a lot of things about myself, and gain insight into my mind. A little while later I became acquainted on youtube and in my local area some western Theravada monks who had a very rationalist view of life and rejected anything deemed "superstitious" or "magic". This obviously included the powers of mantras. Being that they were monks and I saw them as the "experts" I gave up my mantra practice and most other practices deemed "superstitious" and took up the rationalist vipassana insight meditation approach. It didn't take long for me to notice that this practice did not make me feel very good, but I was told that was normal at the beginning and to keep at it and things would improve. The thing is, that things did not improve but this practice continued to make me feel bad. Although I can say it was effective for letting go, as a great many things were let go of, but it felt like crawling across broken glass in order to let go, effective but painful. Needless to say after doing this a few years and never getting past the "beginners hard part" I started to grow weary of this practice. I remembered back to when my primary practice was mantra and how well it had seemed to work in spite of what the western monks claimed about it. So I began to practice mantra again initially as an experiment to see if it was indeed as helpful as I had remembered it being in the past. I had only chanted the Zhunti mantra a few times (including in my head at bedtime) before I had this dream. The transition part seemed obvious enough as I was going back to a practice that I had given up a while back, but I was also giving things that could not be rationally explained another try as well. The school/ego part made sense to me as well, as the aspect of doing it myself and not relying on a mantra or Bodhisattva appealed to my ego, and the idea of having these things help me annoyed my ego. The odd thing is, is the western monks told me that the only way to gain insight was through rational meditation methods, but since restarting mantra as my practice I have been getting insight after insight which I must admit makes my ego feel awkward lol, but I am happy it's working nevertheless.

Ok talking about the 5th dimension, or soul resonance as you say, you are talking about our soul or our greater non-physical consciousness. You say we enter our consciousness here through an extra low frequency VEHICLE that you call ELF, extra low frequency, which is the step down fractal transforming vehicle through which we withdraw our consciousness from the physical time space reality, and rise up to a higher dimension of greater allowed realisation and awareness of 5th dimensional awareness or realisation. This ELF called Extra Low Frequency is actually infact, EXTRTEEEEEEMELY EPICLY MAJORLY TREMENDOUSLY OVERWHELMINGLY HIGH FREQUENCY, from my perspective or my experience of it. 7 hertz, is what I counted. Cause I can count the rythm of it, and calculate the hertz thus by counting seconds. I averaged it on 7 hertz. Now if your entire reality begins pulsing, ALL OF THE COSMOS, begins pulsing in your experience, your walls, your body, the ground, the sky, everything begins pulsing powerfully imposing 7 hertz, that will be experienced to be extremely overwhelmingly fast. For me atleast I experienced it to be very fast. It is infact the fastest frequency that I can still, as a physical human being, experience as a rythm. So anything above 7 hertz, it no longer feels like a rythm, and begins to sound more and more like a tone. It's the edge of rythm for me. If a drummer were to play 7 hertz, then you get my point of how fast that truely is. I find the number 7, being the edge of physical touch experience / rythm. funny. Because it also relates to the idea of the 7 heavens. Which is a funny synchronisity. Which is like the greatest thing we human can realise in physical reality. But I think this experience is often allowed consciously through meditation, as it releases resistance. So it becomes fully capable of being consciously realised. As actually, we experience this every single time we fall asleep. And also when we die. Dying being more fully conscious ofcourse. Sleeping often not conscious. And meditating, being the perfect balance of the best of both worlds. So it makes sense that you were capable of integrating true meaningful translation from the 5th dimension, after meditating for 7 days AND FASTING? That's amazing. I have heard someone say the 4th dimensional time space reality or 3th density is like the hardware. And the 5th dimension or 4th density being like the software. So as one can integrate the software it updates the hardware. It is like a fractal step down transformer that we are, human being, like an antenna allowing the greater cosmis energies to flow through us into this physical time space reality. For our own evermore greater allowed being and becoming evermore. For the purpose of joyous life experience. I'm not sure what the point was of my experience. But it does feel very good to experience an out of body experience. But trying to meet a middle ground, for physical and non-physical to meet in a truely meaningful co-creative way. Cause I only dream of meaningless things it seems, and when I do dream something meaningful, I am not capable of remembering it, or translating it fully into a meaninful way. I have resistance in my being, so I am not capable of flowing this high energy fully through me for full blown allowed realisation. Tho, meditating more often, I feel like I am moving closer towards the eventual full blown allowed conscious and retained realisation I seek to have. The best realisation I've had so far, was conscious memories of atlantis. And that also obviously didn't end up well. But it does help me understand why things are the way they are, and so I am capable of understanding the bigger picture of things. So now often I dream about such big pictures, so broad in scope, that I cannot find any meaningful way of translating it, only very vague. Like hypnogaugic light patterns which move in our consciousness, being the joyful or blissful realisation of the highest consciousness of realisation. I'm not sure what to do with this idea. Except I can relate it to fractals and the infinite nature of it. And then finding one which is truely infinite in nature and expansion. Trying to find the highest God. Or Source Consciousness. Through this fractaline light patterns in our consciousness naturally allowed to arise, without blocking it with self contradictory thought patterns of fear. But simply fully allowing the infinite realisation to be realised by us fully in our fully allowed being and becoming. In the end, it just seems like another book made out of light, that was left as a trace or fingerprint of god. Like all sacred geometry. As fractals is a way through which our consciousness resonates within itself to lay down the foundation of a physical time space reality grid so to speak. So we enter through our pineal gland, third eye, as a consciousness, and the pinecone being like the ultimate vehicle for consciousness to come and go. I understand that. But it still doesn't make me feel free. Like, I have to meditate a long time to go into non-physical, and if I do, as you say, I become catatonic due to love, and I can't flow the love through my physical body. So I feel like I am an antenna out of alignment. I am not capable of fine tuning to allow full flow of greater realisation. I may have to meditate 7 days for sure aswell. For the kind of energy thought stream of realisation I am truely seeking to consciously realise for myself. No other way, I will simply have to do that, and choose to become in alignment with the energy I am truely desiring to receive. I guess I want to become a non-physical being of radiance. I mean, it feels like that everytime I dream, it feels like I am dying. It's that powerful. But this experience may also simply be resistance I have towards the experience, cause when I allow it, it simply feels normal and natural, when I release my resistance towards it and simply relax into that high frequency energy which feels like love and freedom. But whenever I try to do anything, I instantly feel worse and become more and more limited and more and more physical. And then I'm returned back into physical awareness. It's almost like an addiction to physical reality. Like "Oh look at this thing, I know this thing, is so nice and physical. And boom, trauma here and there, self contradictory human thought forms, self contradictory physical time space realisation and experiences. And back into body. I really want physical and non-physical to come together, and the line of seperation simply being lessened and even vanished if possible for myself. I simply can't find any other way to do that, as you did, except through meditation. Maybe unconditional service aswell. Cause otherwise I got no reason to flow those greater realisations through me. I don't know what we are becoming. Sometimes I think we'll just become quasi physical humans made out of radiant light. In permanent meditation or something. Like what is the point if we cannot fully realise physical reality into something that is good. Not bad. But simply the moreness of all that exists. But hopefully one which is in alignment with our own true infinite and eternal nature. Not something we are suppose to break free from. That's like tipping toe in bathtub, and running away, and closing the door forever. I would rather have God Consciousness fully manifest in physical form for ALL human beings. Why do we feel we need to go into the 5th dimension to fly for example. What is so bad about flying as a 3th density physical human being? I see no reason why everything has to be so strict and serious and limitted. Like why can't we just be free to come and go, instead of having to commit to one entire life. For what? To suffer? Suffering wont ever bring about any realisation except it being completely irrelevant. So what the actual hell is the entire planet earth waiting for? Like what is the point of all of this. Everyone says, oh you will know when you die. So where are the nuclear bombs? Let them come then. All those people make no sense. They all contradict themselves. We all do. Even I do. Even right now. I am contradicting myself. I am saying I want to fly. But am I jumping out of my window right now? No... Cause then I will simply fall flat to my face. But why do I want to fly then? Why do I have this desire, that feels good, and then the reality. I am here to flow that energy through me. So I should do what? I can go far far and far away. And then I wanna go back home. Because I become tired. And life is heavy and difficult. I can pretend I am free, more and more. But I will always just simply want to SIMPLY TAKE OFF AND FLY. So why can't I just simply just DO THAT? IT's really weird.

True enough, your dream, for you - what does root chakra work mean to you? Being grounded might be exactly the right place for you to start, were you ‘ungrounded’ at the time of your dream? I’m always a bit wary of deliberate root chakra work myself in case it leads to kundalini in unprepared channels, but that’s just me.

It seems like a very clear guidance dream to me, I see the eagle as your spirit, slowly becoming more and more limited by your physical body, but in the end shown the only way to regain freedom which is by finding the door below and entering through it yourself, ie., by your consciousness entering through the lower door. The dream shows very clearly that there is no other window, gate or door, as seen from the perspective of your spirit itself, apart from the one below, so you are given a head start and don’t need to even try to find one where your spirit has shown that one doesn’t exist. What’s left is what “on the ground” points to, in my experience the starting point is below the navel, equivalent to the lower dantian in Daoism.

Lower down on this very same tree there sat a third monkey, who had listened in on everything. This monkey had insomnia, and scratched out the entire thing onto a collection of coconut shells. And he kicked each shell off his branch, one by one, one for every hour that he could not sleep. On a yet lower branch, another monkey would catch these...weird coconut shells with all these words scratched on them. And this monkey read what had been scratched and said aloud, "You know I don't agree with this use of dimensions, 8-d and all that. This person does not seem to know what they are talking about." The next day this same monkey found his friend, a bear, who lived elsewhere in the forest. The bear sat with the words for a while, made some tea and served it to them both, sat down and then said that he had had a dream some time earlier about a kind of blue electric energy. The bear said that this energy seemed connected with dragon, but perhaps dragon expressing through a different flavor of expression, a different animal. Anyway, said the bear, the animal who had appeared in the dream, via a visual pun, indicated that 'Sung' breathing would cultivate the relationship with this energy. "But that was my dream," said the bear. "And, as we both know," he said to his monkey friend, "I am a bear. And bears differ from other bears, as well as from other species. Now if you'll excuse me," he said, farting as he said it, which made them laugh.

Yeah effectively it’s the hun. (Which can be said to be what your ‘energy body’ actually is - sorry has to be vague or it’s a book’s worth of explanation) So in modern western stuff you see these dream practices where the energy body lifts off your physical one and travels. But you also get the ones where someone is given a coordinate and they view that place… Remote viewing I think it’s called. From what I understand of it (I’m really no expert at all) - they’re both using the Hun… just in different ways. There’s several aspects to the Hun - one is a kind of personal soul and another is a sort of collective soul. So I assume this is why it’s experienced differently - but similar end result. —— For (spiritual) traditions that don’t actively seek siddhi development, there is a stage where a siddhi naturally arises. I call it omniscience - but basically it’s knowledge of all things… Like how you’re able to go into your memory and remember what your front door looks like - someone with this siddhi is able to recollect any human (and non-human) experience, memory, thought or knowledge from all time (past, present and future). From what I understand, this is basically a complete, unobstructed connection with the ‘collective soul’ aspect of the Hun. It can’t be trained or developed - it’s simply a byproduct of a certain (very high) level of attainment. If you do this magical stuff, or focus on siddhi development, then the door to this level of attainment is closed. (Not that it’s likely that the vast majority of us would achieve it anyway 😅)

When an untrained individual or skeptics who cannot feel chi can do the same thing without prior training and replicate brutal Qigong demonstrations "only great masters do," only the densest and brainwashed can keep up the belief in the pipe dream. By the way, the same is valid for many tai chi schools. Parlor trickery, unfortunately, is marketed and sold as a genuine internal art. All this comes from a tiny brain of practitioners and a lack of ethics. Scamgong is a viral disease, and people who endorse those "masters" are on the level of larvae worse than imps in energy realm. Fake martial arts, fake neigong, fake spiritual development, see where it goes - growing a persona cult.

Does he also teach yoga nidra? Dream yoga and yoga nidra go hand in hand beautifully. I'm making the taoist dream techniques my primary framework to build this practice on. I personally find it to be more effortless and deeply covers more ground with less work. I'm also more drawn to working with the tanden/dantian system than the chakra system. Even though the taoist dream practice is a very complete system I'm still very interested in seeing how the hindus and buddhists do their dreamwork just so I can compare and perhaps learn something new that I may be able to incorporate. I think that the Buddhists put a heavy emphasis on dream practice specifically for the purpose of being able to recognize the state of death. Taoists may have a completely different approach like immortality and merging with the macrocosmos (sun, earth, moon, stars etc). Taoists may also be more forgiving (perhaps even encourage) on using dream practices for pleasure, experiences, adventures, sources of inspiration and entertainment. The dzogchen guys look down on it and find it to be a distraction. I could be wrong on these generalizations. At the end of the day it's about doubling your life. Immortals do not sleep. How can something that is conscious in the sleep and dream state be unconscious? The ones who go through their sleep and dream life unconscious are those who are asleep and unaware (as if in a trance) in their "waking" lives. This reminds me of Shakyamuni when he was asked if he was a spirit, god or a man and his response was "I am awake". It's the same with conscious dreaming. If you are truly awakened in your waking life then you will bring that awareness with you into the energetic dream space. You also bring more of that awareness of the dream space with you back into your waking life. Really amazing how this works.

Thank you Daniel, I have been doing what you are suggesting on my own initiative, except for the stop thinking of making a difference for others. The curse has been in recess for a little while now, though not entirely; my mind is still being adjusted by the demon, and I often fall into depression- at least there are no more hallucinations. What concerns me now are my dreams. I dream I am being hazed or initiated, into a group that is violent. I dream of weapons, myself using them too, to prove myself. I dream a lot of strange things, strange landscapes, and none of them comforting to the heart.

You got anything on this topic? I might've posted this already but they only time I'd heard astral travel in a Daoist context was through Jerry Alan Johnson's books, unless dream practices count as the same thing.

So basically you are saying, if nothing in the dream is real, then how do you know what is true in order to recognize it when you experience it, right? Well that's a great question. One way of realizing you are in the dream is by asking "what is a thing?". A lot of people think that if nothing really exists, how can anything function? However, Nagarjuna said that it is precisely because everything does not really exist that everything functions. If everything were truly existent, existing in and of itself and thus being unchanging, things would not depend on anything. But then they could not interact with each other either because that entails change. Therefore, it is only due to everything changing all the time that interaction and functioning are possible. Ponder on this for a moment... So this is basic logic that isn't pointing to what things are, but to what they aren't. You can play with it and try to prove it wrong, but you won't succeed (but please do try). Again we are not talking about what things are, but what they aren't. Since the lower 6 senses cannot comprehend emptiness the only thing we can do at this point is to recognize that we are not perceiving reality as it is. So if things in this dimension don't really exist then how can a self exist? Thus you realize that 1. either there's no self or 2. the self is not here. You must find out which one is true. However in both scenarios an idea that there is a true self here is ridiculous so you can recognize that your perception of what's going on is not real. The you that you think you are is not real. Basically you realize that you are not seeing truth because what you see cannot be truth by any definition. The only thing that is left is to surrender what is false, so only the truth is left at the end. "Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold." - Leo Tolstoy “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge” - Stephen Hawking Please read my words more carefully. I never said anywhere that the scientists have proof of truth. I only said that scientists know that the senses aren't perceiving reality. So basically they have proof of illusion and understand that what we perceive as real is not real. This is not proof of truth. I don't know what you are talking about, different approaches, cop outs... you are not paying attention is all. You seem to be looking for an example of truth in a dream world. Such goal is futile. As I explained the only thing we can do is to explain what is not true, in order to let go of it. There is no contradiction in what I'm saying. You are correct that when we are awake we are fully aware of what dreaming is all about. You seem to be looking for a truth in the dream that would suggest you are dreaming. Is that possible? The only thing you get in the dream is the realization that what you think is going on cannot be real, because basically you perceive things in the absence of things. Thus you don't know what truth is, but you know that whatever you perceive isn't truth. This is the beginning of the journey. So there is no true information in the dream state, there is only realization of lies. As I said multiple times already, it's not about earning and learning your way out of the dream, since nothing from the dream can propel you towards truth. It's about UN-learning what is false in order to uncover a truth. I never said that you can't know reality. I said that the you who you think you are (which is not real) cannot know reality. Drop your philosophies about this school of philosophy or that school of philosophy, this isn't about any school or approach. This is a simple regurgitation of what is obvious. You need to ask yourself the question - what is truth? Obviously truth is something that doesn't change, if it changes then it's not this or that, so you can't rely on it to make any conclusions. So knowing that truth doesn't change, and that everything you experience with the lower 6 senses is changing, the only obvious conclusion is that you aren't experiencing truth. Read this a few times until you grasp it. There are no contradictions here.

The bed chamber is not sexual it is the point of yin and yang giving birth to your higher self. Astral projecting is nobody's goal only side effect or an obstruction of being a better person. In the blink of an eye we travel between dream and reality they are not separate. what sounds lofty and spiritual is only superficial misunderstanding. The third party has so much experience but it is not your own. Only you can travel and pass the heavenly gates. All else is fake and make-believe. Astral projecting is a worthless ambition, intention, want, need, desire that will take you far from the bullseye. Do not seek the far from the near there is a lot of work to be done. Be more interested in small gains and accumulate the wealth. Why spend any wealth of energy that leads to an imaginary space. Just saying not worth it. Know the target before shooting your load. Know what is around, above, below and behind what you are seeking. There is nothing to seek that is the mistake. If you are seeking it is an endless battle that can not be won.