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Every single dream and nightmare will get replayed vividly, no escape. Really? what would be the purpose or reason for something like this? To repeat the nightmares a person already went through, one more time in detail, vividly without instinctual support??? (Does it happen in IMAX 3D? Will the dead person get googles? If so, do you know what kind of goggles also? Does the sound play on Dolby or DTS? I personally prefer DTS, can I book ahead) I am curious. where are these things that you describe, stated? in what scripture or books? Whatever be the source, it sounds like crap to me. Creator or no creator, no one would want to put some one through a process like that. there should be a reason and rhyme for things, or there should be none. I am sorry to state this, whichever way I look, whatever you have written sounds nonsense. There may be some minor truths in it. Edited to add: Death is just a transition in the state of consciousness. Just like from the dream state to the waking state. Yes, this worldly life is a much more complicated and intricate dream. When we wake up (die) from this dream, the transition can possibly be hard and shocking. There could even be flashes like flashes of dream. Still, it is nothing but getting out of one dream to another state. But, playing "all nightmares back vividly" once again??? What is this, some kind of rewind back and play all the nightmare with added effects and no reprieve. Sounds like a pre-planned torture scheme. If this were to be true, whoever or whatever designed this playback of all vivid nightmares should be cruel with no heart.

Nocturnal emissions with a dream, perhaps. Nocturnal emissions with no dream are called 滑精/huajing, which is different from those with a dream, usually called 遺精/yijing or 夢遺/mengyi. Huajing is generally understood to be primarily caused by weak kidney yang. There are various types of mengyi which are categorized by their causes, which can include excessive desire, built up jing fluid, kidney yin deficiency leading to a type of "fire" (metaphorically speaking) that disturbs the mind during sleep and triggers wet dreams; and visits from entities which in English I suppose we could call incubi/succubi. "Weak subconscious" arguably plays a role in all of this, but not necessarily the main role. For instance--supposing that we interpret the term "weak subconscious" in a similar way--a person with this problem may be more easily "seduced" in sleep by a ghost. However, strong qi in and of itself will protect the body from the advances of such creatures, and not everybody who has strong qi has a strong mind, just as not all people with strong minds have strong qi. Premature ejaculation is not generally treated as a symptom of qi stagnation or insufficient qi circulation in Chinese medicine, and since Chinese medicine is very good at treating this condition, I lend credence to its explanations. Premature ejaculation is also more about deficient kidney yang (leading to the inability of the body to "hold" jing in long enough) or kidney yin deficiency (leading to "deficiency fire," which means that the various sexual responses, including both arousal and orgasm, are too easily triggered, kind of like a fuse that burns way too quickly). Chinese medicine also recognizes the mental factors that dominate the thinking on this condition in western medicine, anxiety and excessive excitement being the main culprits.

EXPERIENCE OF SUNYATA THE DILIGENT PRACTITIONER OF DHARMA is always mindful of the transience of life, for we have no idea what is going to happen in the future or when we will die. By contemplating how or when death will come, we learn to appreciate the impermanence of life, and to develop a sense of renunciation. In this way, we become less involved in mundane attachments. It is like planning a move from one geographical location to another. A wise person cultivates an attitude that accepts the idea, then plans the change skillfully, doing important chores ahead of time, so that at his new house everything will be ready and waiting. Once he arrives, he will be less concerned about the home he has left and more able to concentrate on settling down. In the same way, realizing how short and temporary this life is allows us to devote more energy to practicing the Dharma. This is a more fruitful undertaking than being obsessed with material pleasures, for a time is going to come when none of these possessions can be claimed. Indeed, a time will come when we cannot take along even one strand of hair. Our friends may be willing to help us now, but in the future, not they, or any possessions or wealth will have a chance to help us. Our position as Dharma practitioners is very rare, for even famous and rich people may not have the opportunity that we have. Because our lives are limited, we should regard the Dharma and the spiritual master as very, very precious. The connection between the spiritual master and the disciple cannot be stressed enough. The Buddhas and bodhisattvas of the past related to the Dharma first as ordinary sentient beings, and only through proper guidance did they integrate the teachings and achieve enlightenment. From this point, they went on to indestructible omniscience and eternal bliss. Such a state of mind, and the ability to benefit others, comes only from a proper relationship with the master. It is essential to relate to the master in a sincere and genuine way, for he guides us to the proper understanding of the experiences that come with practice. This practice takes a long time to perfect, and we cannot expect fruition to come about in a day or two, or even a few years. The nature of the mind can be explained in three points: how we perceive, how we relate to these perceptions, and the nature of phenomena. Perceptions, projections, and phenomena are all inseparable elements of the mind. Without the mind we have nothing to perceive and no way to relate to what is happening. All shapes, even nightmarish forms, are there because of the mind. If there was no mind, there would be no form. Because a blind man cannot see, for him, there is no color. We perceive colors when our eye consciousness is working, and with this consciousness we distinguish and label the different colors. In terms of ultimate reality, there is no difference between color and mind, or between the labels we give a color and the mind. In the same way, sound is not an entity separate from the mind that hears it, and the ear consciousness reflects the inseparable quality of sound and mind. Likewise, the quality of each sense perception is embodied as a sense consciousness--sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Although sense experiences and their labels are not separate in terms of ultimate reality, we fail to take this perspective, placing what we sense and that which is sensing into different categories. If we acknowledge that there are no perceptions without the mind, we can understand that phenomena, too, are dependent on mind. Perceived objects do not exist independently and do not have a permanent quality of their own, and labels are just reference points that we devise to support the existence of our thoughts or perceptions. Labels such as good/bad, happy/sad, long/short, and hot/cold are created by the mind, and do not in themselves hold any inherent truth. Because everything is a function of the mind, phenomena are not things in themselves, but are what the mind is and how the mind relates to them. Acknowledging that phenomena are mental projections, we can achieve greater renunciation for there really is no point in getting attached to a situation that is not what it seems to be. Going further, we can actually look into our own mind and examine it. This is a fluid situation. We have identified the quality of knowing, but we cannot locate or label that quality. We cannot give our consciousness a fixed shape or color, for the nature of mind itself is insubstantial. That which identifies, relates to, and labels other things does not itself possess a fixed identity. This step-by-step method--examining the perceiver in relation to the perceived--can help us to realize the unborn and insubstantial quality of all things. We are working toward unfolding the nature of everything, which is sunyata or emptiness. Sunyata is not a vacuum or a state of nothingness. Indeed, an enlightened yogi sees the same things we do. At the same time, he or she appreciates the insubstantial and changing quality of everything, and understands that projections and perceptions can cause no harm or trouble. We, on the other hand, regard our projections as something substantial, and we believe that they support and sustain us. We think they are real; indeed, for us this is total reality. We fixate on our perceived reality and become attached to it. That is how we become trapped in our own projections. To go beyond intellectual understanding to a spontaneous experience of sunyata is to experience the nature of the mind as dharmakaya. This state manifests as an all-pervading quality of space. When a practitioner merges his mind with the dharmakaya, he or she continues to experience everything as before, but also sees the transience of all things. He knows at that point that his mind is insubstantial and non-compounded. The state of mind in which we see phenomena, yet perceive it without grasping, is called "the mind of great bliss." Although we do not categorize or focus attention on any fixed thing, we see everything that dawns in the consciousness distinctly, without mistaking one for the other. Such is clarity, and if we see clearly, we can sustain a blissful state without effort. In our lineage this is called "giving birth to the experience of mahamudra." As this awareness dawns, the quality of mind itself manifests as unborn and uncompounded. We construct our own confusion if we hold on to a fixed reality and label phenomena as entities separate from ourselves. In doing this, we inevitably crave some things and reject others, and this is bewildering. Thus, the boundary between enlightened beings and sentient beings lies not in what is seen (because enlightened beings see things too), but in the way they are seen. From the perspective of enlightened mind, everything is Buddhanature, everything is sunyata, and everything is insubstantial. To realize this involves a letting go, the letting go that is enlightenment. Those of us caught up in confusion, imprison ourselves by holding onto a fixed system of dualities. For example, when adults see a rainbow in the sky, they know what it is and understand that it is insubstantial. When a child sees a rainbow for the first time, he wants to catch it and make it his own. This is like the difference between enlightened beings and ordinary sentient beings. Realized beings, when they see anything, understand it as a reflection of the mind, and they get neither bored with it nor excited about it. Ordinary beings, thinking that what they see is real and permanent, run off with their perceptions and compulsively try to possess this and reject that. This is how confusion piles up. One of the highest experiences is to understand that reality is not fixed. It is also like this with dreams. Enlightened beings have dreams much like ours. Within our framework of habitual patterns, some dreams frighten us, and others please us. For a yogi, however, the dream experience is different. He recognizes that a dream is occurring, and he knows that it is insubstantial. He can catch the dream and play with it, doing whatever he wants to do with it. Unlike us, he recognizes that a dream does not have a fixed quality, and he can experience its fluid openness and space without becoming frightened or excited. Day-to-day life is like a dream, for we react to waking experiences as we do to dreams, with the same patterns or habits. Everything seems complete and real; some experiences make us sad and some make us happy. An enlightened being, however, has let go of everything, and regards all phenomena as insubstantial. Therefore, no one is hurt, nothing triggers excitement, and there is no cause for fear. The bardo experience can be encountered in the same way. Usually, we cannot see clearly at the time of the bardo because we have built such heavy habitual patterns, and our projections seem so concrete. We play a game of duality, including conflicts between ourselves and others, so we fight the bardo experience, and everything frightens and bewilders us. Yet, for an enlightened being who realizes the sunyata nature of all things, even in the bardo, whatever appearances may come, there is space, openness, and movement. The experience of sunyata is the essence of enlightenment. It is also the basis for bodhicitta, the motivation to benefit all sentient beings. This is because realizing insubstantiality--the sunyata nature of all things--makes the difference between sanity and insanity. A sane person sympathizes with the suffering of an insane person. He or she thinks, "I wish something better could happen to him," and in this way her bodhicitta grows. Likewise, a realized person sees that those who have not recognized sunyata clutch and hold onto fixed ideas, and knowing that this will lead the other person to further suffering, he or she wants to do all they can to help. Because a person with the experience of sunyata knows what the sunyata experience means to them, they know how much it would mean to others. Just having had the experience of sunyata brings benefit to others because now spaciousness is always present. We are no longer limited to doing only this much or that much, and because there are no limitations, there is also great ability and willingness. When there is no substantial blockage to our true nature, the experience of sunyata is immaculate. Without at least a beginning experience of sunyata, true compassion is not even possible. We will only be able to care genuinely when things go wrong for our own loved ones. This becomes a sort of possessive compassion. It is limited and discriminatory, and it is not the compassion of the bodhisattvas. The bodhicitta generated by bodhisattvas is directed toward all beings equally. Only with such non-discriminating motivation can there be the ability to benefit others. Great ability, or skillful means, extends everywhere because we have transcended a fixed state of reality and overcome all barriers. Regardless of the situation and regardless of which people are involved, we will have the ability to help. Learning about compassion is important, but it is the actual doing of practice that enables us to realize the profundity of the teachings and to integrate them into daily life. We are not talking about practicing for a couple of months or a few years, but doing it constantly and continually until we have great experiences. This is important because the greater our experience of sunyata, the greater and more spontaneous will be our ability to benefit all beings. At the point where we experience sunyata, practice becomes easy. When the sky is cloudy, the sun is obscured, but as the clouds evaporate, the sun's rays appear and become more and more radiant. Likewise, the more we let go of ego, the greater is the space created in the environment. Some people believe that persons who have realized sunyata become detached and aloof. This is not at all true. Indeed, with the experience of sunyata we become even more affectionate, respectful, and helpful toward others. We feel closer to everyone because the wish for them to attain enlightenment is also growing. Thus the greater our experience of sunyata, the greater our concern for all beings. The transcendental qualities of the great yogis are beyond belief. Once in Tibet, a great yogi was doing an intensive ritual practice and a robber crept up behind him with a knife. As the yogi played his drums and ritual objects, the robber cut off his head, which dropped to the ground. Nonchalantly, the yogi picked up his head, put it back on, and continued the ritual. The robber stared speechless until the yogi had finished, and then said: "Oh, I wanted to kill you so much! I really wanted to get rid of you." The yogi replied, "Well, will my death make you happy? If it will, I'll die right here. My prayer for you is that there may come a time when I will cut the neck of your ego." With that, he fell dead. This is an example of a total letting go. Of course, we do not actually want to drop dead, but the point is that the yogi acted effortlessly and spontaneously, and created for the future a connection between himself and the robber. In a later life, this robber became his disciple, and through this connection and his own prayers, he was helped toward liberation. Most of us have had dreams of effortless action. As you dream of a fire, for example, you jump into it, then realize that it is only a dream, and you are not burned. Or perhaps a huge beast lunges at you, yet nothing happens. It is like that for enlightened ones: being attacked is like being in a dream. Similarly, you may dream of finding a precious object, and your first instinct is: "Oh, wow! I've got a precious jewel!" But on second thought, you realize that this is just your dream, so you just play with the jewel and then let it go. This is what seems to happen to diligent practitioners. It is important to learn how to recognize sunyata so that we can realize that every perception is relative to our mind, and that the nature of labels, of phenomena--in reality the nature of all things--is insubstantial. We never reach a point where we can say that the mind is going in this direction, is located here, or comes from there--or for that matter that it has any particular color or shape at all. Understanding this, we can let go of our confusion, letting go of our ego and conflicting emotions as well. We can transcend our bewilderment and reach Buddhahood. A Buddha works so that others, too, may recognize sunyata, and may themselves become Buddhas. The main point is that someone who understands sunyata acts with naturally arising compassion for the liberation of all those who are suffering. When we build a house, we start by clearing away dirt, not by placing the completed building on bare ground. Digging the foundation is a part of the building process. In the same way, purification of defilements is part of the process of enlightenment, and it is necessary for our ultimate realization of sunyata. In helping you recognize the true nature of your mind, the teacher does not place a new mind in you, but just helps you to recognize how things really are. This is the profound instruction of the Kagyu lineage. It is a path of unbroken teaching because it is the same path that the great masters have followed. The teachings are not presented to you in a neat package ostentatiously wrapped, and just hearing about the Dharma is not enough. Methods such as visualizing deities, reciting mantras, and so forth provide the skill to purify all accumulated neuroses, and they engender the virtues that cut through obscurations. Dharma practices are the tools that we need to break through to the experience of sunyata. This teaching was given by Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche at Karma Triyana Dharmachakra. It was translated by Chojor Radha and edited by Sally Clay. It originally appeared in Densal, Vol. 11, Number 2.

I’ve always used dreams as a source of useful and valid information, which I think is not compatible with dream yoga. For me dreams reflect what is going on emotionally and mentally at a subconscious level, which I have found to be valuable in teasing out what is conditioning and what is natural, but they have also often enough showed me a state that I am to work towards energetically. For me dreams are invaluable, but used in an entirely different manner to dream yoga, and with an entirely different end point.

On a side note.... its a bad idea to consciously swallow mucus. They're nothing but blobs of toxin meant to be expunged. On the matter of nostril blockages, I'd be curious if any of you have regulated your breathing to the abdomen instead of from the lungs/chest? Personally, I'm a habitual abdominal breather, and I don't experience any bunged up nostrils unless I get a cold, which is pretty rare. Abdominal breathing is essential for dream yoga to stabilize, and dream yoga is another useful yardstick to know if your practice is working.

@steve Thanks for your detailed answers and responses!!! I will definitely check up on Yungdrung Bön. It was a Bön visualisation that led to my own breakthrough in lucid dream, so I wouldn't mind checking out some more Bön Kudos to your dedicated practice!! It fuels my own motivation to keep going

@Shadao Thanks for sharing! Me2, on my first truly lucid dream I also went... wild Great pointers

It depends how you look at it. We humans have to ability to imagine anything we want. Sure, if you lie in bed with your eyes closed and let go of awareness of your physical body, that ability to imagine becomes very vivid and real and lucid, if you couple it with a tremendous consistent focus. This ability to powerfully focus is often most easily achieved when one has a desire that is extremely powerful and big. That is also why often people go to caves to fast for days in order to use this as a permission slip to allow themsleves to consciously dream or get a "vision." It's like, yeah, I'm so determined! I'm gonna do it no matter what! I want this more than anything! In the same way, someone may have a strong desire for something, and they lie in bed, and they want to see their desire and they imagine it, and they feel so good in it, they can't help but focus more and more on the desire, to a point where the mind just is completely consumed by the imagination, and it keeps becoming more and more vivid, untill the physical reality begins to synchronise with their vision and they enter a inter dimensional trance state where the vision begins to crystalise, much like in a wake induced lucid dream, and they may very well find themselves in their imagined reality, looking directly at the very reality of their desire. As fully and colorful and vivid and lucid as one can possibly imagine. They can taste it and touch it. But it is still existing for the purpose of inspiring us the state of being, the feeling that that dream, or imagination or desire induces in us. The feeling that inspires us to live our life more fully. To be that freedom in this life more fully and express it here. To take that love and joy and express it here in this life. And be it here! To take all that energy and crystalize it here! Make it real here in this life. To realise it here in this physical life. Which is why we have come here. For the more. The more real. The more real. We did not come here to go back into non-physical. Sure you may not be easily capable of realising all your dreams instantly. But you can take that feeling of joy that you feel as you imagine what you want so fully that you can feel it, and you can take that guiding light of your joy to guide you and inspire you through your physical life. To go and be your dreams. To live your dreams instead of dreaming that you are alife. Our brain is like the antenna and receiver of that energy that people can call thought form. You can have thought form from humans and thought form from even higher dimensions and from Source. As you allow yourself to align with that, like focusing on it which tunes your dial to receive a certain frequency of energy thought form vibration, yeah you can then more fully translate that reality or "radio station." You can dream whatever you want, if you just allow yourself to focus on what you want. And then, as you feel that love, then you can easily see where that love is in this life and then you can live and co-create your life with that love in this life. Or joy or freedom or knowledge or whatever you wish. But it requires the willingness to focus consistently. Deliberate conscious co-creation.

* * * Killing the Ego * * * Question : Papaji, a recurring difficulty for me is that my ego wants to be part of the process of becoming free. My ego want to congratulate itself by saying “Look at me. Look at what l am doing " Part of me says, 'No, you are not coming here, " but my ego, feeling like a little child, says, “Me , too I am coming too ! So there isn't quite that letting go. Sri Papaji : No need for letting go. You should make use of this very sympathetic ego. It is a nice ego, a good ego. If the ego wants to be free, it is a good symptom. First, the ego will start. Usually, the ego doesn't want you to be free, and will tend to take you toward the objects of the senses. Mostly for enjoyment. If the ego wants to be free, start with the ego itself. First, I is an ego, isn't it? Yes. Through this ego you are working. Everything is being worked by the ego itself in the world. Now you have to make use of this ego. Take this ego Selfward from where it arises. If she wants to be free, take this ego toward freedom. What is that? Return to its source. Ego is a thought, isn't it? Ego is the first thought that rises in the morning. " I am Fred" is Fred-thought. So dive this ego-thought toward where it rises. I has taken a role of ego itself. I, the real I, has become I as an ego. "I am doing this; I have done that; I want that; I don't want this; I know." These thoughts rise as the ego. Then, turn the ego back towards its source from where it rises. "My ego wants to be free," you said. So bring this ego back to its source. Then this ego-I will introduce you to the real source, also an I. When she returns to her source, this I will merge into the source. That is why this thought is a very blessed thought. "I want to be free" is still ego appearing. So you must work on this ego-thought, this I-thought. And return back to its source. Then the ego will see her face; she will merge and ego will vanish. What will be left is the source itself. And this ego will not appear again. It will be dissolved.., discharged into the ocean as a river discharges into the ocean and becomes ocean and does not return. From there, file functions will be from the source itself ! Not egoistic. Spontaneous, without involvement in the thought process. No thought process will be there--only direct sponta¬neous activity without thinking. First I think and then I act. This process will be gone and direct activity will be there according to circumstances. In this process even the memory won't be there either. You don't need memory. Memory is ego itself. All this will be finished. Mind wiIl be no-mind. Mind and ego, there is not much difference. Neither the mind nor the ego exist. In fact, they never existed ! These are just your own desires. Desires for the enjoyment of the samsara. Yet in reality, they don't exist. You have never seen the face of your ego, nor tile face of your mind. It is like a ghost, so as a ghost we accept it. This has been handed down from generation to generation. In reality, the ego doesn't exist, the mind doesn't exist, and samsara doesn't exist. Yet when the ego rises, samsara rises. When the ego ceases, samsara ceases. When samsara ceases, then you will recognize your nature. You are not to earn it by any effort ! Even when you meditate it is the suggestion through the ego itself that you meditate. Q : The way you speak about it now, it sounds like a very loving process. Normal, I think of getting rid of the ego or killing the ego, to let it go. But now you are saying that one should let the ego see its own true nature. Sri Papaji : Yes, Q : That seems like an incredibly loving thing to do for anything. Because then it isn't killing but an enhancement. Whatever sees its own true nature would be perfect. Sri Papaji : When you decide to kill ego, this is the ego itself. How will you kill it? Has anybody killed the ego? What is the weapon needed to kill the ego? First there must be something to be killed. First you must see the thing that is to be killed. Then, in the seeing, it is already killed. This thought arises: "I want to kill the ego." Trace this I itself. When you say, "I want to kill the ego," return back to this l and see if there is any ego to be killed. Q : You have often said the ego is like a wave arising in the ocean. It seems to me that the ocean and the ego are part of the same thing. Now l see I should really sink into my ego and from the place of the ego recognize that I am of the ocean itself Sri Papaji : No, not that way. When you say the wave belongs to the ocean, who is saying the wave is different from the ocean? Q : Ego. Sri Papaji : Ego is the wave. You are the source. You are ocean, yet you do not identify yourself with the ocean in that place. When you are the ocean, how do you differ from the waves? What conflict do you have with the waves? Q: None. But my problem is to go from the ego to the source. Sri Papaji : This source is ocean itself. Ego plays on the surface of the ocean like a wave. The trouble is that right now you are describing yourself as an onlooker of both ocean and wave, standing somewhere on the beach. You have to identify yourself and say, "I am the ocean." Q : l see. I thought I was seeing myself as the wave. But if I really saw myself as the wave then I wouldn’t be separate from the ocean. So the wave can't see itself as separate from the ocean. Sri Papaji : You have to be ocean itself. You are the ocean. When a wave arises, you be under the wave. How is the wave different from the ocean itself ? Name, shape, and movement. All this is activity, but how is the ocean concerned with the wave's name, form, or movement ? Waves rise and fall and move about, and how is this the ocean's concern? You be the ocean first and then see. Where is the wave? Where is your ego? These waves are only samsara rising from the ocean. Under¬neath is nirvana. Ocean is nirvana. Emptiness. In that emptiness waves arise. And in emptiness if waves are moving, how are they different from emptiness itself? They are all empty ! So you have to return to the source, to emptiness, to the ocean, and then see how you feel, how you are different in activities, movement, name, form. Q: What is your response to someone who says, "I have a family and children. I have too many commitments, so what possibility is there for me to awaken?" Sri Papaji : That person must wake up from the dream that he or she has a family. One is always free and one is always alone. The mind is only dreaming. For example, when I fall asleep I dream that I marry and have children. In the dream I start to worry that I have no time for meditation or to go to the cave in the mountains. All these things are uttered when a person is living in a dream. It is better to wake that person up from the dream. Nothing has ever touched this person; he or she is always alone. When you see any name or any form, it is only a dream. Q : I read that the Maharshi said we should constantly abide in the Self Sri Papaji : I would say instead, liberate the mind from any abiding. Q: But the mind does not abide. Sri Papaji : Who else but the mind abides? Yes, but the mind finishes. Sri Papaji : Yes, this is non-abidance. If you abide somewhere, you have rejected someplace else to abide here. If you abide here, the mind will jump to abide somewhere else as well. Allow the mind to abide nowhere and what will be the result? Mind has to abide on an object. If the object is removed, the mind can¬not hang with an object. Then there will be no-mind. Q : Then the mind is its object. Yes, same thing. Any object is objectified mind. And if you don't allow the mind to abide anywhere, there is no-mind. No-mind is freedom. When mind abides, samsara appears. Samsara is a construction of the mind. ~ From WakeUp and Roar Satsang with H.W.L. Poonja Book

So the dreamer is asleep in part of the dream? The energy anchored in Uluru is quite important - being part of horizontal and vertical energy flows. Move above Uluru for 2 widths of Australia and see what entity you find

Here is a practice that has been on my to do list for quite a while. One that I have very little flair for. I am not good at remembering my dreams. After a few minutes of wakefulness they fade quickly and I'm too groggy to write them down. I have had periods of greater awareness and will power when I've been able to do a dream diary for a few weeks, and it had been fruitful. I certainly have the resources. Books, tapes. I have Winns Dream tapes. must go Michael

@Nuralshamal 1) My LD phase was in my early twenties. I journaled extensively and from that, the lucidity just popped up. Part of it I suspect is improving recall of both the LDs you're already having, but also creating a link between the wake up-consciousness and the dream-consciousness. I came to the point where I could easily fill ten pages with dreams every morning and more and more were lucid. Didn't have discipline though so did this in spurts. 3) Not much. Enjoyed myself :3 This was before I had encountered an established spiritual path so didn't have much of significance to do. Today, the situation would be very different. When life permits I would like to do it again and use the lucidity for my current practices. M

To be with the Tao, you are in Wu Wei. To live harmoniously at least. Yet, America is too divided. Just look at the Trump phenomena!!! Now, Pentagon with its own foreign policy agendas, is trying to drag the country into wars with China and Russia (military buildup in the South China Sea and Nato expansion in the East of Europe)..even when we don't even know who would get elected as the new president. America is not in and with the Tao because I don't sense it. I don't dream about America. I dream about people I know in America but I don't dream about the spirit of America...if it ever exists. I dream about Israel a dozen times, the spirit of Israel and Zionism. In the past, I dream about German history. Even the former, late foreign minister Guido Westerwelle. I feel that I am connected to him (dream of him more than a dozen of times). I have to admit it, I dream of John Kerry once but it wasn't about America. I have couple of dreams about Obama too but I was never in conversation with him. Is more like I was witnessing him.

addon <David Wong aka Jason Pargin's articles and there many gems, are at http://www.cracked.com/members/David+Wong/ > 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person By David Wong December 17, 2012 2013, motherfuckers. Yeah! LET'S DO THIS. "Do what?" you ask. I DON'T KNOW. LET'S FIGURE THAT OUT TOGETHER, MOTHERFUCKERS. Feel free to stop reading this if your career is going great, you're thrilled with your life and you're happy with your relationships. Enjoy the rest of your day, friend, this article is not for you. You're doing a great job, we're all proud of you. So you don't feel like you wasted your click, here's a picture of Lenny Kravitz wearing a gigantic scarf. For the rest of you, I want you to try something: Name five impressive things about yourself. Write them down or just shout them out loud to the room. But here's the catch -- you're not allowed to list anything you are (i.e., I'm a nice guy, I'm honest), but instead can only list things that you do (i.e., I just won a national chess tournament, I make the best chili in Massachusetts). If you found that difficult, well, this is for you, and you are going to fucking hate hearing it. My only defense is that this is what I wish somebody had said to me around 1995 or so. #6. The World Only Cares About What It Can Get from You Let's say that the person you love the most has just been shot. He or she is lying in the street, bleeding and screaming. A guy rushes up and says, "Step aside." He looks over your loved one's bullet wound and pulls out a pocket knife -- he's going to operate right there in the street. You ask, "Are you a doctor?" The guy says, "No." You say, "But you know what you're doing, right? You're an old Army medic, or ..." At this point the guy becomes annoyed. He tells you that he is a nice guy, he is honest, he is always on time. He tells you that he is a great son to his mother and has a rich life full of fulfilling hobbies, and he boasts that he never uses foul language. Confused, you say, "How does any of that fucking matter when my (wife/husband/best friend/parent) is lying here bleeding! I need somebody who knows how to operate on bullet wounds! Can you do that or not?!?" Now the man becomes agitated -- why are you being shallow and selfish? Do you not care about any of his other good qualities? Didn't you just hear him say that he always remembers his girlfriend's birthday? In light of all of the good things he does, does it really matter if he knows how to perform surgery? In that panicked moment, you will take your bloody hands and shake him by the shoulders, screaming, "Yes, I'm saying that none of that other shit matters, because in this specific situation, I just need somebody who can stop the bleeding, you crazy fucking asshole." So here is my terrible truth about the adult world: You are in that very situation every single day. Only you are the confused guy with the pocket knife. All of society is the bleeding gunshot victim. If you want to know why society seems to shun you, or why you seem to get no respect, it's because society is full of people who need things. They need houses built, they need food to eat, they need entertainment, they need fulfilling sexual relationships. You arrived at the scene of that emergency, holding your pocket knife, by virtue of your birth -- the moment you came into the world, you became part of a system designed purely to see to people's needs. Either you will go about the task of seeing to those needs by learning a unique set of skills, or the world will reject you, no matter how kind, giving and polite you are. You will be poor, you will be alone, you will be left out in the cold. Does that seem mean, or crass, or materialistic? What about love and kindness -- don't those things matter? Of course. As long as they result in you doing things for people that they can't get elsewhere. For you see ... #5. The Hippies Were Wrong Here is the greatest scene in the history of movies (WARNING: EXTREME NSFW LANGUAGE): For those of you who can't watch videos, it's the famous speech Alec Baldwin gives in the cinematic masterpiece Glengarry Glenn Ross. Baldwin's character -- whom you assume is the villain -- addresses a room full of dudes and tears them a new asshole, telling them that they're all about to be fired unless they "close" the sales they've been assigned: "Nice guy? I don't give a shit. Good father? Fuck you! Go home and play with your kids. If you want to work here, close." It's brutal, rude and borderline sociopathic, and also it is an honest and accurate expression of what the world is going to expect from you. The difference is that, in the real world, people consider it so wrong to talk to you that way that they've decided it's better to simply let you keep failing. That scene changed my life. I'd program my alarm clock to play it for me every morning if I knew how. Alec Baldwin was nominated for an Oscar for that movie and that's the only scene he's in. As smarter people have pointed out, the genius of that speech is that half of the people who watch it think that the point of the scene is "Wow, what must it be like to have such an asshole boss?" and the other half think, "Fuck yes, let's go out and sell some goddamned real estate!" Or, as the Last Psychiatrist blog put it: "If you were in that room, some of you would understand this as a work, but feed off the energy of the message anyway, welcome the coach's cursing at you, 'this guy is awesome!'; while some of you would take it personally, this guy is a jerk, you have no right to talk to me like that, or -- the standard maneuver when narcissism is confronted with a greater power -- quietly seethe and fantasize about finding information that will out him as a hypocrite. So satisfying." That excerpt is from an insightful critique of "hipsters" and why they seem to have so much trouble getting jobs (that doesn't begin to do it justice, go read the whole thing), and the point is that the difference in those two attitudes -- bitter vs. motivated -- largely determines whether or not you'll succeed in the world. For instance, some people want to respond to that speech with Tyler Durden's line from Fight Club: "You are not your job." But, well, actually, you totally are. Granted, your "job" and your means of employment might not be the same thing, but in both cases you are nothing more than the sum total of your useful skills. For instance, being a good mother is a job that requires a skill. It's something a person can do that is useful to other members of society. But make no mistake: Your "job" -- the useful thing you do for other people -- is all you are. There is a reason why surgeons get more respect than comedy writers. There is a reason mechanics get more respect than unemployed hipsters. There is a reason your job will become your label if your death makes the news ("NFL Linebacker Dies in Murder/Suicide"). Tyler said, "You are not your job," but he also founded and ran a successful soap company and became the head of an international social and political movement. He was totally his job. Or think of it this way: Remember when Chick-fil-A came out against gay marriage? And how despite the protests, the company continues to sell millions of sandwiches every day? It's not because the country agrees with them; it's because they do their job of making delicious sandwiches well. And that's all that matters. You don't have to like it. I don't like it when it rains on my birthday. It rains anyway. Clouds form and precipitation happens. People have needs and thus assign value to the people who meet them. These are simple mechanisms of the universe and they do not respond to our wishes. If you protest that you're not a shallow capitalist materialist and that you disagree that money is everything, I can only say: Who said anything about money? You're missing the larger point. #4. What You Produce Does Not Have to Make Money, But It Does Have to Benefit People Let's try a non-money example so you don't get hung up on that. The demographic that Cracked writes for is heavy on 20-something males. So on our message boards and in my many inboxes I read several dozen stories a year from miserable, lonely guys who insist that women won't come near them despite the fact that they are just the nicest guys in the world. I can explain what is wrong with this mindset, but it would probably be better if I let Alec Baldwin explain it: In this case, Baldwin is playing the part of the attractive women in your life. They won't put it as bluntly as he does -- society has trained us not to be this honest with people -- but the equation is the same. "Nice guy? Who gives a shit? If you want to work here, close." So, what do you bring to the table? Because the Zooey Deschanel lookalike in the bookstore that you've been daydreaming about moisturizes her face for an hour every night and feels guilty when she eats anything other than salad for lunch. She's going to be a surgeon in 10 years. What do you do? "What, so you're saying that I can't get girls like that unless I have a nice job and make lots of money?" No, your brain jumps to that conclusion so you have an excuse to write off everyone who rejects you by thinking that they're just being shallow and selfish. I'm asking what do you offer? Are you smart? Funny? Interesting? Talented? Ambitious? Creative? OK, now what do you do to demonstrate those attributes to the world? Don't say that you're a nice guy -- that's the bare minimum. Pretty girls have guys being nice to them 36 times a day. The patient is bleeding in the street. Do you know how to operate or not? "Well, I'm not sexist or racist or greedy or shallow or abusive! Not like those other douchebags!" I'm sorry, I know that this is hard to hear, but if all you can do is list a bunch of faults you don't have, then back the fuck away from the patient. There's a witty, handsome guy with a promising career ready to step in and operate. Does that break your heart? OK, so now what? Are you going to mope about it, or are you going to learn how to do surgery? It's up to you, but don't complain about how girls fall for jerks; they fall for those jerks because those jerks have other things they can offer. "But I'm a great listener!" Are you? Because you're willing to sit quietly in exchange for the chance to be in the proximity of a pretty girl (and spend every second imagining how soft her skin must be)? Well guess what, there's another guy in her life who also knows how to do that, and he can play the guitar. Saying that you're a nice guy is like a restaurant whose only selling point is that the food doesn't make you sick. You're like a new movie whose title is This Movie Is in English, and its tagline is "The actors are clearly visible." I think this is why you can be a "nice guy" and still feel terrible about yourself. Specifically ... #3. You Hate Yourself Because You Don't Do Anything "So, what, you're saying that I should pick up a book on how to get girls?" Only if step one in the book is "Start making yourself into the type of person girls want to be around." Because that's the step that gets skipped -- it's always "How can I get a job?" and not "How can I become the type of person employers want?" It's "How can I get pretty girls to like me?" instead of "How can I become the type of person that pretty girls like?" See, because that second one could very well require giving up many of your favorite hobbies and paying more attention to your appearance, and God knows what else. You might even have to change your personality. "But why can't I find someone who just likes me for me?" you ask. The answer is because humans need things. The victim is bleeding, and all you can do is look down and complain that there aren't more gunshot wounds that just fix themselves? Everyone who watched that video instantly became a little happier, although not all for the same reasons. Can you do that for people? Why not? What's stopping you from strapping on your proverbial thong and cape and taking to your proverbial stage and flapping your proverbial penis at people? That guy knows the secret to winning at human life: that doing ... whatever you call that ... was better than not doing it. "But I'm not good at anything!" Well, I have good news -- throw enough hours of repetition at it and you can get sort of good at anything. I was the world's shittiest writer when I was an infant. I was only slightly better at 25. But while I was failing miserably at my career, I wrote in my spare time for eight straight years, an article a week, before I ever made real money off it. It took 13 years for me to get good enough to make the New York Times best-seller list. It took me probably 20,000 hours of practice to sand the edges off my sucking. Don't like the prospect of pouring all of that time into a skill? Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the sheer act of practicing will help you come out of your shell -- I got through years of tedious office work because I knew that I was learning a unique skill on the side. People quit because it takes too long to see results, because they can't figure out that the process is the result. The bad news is that you have no other choice. If you want to work here, close. Because in my non-expert opinion, you don't hate yourself because you have low self-esteem, or because other people were mean to you. You hate yourself because you don't do anything. Not even you can just "love you for you" -- that's why you're miserable and sending me private messages asking me what I think you should do with your life. Do the math: How much of your time is spent consuming things other people made (TV, music, video games, websites) versus making your own? Only one of those adds to your value as a human being. And if you hate hearing this and are responding with something you heard as a kid that sounds like "It's what's on the inside that matters!" then I can only say ... #2. What You Are Inside Only Matters Because of What It Makes You Do Being in the business I'm in, I know dozens of aspiring writers. They think of themselves as writers, they introduce themselves as writers at parties, they know that deep inside, they have the heart of a writer. The only thing they're missing is that minor final step, where they actually fucking write things. But really, does that matter? Is "writing things" all that important when deciding who is and who is not truly a "writer"? For the love of God, yes. See, there's a common defense to everything I've said so far, and to every critical voice in your life. It's the thing your ego is saying to you in order to prevent you from having to do the hard work of improving: "I know I'm a good person on the inside." It may also be phrased as "I know who I am" or "I just have to be me." Don't get me wrong; who you are inside is everything -- the guy who built a house for his family from scratch did it because of who he was inside. Every bad thing you've ever done has started with a bad impulse, some thought ricocheting around inside your skull until you had to act on it. And every good thing you've done is the same -- "who you are inside" is the metaphorical dirt from which your fruit grows. But here's what everyone needs to know, and what many of you can't accept: "You" are nothing but the fruit. Nobody cares about your dirt. "Who you are inside" is meaningless aside from what it produces for other people. Inside, you have great compassion for poor people. Great. Does that result in you doing anything about it? Do you hear about some terrible tragedy in your community and say, "Oh, those poor children. Let them know that they are in my thoughts"? Because fuck you if so -- find out what they need and help provide it. A hundred million people watched that Kony video, virtually all of whom kept those poor African children "in their thoughts." What did the collective power of those good thoughts provide? Jack fucking shit. Children die every day because millions of us tell ourselves that caring is just as good as doing. It's an internal mechanism controlled by the lazy part of your brain to keep you from actually doing work. How many of you are walking around right now saying, "She/he would love me if she/he only knew what an interesting person I am!" Really? How do all of your interesting thoughts and ideas manifest themselves in the world? What do they cause you to do? If your dream girl or guy had a hidden camera that followed you around for a month, would they be impressed with what they saw? Remember, they can't read your mind -- they can only observe. Would they want to be a part of that life? Because all I'm asking you to do is apply the same standard to yourself that you apply to everyone else. Don't you have that annoying Christian friend whose only offer to help anyone ever is to "pray for them"? Doesn't it drive you nuts? I'm not even commenting on whether or not prayer works; it doesn't change the fact that they chose the one type of help that doesn't require them to get off the sofa. They abstain from every vice, they think clean thoughts, their internal dirt is as pure as can be, but what fruit grows from it? And they should know this better than anybody -- I stole the fruit metaphor from the Bible. Jesus said something to the effect of "a tree is judged by its fruit" over and over and over. Granted, Jesus never said, "If you want to work here, close." No, he said, "Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." The people didn't react well to being told that, just as the salesmen didn't react well to Alec Baldwin telling them that they needed to grow some balls or resign themselves to shining his shoes. Which brings us to the final point ... #1. Everything Inside You Will Fight Improvement The human mind is a miracle, and you will never see it spring more beautifully into action than when it is fighting against evidence that it needs to change. Your psyche is equipped with layer after layer of defense mechanisms designed to shoot down anything that might keep things from staying exactly where they are -- ask any addict. So even now, some of you reading this are feeling your brain bombard you with knee-jerk reasons to reject it. From experience, I can say that these seem to come in the form of ... *Intentionally Interpreting Any Criticism as an Insult "Who is he to call me lazy and worthless! A good person would never talk to me like this! He wrote this whole thing just to feel superior to me and to make me feel bad about my life! I'm going to think up my own insult to even the score!" *Focusing on the Messenger to Avoid Hearing the Message "Who is THIS guy to tell ME how to live? Oh, like he's so high and mighty! It's just some dumb writer on the Internet! I'm going to go dig up something on him that reassures me that he's stupid, and that everything he's saying is stupid! This guy is so pretentious, it makes me puke! I watched his old rap video on YouTube and thought his rhymes sucked!" *Focusing on the Tone to Avoid Hearing the Content "I'm going to dig through here until I find a joke that is offensive when taken out of context, and then talk and think only about that! I've heard that a single offensive word can render an entire book invisible!" *Revising Your Own History "Things aren't so bad! I know that I was threatening suicide last month, but I'm feeling better now! It's entirely possible that if I just keep doing exactly what I'm doing, eventually things will work out! I'll get my big break, and if I keep doing favors for that pretty girl, eventually she'll come around!" *Pretending That Any Self-Improvement Would Somehow Be Selling Out Your True Self "Oh, so I guess I'm supposed to get rid of all of my manga and instead go to the gym for six hours a day and get a spray tan like those Jersey Shore douchebags? Because THAT IS THE ONLY OTHER OPTION." And so on. Remember, misery is comfortable. It's why so many people prefer it. Happiness takes effort. Also, courage. It's incredibly comforting to know that as long as you don't create anything in your life, then nobody can attack the thing you created. It's so much easier to just sit back and criticize other people's creations. This movie is stupid. That couple's kids are brats. That other couple's relationship is a mess. That rich guy is shallow. This restaurant sucks. This Internet writer is an asshole. I'd better leave a mean comment demanding that the website fire him. See, I created something. Oh, wait, did I forget to mention that part? Yeah, whatever you try to build or create -- be it a poem, or a new skill, or a new relationship -- you will find yourself immediately surrounded by non-creators who trash it. Maybe not to your face, but they'll do it. Your drunk friends do not want you to get sober. Your fat friends do not want you to start a fitness regimen. Your jobless friends do not want to see you embark on a career. Just remember, they're only expressing their own fear, since trashing other people's work is another excuse to do nothing. "Why should I create anything when the things other people create suck? I would totally have written a novel by now, but I'm going to wait for something good, I don't want to write the next Twilight!" As long as they never produce anything, it will forever be perfect and beyond reproach. Or if they do produce something, they'll make sure they do it with detached irony. They'll make it intentionally bad to make it clear to everyone else that this isn't their real effort. Their real effort would have been amazing. Not like the shit you made. Read our article comments -- when they get nasty, it's always from the same angle: Cracked needs to fire this columnist. This asshole needs to stop writing. Don't make any more videos. It always boils down to "Stop creating. This is different from what I would have made, and the attention you're getting is making me feel bad about myself." Don't be that person. If you are that person, don't be that person any more. This is what's making people hate you. This is what's making you hate yourself. So how about this: one year. The end of 2013, that's our deadline. Or a year from whenever you read this. While other people are telling you "Let's make a New Year's resolution to lose 15 pounds this year!" I'm going to say let's pledge to do fucking anything -- add any skill, any improvement to your human tool set, and get good enough at it to impress people. Don't ask me what -- hell, pick something at random if you don't know. Take a class in karate, or ballroom dancing, or pottery. Learn to bake. Build a birdhouse. Learn massage. Learn a programming language. Film a porno. Adopt a superhero persona and fight crime. Start a YouTube vlog. Write for Cracked. But the key is, I don't want you to focus on something great that you're going to make happen to you ("I'm going to find a girlfriend, I'm going to make lots of money ..."). I want you to purely focus on giving yourself a skill that would make you ever so slightly more interesting and valuable to other people. "I don't have the money to take a cooking class." Then fucking Google "how to cook." They've even filtered out the porn now, it's easier than ever. Damn it, you have to kill those excuses. Or they will kill you. The 10 Most Important Things They Didn't Teach You In School By David Wong June 21, 2010  By the time you're 30, you'll be hit with the crushing truth of just how much the grownups didn't teach you when you were in school. And, while liberals and conservatives haggle over whether public schools need more funding or more lessons on the Ten Commandments, we think all can agree there are some very basic, useful things that our children really, really should know. Therefore when Cracked starts its line of private schools, know that your kids won't graduate without having passed... #10. Sex Ed (for Girls): How to Spot a Douchebag  Young ladies, you're in your teens now and already you have no doubt run into some guys who are being suspiciously nice to you. Likely you have figured out that in many cases, this has nothing to do with them being nice guys and everything to do with them desperately wanting you to touch their boner. What you may not realize is that over the next few years, a string of rejections will cause many of these men to start hating you. Some of them hate you already, because they grew up hating their mothers and it kind of carries over. Boys are like that. Now, some of these men will then become members of the Pick Up Artist Community, also known as the Seduction Community. This is a loose club of guys who see females as a collection of walking masturbation aids. They have websites and seminars and chat rooms where they trade tips on how to manipulate you into having sex with them. They believe the male/female relationship is adversarial in nature, and that sex is a way of conquering you. Thus many of their techniques work by playing on your insecurities, like "the Neg," where they first engage you in conversation, then drop subtle criticisms that will undermine your self-esteem and subconsciously make you want to gain their approval (by letting them touch your boobs). Believe it or not, it works--if you're not ready for it. This is just one type of douchebag; this class will cover several varieties. And, while we're not telling you not to sleep with these men, the lesson you will learn from this course is that they will put the same effort into making you happy as they do the semen-encrusted sock under their bed. Chapters Include: I. Types of Douchebag;
II. How to Tell When He's Lying;
III. Why Your Male Friends Almost Certainly Want to Have Sex With You;
IV. Why There is Nothing to be Gained by Showing Your Boobs to a Camera. #9. Sex Ed (for Boys): Why Porn is Not a Good Way to Learn About Sex  Young men, you're in your teens now and that means already you've seen several thousand hours of Internet porn. Many of you will soon engage in your first sexual encounter, having no practical instruction to guide you beyond those videos. Unfortunately, what you see on PornTube represents only what certain men wish sex was like. We're not saying that you'll never meet a woman who enjoys, say, having semen squirted into her eyes, or having sex on camera with five strangers in the back of a decorated van. What we're saying is that just about everything you see in those videos--including the ones that claim to be hidden camera or "reality" porn--is there specifically because real women are not like that. These videos fill a gap between fantasy and reality. So how do you figure out what to do when you're finally alone with a lady? Well, we can give you the basics, but the rest will be up to you. Chapters Include: I. It's a Vagina, Not a Slab of Meat You're Trying to Tenderize;
II. Your Penis Size is Probably Perfectly Fine;
III. Why Your First Time is Going to be a Humiliating Disaster, No Matter What You Do;
IV. Most Women Are Not Sexually Stimulated by Spanking;
V. Every Woman is Different and You Will Only Learn What She Likes Via Practice;
VI. That's OK, Because the Practice is Awesome. #8. Phys. Ed: Practical Self-Defense  We're calling this course "Practical Self-Defense" but a more accurate title would be, "How To Get Away From Somebody Who is Trying to Mug or Rape You." Yes, "Get Away." Some of you guys who grew up on The Matrix still fantasize about beating the shit out of a street full of thugs in a fight that looks like a choreographed dance. This class will not teach you how to do that. No class will teach you how to do that.
Will not happen. Oh, there are guys out there capable of kicking ass. They're called criminals. They're good at fighting because they have poor impulse control and anger management, and thus are constantly getting into fights. If you, on the other hand, are going to be civilized and successful parents and homeowners and taxpayers, the odds are overwhelming you will not ever be good at fighting. This fact is thus reflected in our curriculum. Chapters Include: I. Why Your Wallet is Not Worth Dying For;
II. Why Guns and Knives Are Not Awesome (Includes Visual Aids Depicting Wounds of Gnarled Strips of Exposed Fat, Tendons and Skin, Plus Graphic Descriptions of Life in a Wheelchair);
III. How to Break Off an Argument With a Hobo Before He Stabs You;
IV. Why You Can't Reason With a Screaming Drunk;
V. Why Believing Action Movies Are Real Will Get You Killed;
VI. How to Tell When That Guy Walking Toward You is Concealing a Weapon.
 #7. Industrial Arts: Emergency Repairs  This does not require a great deal of elaboration. Quite simply, there are certain things a person who is about to be living on their own needs to know how to do. Building a goddamned birdhouse is not one of them. Chapters Include: I. How to Patch and Paint a Wall So You Can Get Your Deposit Back From Your Landlord;
II. Identifying Which Wires in Your House Will Kill You if You Touch Them;
III. What to do When You Wake Up to Find Your Toilet/Refrigerator/Hot Water Heater/Air Conditioner/Sink is Puking Water Onto Your Floor;
IV. When to Call the Repair Guy;
V. How to Figure Out if the Repair Guy is Screwing You;
VI. Foreign Objects You're Going to Try to Put in the Microwave at Some Point so Let's Just Get it Out of Your System Now. #6. Business: Success = Meeting the Right People  All of those successful people you see around town, with their convertibles and huge televisions? Approximately 100 percent of them got where they are because they had three things. All three are absolutely essential, but one of them is almost never mentioned. They are: * Talent
* Hard Work
* Randomly Meeting the Right People and Not Pissing Them Off The autobiographies of famous people will do everything they can to downplay that third part, because it has the element of sheer luck. People get offended when you mention it, because they think it somehow undermines the first two. But remember, we said you need all three. For instance, let's take maybe the most successful movie actor of all time, Harrison Ford. He farted around Hollywood for nine years, taking bit parts without anything major ever coming his way. Clearly talented, very hard-working. Yet not once did anybody look at him and say, "This guy will sell several billion dollars' worth of tickets and action figures some day!" He was just another ambitious, pretty face, in a city full of them. He got so fed up, he quit acting and became a carpenter.
 There's a parallel world without this man as Han Solo, and we don't want to live there. Then one day he got hired to install cabinets in the home of a guy named George Lucas. They became friends. That got him the role of Han Solo a few years later. Click the link; that's a true story. Decades earlier another Ford, Henry, was just one of many engineers screwing around with early car engine designs until he became friends with a wealthy businessman named Alexander Malcomson who forked over the money to get Ford Motor Company started. This also works for guys not named Ford; Justin Bieber was one of several hundred thousand teenagers singing on YouTube videos before a former record exec named Scooter Braun clicked on one of his videos by accident and got him a record deal.
But everyone already knew he was an accident. On the other end of the spectrum, you have guys like Edgar Allan Poe, whose legendary poem "The Raven" earned him... nine dollars. He burned so many bridges he wound up basically begging the public for money before dying at 40. At some point Poe probably met his George Lucas, but made such a horrible impression on him the guy wouldn't return his calls.
"Oh, shit, honey, he's at the door! Pretend we're not home! Did he see me?" Chapters include: I. First Impressions are Really Important;
II. Subsequent Impressions Are Also Important;
III. No, You're Not Terrell Owens (aka Why Acting Like a Douchebag is a Bad Investment). #5. Health: How to Stop Throwing Your Money Away on Snake Oil  Go to the drug aisle in your grocery store. In between the pills and the vitamins will be a huge shelf full of herbal supplements that promise to do everything from helping you lose weight to easing joint pain to making your brain work better. And it's all bullshit. All of it. Worse, it's bullshit that we spend $34 billion a year on, almost a third as much as we spend on prescription drugs that actually do something. Just to be clear: Scientists have spent billions in government money carefully testing the effectiveness of this stuff. Their results? No, echinacea can't cure your cold. Gingko doesn't do anything for your brain, glucosamine and chondroitin won't fix your arthritis. Hoodia gordonii won't help you lose weight.
If it were good for you, it probably wouldn't be covered in horrible spikes. Don't get us wrong; we completely realize that lots of the drugs we have now were once naturally occurring in plants and that it is therefore possible that out there, somewhere, is a leaf yet undiscovered by science that will cure your diabetes. But if so, these jerkoffs in the grocery aisle aren't going to be the ones who find it. They're scam artists. They're so sure their supplements don't do anything they don't do any actual quality control to track how much of the supplement is in each pill. They just throw a little bit in there and shrug. Aren't they worried about people accidentally overdosing? No, they're not. They know you can't overdose on a placebo. All they're doing is "curing" ailments that either naturally go away on their own (colds, joint pain) so you wind up falsely attributing the relief to the supplement, or they're claiming to cure conditions that are hard to quantify (see supplements for "alertness" or "stress relief"). Snake oil salesmen have been getting away with that technique for thousands of generations. Students, we're counting on you to make sure that ours is the last. Chapters Include: I. Pharmaceutical Companies Are Dicks, But at Least They Use Scientists;
II. Why Hippies Have Never Discovered a Single Disease Cure;
III. "Homeopathic" is Another Word for Voodoo Bullshit;
IV. Just Go See a Doctor You Big Baby. NOTE: Weight Loss supplements will be explored in-depth in... #4. Health: Why Losing Weight Requires Some Amount of Suffering  First of all, know that some people are naturally thin. They often skip meals just because they forgot to eat, and/or enjoy hobbies that involve burning calories as a byproduct--basketball, cycling, whatever. They'll never be fat and they'll never have to think about it. They're excused from this class.
Take a walk. This course is for the rest of you, who will spend your life fatter than what our society considers ideal, and who will forever be uncomfortable in your own skin as a result. You'll spend many dollars on bullshit exercise equipment that promises to make working out "easy." You'll jump on diet fads, eating a bunless hamburger with a knife and fork one week, eating nothing but cabbage soup the next. Each and every one of these will fail (the success rate for dieters over the long term is close to 0 percent) because they're all based on the utterly false premise that you can lose weight without ever feeling sore or hungry or some other negative sensation. It is not possible. Students, imagine that in front of you is a castle. That's where you want to be. But surrounding that castle is a moat, full of piranha. The only way to get into Sexy Abs Castle is to swim across the moat and let the little fish painfully chew off hunks of fat. The real situation is exactly like that, only the swim will take years.
Sexy Abs Castle is also heavily guarded. Your body will get really mad at you when you try to lose weight, because it thinks you're starving to death. You have to go into any weight loss plan knowing that you will suffer, and just have to man up in preparation for it. Otherwise, just live with it. Being fat isn't the end of the goddamned world. Chapters Include: I. Hunger is Fat Leaving the Body;
II. Eating Three Square Meals a Day Will Absolutely Make You Fat if You Sit in a Chair All Day;
III. Have You Considered Walking Instead of Driving;
IV. How to Dress in Ways That De-Emphasize Your Fatness. NOTE: The above class is a prerequisite for... #3. Home Economics: How to Cook Cheap Food That Won't Kill You  Most of you will gain weight in college. You'll be poor, and cheap food makes you fat, as adding salt and fat is the easiest way to make poor quality food taste good. Ramen noodles, Taco Bell burritos, six-dollar pizzas from Papa John's... all of it is dirt cheap, and all contains way more calories than you're going to burn while sleeping through classes and playing Guitar Hero. Fortunately, there are ways around this if you're willing to put in a little time. As it turns out, spices are also cheap, as are some meats, and dried pasta, and vegetables. You just have to combine them the right way. But no matter what you come up with, it would be extremely difficult to cook something as unhealthy as a Quarter-Pounder Value Meal.
 Chapters Include: I. Pay Attention to Serving Sizes on the Label, They're Laughably Small;
II. Fat Free Versions of Fat Foods Are Terrible, Don't Bother;
III. Seriously, Fat Free Cheese Doesn't Melt;
IV. It's Hard to Screw Up Spaghetti;
V. Why if You Eat Fruity Pebbles for Dinner, You'll be Hungry Again 30 Minutes Later;
VI. If You Make a Pot of Chili and Freeze Bowls of It You'll Totally Have Like Two Months' Worth of Meals There. #2. Political Science: Why Talk Radio is a Terrible Source of Information  Politics are boring, and for the 20 percent or so of you who will spend a lot of time following politics, many of you will do so via entertaining political talk shows on radio or cable. Now, we don't have time to go into the mind-boggling list of idiotic things Glenn Beck has said, and will not laboriously debunk the rantings of the hundreds of other political talk show hosts like him. What you need to understand is that with talk radio and TV, the format itself makes accuracy utterly impossible. It's fairly simple, really. If a political talk show is going to get ratings, it has to have two things in every episode: A. A clear, simple thesis (ie, Liberals Are Destroying America, Corporations Are Destroying America) that continues through every single segment;
B. Up to the minute commentary on current events.
"Things are happening in the world. But more importantly, look at me." You see the problem: These two things are going to sometimes conflict. Even if the thesis of a show is Pie is Awesome, the host is still going to wake up one day and see headlines about a pie recall because some tainted filling killed 173 people. Guess what: he still has to do a show that day about why Pie is Awesome. He will manipulate B to make it fit A, even if he has to lie. He doesn't draw a paycheck otherwise. Likewise, if the big headline tomorrow is that Barack Obama single-handedly fought and slew Lucifer, Glenn Beck still has to do a show about how Obama is an Anti-Christian Communist out to destroy America. That's what his show is about; that's what the listeners tune in for, that's what his advertisers paid for. If he doesn't follow through, his audience will simply turn the dial until they find someone who's willing to tell them what they want to hear. So, because a talk show has to, by necessity, sometimes skew or outright lie about current events in order to maintain the entertainment value of their show, trying to learn about current events by listening to a talk show is like learning physics by watching cartoons. Chapters Include: I. If the Host Compares His Opponents to Communists or Nazis, He is Crazy; II. Why Politics Cannot be Simplified; III. If the Host Uses Derisive Nicknames for His Opponents, He Has Nothing to Teach You. #1. Social Studies: Life is Hard and You Will Die, Get Over It  We're not foolish enough to think one semester of this course can deprogram years of Hollywood bullshit. That's why we make this a daily class, that continues from K through 12. Many of you will get very depressed in your 20s, and some of you will stay that way the rest of your lives. Over the years your garage band will break up, you career dream will fall through, a girl will break your heart, you'll be unhappy with your body, you'll lose your parents, your favorite pet will die, you will endure at least one very terrible injury that requires hospitalization and breaks new boundaries for what kind of pain you thought was possible.
And your childhood memories will be exploited to buy vast amounts of cocaine. Deal with it. The reason why this will lead to depression, where it may not have done so for an equivalent person 200 years ago, is because you were raised on illogical stories where things always work out for the main character for utterly arbitrary reasons. Han Solo can shoot straight, but none of the bad guys can--even though they train more. John McClane beats the terrorists because he has toughness and perseverance--something the bad guys lack, even though they should be equally desperate. If a guy and a girl are right for each other, they always wind up together, careers and geography and personal hang-ups be damned. Here's the problem: these fantasies were created by adults, as a means of escape from the real world. You, however, have been watching them since you were five--for most of us these were our first impressions of how the adult world works, even if on a subconscious level. You had no context to realize they were bullshit. It sounds frivolous, but that doesn't change the fact that some of you reading this will not survive the long process of learning how different the real world is. If it helps, try to remember that you're still one of the one percent of humanity that was born in a time and place where there is such a thing as anesthesia. Chapters Include: I. You Can Die at Any Moment, Get Over It;
II. Required Reading: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy;
III. Roleplay Exercise: Various Scenes from The Road, by Cormac McCarthy;
IV. Yes, It Takes 10,000 Hours to Get Really Good at Something, But At Least You're Not Scavenging Through a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland. 5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won't)By Jane Jones, David Wong February 17, 2009 If 80s movies taught us anything, it's that at some point you're going to run into a mysterious relic that lets you switch bodies with other people. Would you use it? Would you choose to switch lives with, say, Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie or Dale DeBone? Most people would. But let's say the artifact doesn't let you choose, but will instead switch you randomly with one of the other six billion people on the planet. Virtually nobody will take that deal, for fear they'd switch with some poor villager in Nigeria. So what does that say about us? Well, according to experts, it says almost everything we think about what would make us happy is dead wrong. Let's look at the five things we're most wrong about, with some pictures of adorable animals for good measure. #5. Fame  Go to the little girls' aisle at the department store, if you're not there already. On the shelves you'll see the dominant little girl fantasy isn't Cinderella or even Dora the Explorer. It's Hannah Montana. Playsets come complete with a camera, makeup and a mirror for Hannah to admire herself in. The girls play with that when they're eight, and by 16 they're on MySpace, pouting at the camera in their underwear and watching the friend requests pour in. In a recent survey of high school kids, 51 percent said their ultimate goal was to become famous. This is brand new to humanity; for thousands of years, material goods and security dominated. Now, fame is at the top. Obviously part of the reason is the perception that anybody can get famous these days--reality TV and YouTube have proven that you can become a celebrity for doing not a goddamned thing. But there's another, less obvious factor. And it explains why so many famous people are miserable. So What's the Problem? Experts say where you find kids who desperately want to be famous, you find a history of neglect at home. Parents were either absent completely or, at best, emotionally distant dicks. It turns out the whole surge in aspirations for fame came right along with the explosion of single parents and "broken" homes. Only half of today's children live with their original two parents. You can see how this sad mechanism works in the attention-starved mind. The kid is programmed by biology to love a parent, but the parent doesn't return the love. Fame lets them turn the tables on that arrangement. When you're famous, millions love you, but you don't even know their names. It's purely one-sided. They wait for hours in the cold for your autograph, you barely glance at them on the way to your limo. You get to take their love and wipe your ass with it, the same as your parents did to you. 
"I love you!" "Your deaths would mean nothing to me." But it turns out that kind of massive, paper-thin adoration is a poor substitute. Famous people are four times as likely to commit suicide as the rest of us (Hell, you'd think it'd be higher--everybody reading this has seen more than one of their favorite performers self-destruct). Wait, it Gets Worse... If you're saying that your parents were awesome and that fame still looks pretty freaking cool, well, we're not done. Studies show nothing is more stressful for a human than when their goals are tied to the approval of others. Particularly when those "others" are an enormous crowd of fickle strangers holding you up to a laughably unrealistic ideal built by publicists, thick makeup and heavily Photoshopped magazine covers. You could seek comfort from your circle of friends, only now your friends have been replaced Invasion of the Body Snatcher's-style with hangers-on, vultures, unscrupulous characters and plain dumbasses who only want a piece of the spotlight. . . even if it means selling you out later. For example, have you ever lit up a bong at a party? Were you worried that one of your friends would snap a photo of you, sell it to a tabloid for thousands of dollars and ruin your career? Well become famous, and then try it. #4. Wealth  Let's not bullshit each other. You see those ads on the side of the screen? And at the top? And at the bottom? Go look at one of them. We just made $800, baby. Seriously, they're set up to detect the position of your eyeballs. If you actually click on one, we make enough to fill our SnoCone machine with Cristal. Most of us get out of bed everyday purely because it edges us one step closer to some kind of financial future we want. If we won the lottery, most of us would show up to the office the next day wearing an ankle-length fur coat and enough bling to make Mr. T look Amish, and only stay just long enough to take a dump in our boss's inbox. So What's the Problem? Hey, remember when we said earlier that most people wouldn't do the body-switching thing for fear they'd wake up in Nigeria? Well according to surveys, Nigerians are happier with their lives than the people of any other country. The USA came in 16th. Hey, did we mention that the average Nigerian makes $300 a year? That's less than a hundredth of what the average American makes. America being the country that hands out 120 million prescriptions for anti-depressants every year. China is turning into a great object lesson in this, as their economy explodes and incomes skyrocket, but levels of happiness and personal satisfaction are dropping at the same rapid rate. There's a couple of reasons for it. First, your brain adjusts feelings of happiness downward after you've reached some goal or other. It regulates the good feelings, presumably so that you have motivation to reach the next goal instead of just lounging by the pool for the rest of your days. The second one is that as social creatures, we compare ourselves to our neighbors. This is why executives can cry about the $500,000 salary cap that comes with taking government bailout money. Their friends are making $3 million a year and live in igloo made out of cocaine. We can laugh at their complaints, but of course then you're giving the Nigerian permission to laugh at yours. That guy made 100 times more than you, you make 100 times more than the Nigerian. Once you start hanging around the other high earners, you'll want all the stuff they have. No, that's not right--you'll want the stuff that's so much better than their stuff that they'll vomit with envy. As one magazine for Wall Street bigshots put it, you want the stuff that will be "a huge middle finger to everyone who enters your home." 
"Yeah, same model as yours. Only covered in solid fucking gold." But what about sudden wealth, like if you won the lottery, or sold your novel for $10 million? That'd be cool, right, because you'd still remember your former life and appreciate your new riches! Well, just ask William "Bud" Post, who wound up broken and bankrupt after he won $16 million in the lottery. It turns out that while he knew how to handle the stress of being poor thanks to a lifetime of experience, he had no concept of how to handle the new and alien stresses of wealth. Wait, it Gets Worse... Remember the whole Invasion of the Body Snatchers phenomenon we talked about with famous people, where suddenly all of your friends turn into leeches? Same here, only worse. With your newfound riches, suddenly "friends" pop up from all over. Cousins who you've never met, forgotten classmates from school, women who'd never even look your way before, all suddenly in your orbit, complimenting you, doing you favors. Then they casually slip it into conversation that they're going to have to default on their mortgage unless somebody helps out.
Your very own entourage! Suddenly every relationship is in doubt. Do they actually care about you? Or do they just want a seat on the Bling Train? Would they sell you out to get to your cash? That lottery winner we mentioned above . . . somebody hired a hitman to take him out, to get to his money. That somebody was his own fucking brother. #3. Beauty  We know all about this one first-hand. That old stereotype about how comedy writers and heavy Internet users tend to have bodies chiseled out of solid sex? It's true. One visitor remarked that the Cracked office "Looked like a Manowar album cover came to life." 
Yes, being physically attractive has concrete advantages. Attractive people earn more, get better grades, have better jobs and find more successful partners than average or ugly people. Strangers are more likely to help them in a crisis. They have wider social circles. So What's the Problem? Remember, we're talking about happiness here, not success. For one, attractive people have the same self-esteem problems the ugly people do. Like money, attractiveness is relative and if you're hotter than your friends, at that stage you start comparing yourself to people in the media. You know, like the magazine covers we mentioned before, the ones that that have had the living shit Photoshopped out of them. In other words, they've adjusted to the experience of being attractive the same as our high income earners have adjusted to having money; they just pick other flaws to worry about. Sure, if you used the magical artifact up there to become Angelina Jolie tomorrow, you'd notice the difference over how you're treated now. But if you were born Angelina Jolie, you'd have no way of grasping it, the same as right now you don't realize what it's like to live life with some kind of horrible deformity (if you do have a horrible deformity, then you don't know what it's like to live with a worse one. Work with us here). Wait, it Gets Worse... You know how when the hot girl at the bar tells an unfunny joke, all the guys laugh anyway? Or when the office stud makes a mistake, the female boss laughs it off? Attractive people live in a world where most feedback they get is bullshit. The compliments mean nothing--they've learned that's just the sound people make when they walk by. That's why studies show they tend to dismiss the genuine compliments they get in other areas (their work, personality, sense of humor, creativity) because it gets lumped in with the same counterfeit flattery they've been getting their whole lives. #2. Genius  We're using the broader definition of the word "genius" here, meaning anyone with an extraordinary talent or skill. So for instance Dennis Rodman was a genius when it came to rebounding basketballs, but was probably not a genius in the way that Einstein was. But as Dennis demonstrates, genius--whether it involves writing ground-breaking computer code, picking stocks or writing the dopest rhymes--means one thing above all else: You are forever granted an exception to society's rules. The fictional archetype for this these days is TV's Dr. House, whose being a genius means he gets a free pass to do drugs on the job, break hospital policy, insult his superiors and treat patients like shit. But don't blame the writers, the real world examples are just as extreme, from Hemingway to Kanye West. Being a genius means you get to do great things, sure, but it's also a blank check for douchebaggery. Who could turn that down? So What's the Problem? Want to know what it's like to live life as a genius? All you have to do is go hang around with the stupidest, most incompetent people you know. Cringe at their stupid jokes, feel the frustration as they fumble even the easiest tasks and fail to grasp the simplest concepts. Being a genius must be like that, only everyday. Everyone is an idiot compared to them. They're living Idiocracy. We can't imagine what it's like to make friends in that world. Genuine connections will be rare indeed when every honest expressions of thought or feelings on your end is met with a look of dull Keanu Reeves-esque befuddlement. If you're not the Einstein kind of genius, it doesn't matter, any situation where you're 10 levels above your coworkers is going to be daily frustration. If you're a genius at spreading concrete, that feeling only occurs to you in the form of everyone else being sloppy and helpless. No wonder they wind up treating people like dirt. Not that you'd have time for friends anyway. Genius takes practice. Lots of it. Shows like House don't tell you that to become as good at your job as Dr. House, you've got to devote an enormous amount of time to working, studying and practicing your craft (at least 10 thousand hours, according to that Malcolm Gladwell book everyone is quoting these days). Behind the genius is hundreds of weekends spent pouring over texts while everyone else was at the party, playing bikini Twister. All of this is a great recipe for the stereotypical depressed, moody genius who dies alone and bitter. Wait, it Gets Worse... If your genius lies in some kind of creative field, then there's a good chance you have actual mental illness to deal with. While only one percent of the population suffers from bipolar disorder, it is claimed that 50 percent of poets, 38 percent of musicians and 20 percent of painters have it. It's just part of the package. Compare the number of great musical innovators who have died of suicide or drug overdose versus, say, the number of plumbers who have died the same way. It might be better to just stand in the poop all day. #1. Power You never hear little kids say they want to be "powerful" when they grow up. Parents don't encourage that sort of thing, since it's kind of terrifying coming from a toddler. Yet, power is what everything else on this list is about. Fame is about having power in the relationship with the fans. Beauty is about gaining power through others' sexual desire and jealousy. Genius means society needs your skills more than you need its approval. Money . . . well, money and power are conjoined twins. So it's pretty safe to say that while not many of you reading this specifically aspire to go into any kind of political office, a great many of you do aspire to some kind of power. Maybe you're eying the kind of job where you'll be the boss, or maybe you want to go into law enforcement. Or maybe you're just driven by that bitter, unspoken urge almost all of us feel at least once in our youth: "I'll show them! I'll show them all." So What's the Problem? Saying "power corrupts" is stating something so obvious we feel stupid even typing it. It's like saying elevators elevate. If you found out tomorrow your congressman was caught firing orphans out of a cannon, you'd barely raise an eyebrow. It has nothing to do with the "culture of corruption in Washington DC" the Libertarians are always talking about. You find it everywhere, from the asshole supervisor to the bitter gym coach. Small people driven to mindless, unethical behavior, drunk on just a few drops of bullshit power. They often can't make friends, their marriages end badly, they self destruct. The world is full of these miniature, sad Tony Montanas, destined for a proverbial bloody downfall.
Usually instead of a mansion it's a cubicle, and instead of bullets it's a series of pissy emails Wait, it gets worse... The thing is, it's the desire itself that's poisonous. You find that need for power most in the type of person who hates having to obey all of society's social contracts, particularly the ones that require them to not act like cocks all day. These are the people who are only nice guys because of fear of retribution if they do otherwise, so their main goal is to become strong enough that no retribution is possible (this is why sociopaths tend to seek positions of power, by the way). So it's not just that power will destroy you. It's that the urge itself is bad news. That desire for power is a vicious, ravenous animal and feeding it only makes it strong enough to tear its way out of your belly and go on a bloody rampage. 
"So what will make me happy, Cracked.com writers? What's left?" For the next 10 seconds, stare at this picture of a guy hugging a tiger. Notice how you weren't worrying about your job during those 10 seconds? Experts have figured out that the brain has no ability to actually predict your emotional reaction to life changes that haven't happened yet. In other words, you physically do not know what you want. The act of sitting around pondering it is apparently what fucks you up. This might be because for most of human history, we didn't have time to do that. We were too busy gathering berries and running from wild animals. Now that we've got things so under control that the animals hug us. . . well, we're like the guy up there who didn't know what to do with his lotto winnings. This may be why studies show friendships, altruism and religious practices bring happiness. It may be that taking the focus off your own happiness is what makes happiness possible.  If that sounds like a mind-boggling, ridiculous paradox, clearly arranged by the gods to torment us. well, we agree. 6 Brainwashing Techniques They're Using On You Right Now By David Wong September 23, 2008  Brainwashing doesn't take any sci-fi gadgetry or Manchurian Candidate hypnotism bullshit. There are all sorts of tried-and-true techniques that anyone can use to bypass the thinking part of your brain and flip a switch deep inside that says "OBEY." Now I know what you're thinking. "Sure, just make an ad with some big ol' titties on there! That'll convince people!" While that's certainly true ... ... they've got a whole arsenal of manipulation techniques that go way beyond even the most effective of titties. Techniques like ... #6. Chanting Slogans  Every cult leader, drill sergeant, self-help guru and politician knows that if you want to quiet all of those pesky doubting thoughts in a crowd, get them to chant a repetitive phrase or slogan. Those are referred to as thought-stopping techniques, because for better or worse, they do exactly that. Sounds like: "Say it with me now, folks!" "FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!" "One, two, three, four, I, Love, The Marine, Corps. One, two..." Why It Works:
The "Analytical" part of your brain and the "Repetitive Task" part tend to operate in separate rooms. But you didn't need an expert to tell you that. You know you can't solve a complex logic puzzle if I force you to scream the chorus to that Chumbawamba song over and over again while you're doing it. Try it. Meditation works the same way, with chants or mantras meant to "calm the mind." Shutting down those nagging voices in the head is helpful for stressed-out individuals, but even more helpful to a guy who wants to shut down an audience full of nagging internal voices suggesting that what he's saying might be retarded. Recently Seen:
At the political conventions, notice how they trained the audiences to fill the gaps between applause lines with chants ("U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!") rather than, say, pensive silence to carefully consider what the speaker has just said. Also, those of you who've worked at Wal-Mart are familiar with the "Wal-Mart Cheer" that begins every shift: They used to sacrifice a goat at the end, but PETA put a stop to it. #5. Slipping Bullshit Into Your Subconscious  The rise of the internet news portal has given birth to a whole new, sly technique of bullshit insertion. What They (and from here on, "They" with a capital T means anyone who draws a paycheck by manipulating your opinion) have figured out is that most of you don't read the stories, you just browse the headlines. And there's a way to exploit that, based on how the brain stores memories. The Drudge Report lives off this. A single anonymous source will report to some news blog that, say, Senator Smith runs a secret gay bordello in New Orleans. Drudge will run the headline: NEW QUESTIONS ABOUT SMITH'S SECRET GAY BORDELLO Or perhaps there'll just be a question mark on the end: SMITH: SECRET GAY BORDELLO ASS MASTER? It doesn't matter that the headline merely involves "questions" about the bordello. The idea has been planted, and two months later when somebody mentions Senator Smith around the water cooler you'll say, "The gay bordello guy, right?"
 Sounds like: "WHAT IS OBAMA'S CONNECTION TO LEFT-WING EXTREMISTS?" "TOYOTA PRIUS - MORE WASTEFUL THAN A HUMMER?" "OFFICIAL SAYS WTC COLLAPSE 'UNEXPLAINED'" Why It Works:
They call it "Source Amnesia." For instance, you know what a wolverine is, but probably don't remember exactly how you learned that piece of information. The brain has limited storage, so it stores just the important nugget (that a wolverine is a small, ferocious animal) but usually discards the trivial context, such as when and where you learned about it (the movie Red Dawn, probably).  In the era of the web and information overload, that's a mechanism They can exploit very easily. What They have found is that a piece of information--say, an ugly rumor about a politician--can be presented with all sorts of qualifiers (a question mark, attribution to a shitty source, the word "unconfirmed") but often the brain will only remember the ugly rumor and completely forget the qualifier. And get this: it happens even if the headline we read was specifically about the rumor being untrue. You'll see this daily, in every election cycle. The entire point of putting a shaky rumor into the press is to force your opponent to deny it. Why? Because They know that the denial works just as well as the accusation. Thanks to Source Amnesia, for millions of people all three of these ... SMITH DENIES GAY BORDELLO RUMORS SMITH REFUSES COMMENT ON GAY BORDELLO RUMORS SMITH ADMITS GAY COCK BORDELLO ... register as the exact same headline. Recently Seen:
During the presidential primaries, Drudge ran a huge photo of Barack Obama wearing a turban. Under it was an inflammatory headline about how disgusting it was that Clinton staffers were circulating such a picture. But a huge number of people who saw it only remembered the picture (months later, 13% of voters still thought he was a muslim). That's the idea. #4. Controlling What You Watch and Read  Restriction of reading and/or viewing material is common to pretty much every cult. Here on the internet, we've all heard horror stories about Scientology, which goes as far as filtering members' internet access. Obviously the idea is to insulate the members from any opposing points of view, to keep them marching in line. That technique works just as well outside of the cult world, but They have to be more subtle about it. It just takes a little poison in the well, that's all. Sounds like: "Of course the public is misinformed! They're reading that trash in the liberal mainstream media!" "Of course the public is misinformed! They're watching Faux News and the other trash in the corporate mainstream media!" Why It Works:
Studies show the brain is wired to get a quick high from reading things that agree with our point of view. The same studies proved that, strangely, we also get a rush from intentionally dismissing information that disagrees, no matter how well supported it is. Yes, our brain rewards us for being closed-minded dicks. So with a little prodding, the followers will happily close themselves in the same echo chamber of talk radio, blogs and cable news outlets that give them that little "They agree with ME!" high. This wouldn't have been possible even 20 years ago. I grew up in the 80s, in a house with three TV stations. Three. We got one newspaper, the local one. You didn't get to pick from the conservative news or liberal news, back in my day you took what you got and you were thankful for what you had, dammit.  Today, I go through that many outlets a day just to get my freaking video game news. And now, that explosion of the 24-hour cable news stations and, later, the web and blogosphere, has created these parallel universes of Right vs. Left media outlets, complete with their own publishing arms.  And for each, their favorite topic of discussion is how corrupt and ridiculous the other side's media is. They each even have "watchdog" groups that exist purely for the reason of hammering away at each other (the left has FAIR and MediaMatters, the right has the Media Research Center). Recently Seen:
When an MSNBC interview with candidate John McCain got tense, he responded to the question by openly accusing the reporter of being an operative for the other side: Just days later the campaign called The New York Times "a pro-Obama advocacy organization." This technique is relatively new, but you'll see a lot more of it in future elections. The candidate will talk right past the reporter asking the questions and says to his supporters, "These guys work for the enemy, don't believe a word they say. Their lies will only poison your mind." What is the Monkeysphere? By David Wong September 30, 2007  "One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic." -Kevin Federline What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even e-mail spam? You'll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go Inside the Monkeysphere. "What the Hell is the Monkeysphere?"  First, picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if that helps you. We'll call him Slappy. Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. Think how sad you'd be if Slappy died. Now, imagine you get four more monkeys. We'll call them Tito, Bubbles, Marcel and ShitTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them now. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is quiet, the other just throws shit all the time. But they're all your personal monkey friends. Now imagine a hundred monkeys. Not so easy now, is it? So how many monkeys would you have to own before you couldn't remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? Even though each one is every bit the monkey Slappy was, there's a certain point where you will no longer really care if one of them dies. So how many monkeys would it take before you stopped caring? That's not a rhetorical question. We actually know the number. "So this whole thing is your crusade against monkey overpopulation? I'll have my monkey castrated this very day!" Uh, no. It'll become clear in a moment.  You see, monkey experts performed a monkey study a while back, and discovered that the size of the monkey's monkey brain determined the size of the monkey groups the monkeys formed. The bigger the brain, the bigger the little societies they built. They cut up so many monkey brains, in fact, that they found they could actually take a brain they had never seen before and from it they could accurately predict what size tribes that species of creature formed. Most monkeys operate in troupes of 50 or so. But somebody slipped them a slightly larger brain and they estimated the ideal group or society for this particular animal was about 150. That brain, of course, was human. Probably from a homeless man they snatched off the streets. "So that's the big news? That humans are God's big-budget sequel to the monkey? Who didn't know that?"  It goes much, much deeper than that. Let's try an example. Famous news talking guy Tim Russert tells a charming story about his father, in his book Big Russ and Me (the title referring to his on-and-off romance with actor Russell Crowe). Russert's dad used to take half an hour to carefully box up any broken glass before taking it to the trash. Why? Because "The trash guy might cut his hands." That this was such an unusual thing to do illustrates my monkey point. None of us spend much time worrying about the garbage man's welfare even though he performs a crucial role in not forcing us to live in a cave carved from a mountain of our own filth. We don't usually consider his safety or comfort at all and if we do, it's not in the same way we would worry over our best friend or wife or girlfriend or even our dog. People toss half-full bottles of drain cleaner right into the barrel, without a second thought of what would happen if the trash man got it splattered into his eyes. Why? Because the trash guy exists outside the Monkeysphere. "There's that word again..."  The Monkeysphere is the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people. If the monkey scientists are monkey right, it's physically impossible for this to be a number much larger than 150. Most of us do not have room in our Monkeysphere for our friendly neighborhood sanitation worker. So, we don't think of him as a person. We think of him as The Thing That Makes The Trash Go Away. And even if you happen to know and like your particular garbage man, at one point or another we all have limits to our sphere of monkey concern. It's the way our brains are built. We each have a certain circle of people who we think of as people, usually our own friends and family and neighbors, and then maybe some classmates or coworkers or church or suicide cult. Those who exist outside that core group of a few dozen people are not people to us. They're sort of one-dimensional bit characters. Remember the first time, as a kid, you met one of your school teachers outside the classroom? Maybe you saw old Miss Puckerson at Taco Bell eating refried beans through a straw, or saw your principal walking out of a dildo shop. Do you remember that surreal feeling you had when you saw these people actually had lives outside the classroom? I mean, they're not people. They're teachers. "So? What difference does all this make?"  Oh, not much. It's just the one single reason society doesn't work. It's like this: which would upset you more, your best friend dying, or a dozen kids across town getting killed because their bus collided with a truck hauling killer bees? Which would hit you harder, your Mom dying, or seeing on the news that 15,000 people died in an earthquake in Iran? They're all humans and they are all equally dead. But the closer to our Monkeysphere they are, the more it means to us. Just as your death won't mean anything to the Chinese or, for that matter, hardly anyone else more than 100 feet or so from where you're sitting right now. "Why should I feel bad for them? I don't even know those people!" Exactly. This is so ingrained that to even suggest you should feel their deaths as deeply as that of your best friend sounds a little ridiculous. We are hard-wired to have a drastic double standard for the people inside our Monkeysphere versus the 99.999% of the world's population who are on the outside. Think about this the next time you get really pissed off in traffic, when you start throwing finger gestures and wedging your head out of the window to scream, "LEARN TO FUCKING DRIVE, FUCKER!!" Try to imagine acting like that in a smaller group. Like if you're standing in an elevator with two friends and a coworker, and the friend goes to hit a button and accidentally punches the wrong one. Would you lean over, your mouth two inches from her ear, and scream "LEARN TO OPERATE THE FUCKING ELEVATOR BUTTONS, SHIT CAMEL!!" They'd think you'd gone insane. We all go a little insane, though, when we get in a group larger than the Monkeysphere. That's why you get that weird feeling of anonymous invincibility when you're sitting in a large crowd, screaming curses at a football player you'd never dare say to his face. "Well, I'm nice to strangers. Have you considered that maybe you're just an asshole?"  Sure, you probably don't go out of your way to be mean to strangers. You don't go out of your way to be mean to stray dogs, either. The problem is that eventually, the needs of you or those within your Monkeysphere will require screwing someone outside it (even if that need is just venting some tension and anger via exaggerated insults). This is why most of us wouldn't dream of stealing money from the pocket of the old lady next door, but don't mind stealing cable, adding a shady exemption on our tax return, or quietly celebrating when they forget to charge us for something at the restaurant. You may have a list of rationalizations long enough to circle the Earth, but the truth is that in our monkey brains the old woman next door is a human being while the cable company is a big, cold, faceless machine. That the company is, in reality, nothing but a group of people every bit as human as the old lady, or that some kind old ladies actually work there and would lose their jobs if enough cable were stolen, rarely occurs to us. That's one of the ingenious things about the big-time religions, by the way. The old religious writers knew it was easier to put the screws to a stranger, so they taught us to get a personal idea of a God in our heads who says, "No matter who you hurt, you're really hurting me. Also, I can crush you like a grape." You must admit that if they weren't writing words inspired by the Almighty, they at least understood the Monkeysphere. It's everywhere. Once you grasp the concept, you can see examples all around you. You'll walk the streets in a daze, like Roddy Piper after putting on his X-ray sunglasses in They Live. But wait, because this gets much bigger and much, much stranger. "So you're going to tell us that this Monkeysphere thing runs the whole world? Also, They Live sucked."  Go flip on the radio. Listen to the conservative talk about "The Government" as if it were some huge, lurking dragon ready to eat you and your paycheck whole. Never mind that the government is made up of people and that all of that money they take goes into the pockets of human beings. Talk radio's Rush Limbaugh is known to tip 50% at restaurants, but flies into a broadcast tirade if even half that dollar amount is deducted from his paycheck by "The Government." That's despite the fact that the money helps that very same single mom he had no problem tipping in her capacity as a waitress. Now click over to a liberal show now, listen to them describe "Multinational Corporations" in the same diabolical terms, an evil black force that belches smoke and poisons water and enslaves humanity. Isn't it strange how, say, a lone man who carves and sells children's toys in his basement is a sweetheart who just loves bringing joy at Christmas, but a big-time toy corporation (which brings toys to millions of kids at Christmas) is an inhuman soul-grinding greed machine? Strangely enough, if the kindly lone toy making guy made enough toys and hired enough people and expanded to enough shops, we'd eventually stop seeing it as a toy-making shop and start seeing it as the fiery Orc factories of Mordor. And if you've just thought, "Well, those talk show hosts are just a bunch of egomaniacal blowhards anyway," you've just done it again, turned real humans into two-word cartoon characters. It's no surprise, you do it with pretty much all six billion human beings outside the Monkeysphere. "So I'm supposed to suddenly start worrying about six billion strangers? That's not even possible!"  That's right, it isn't possible. That's the point. What is hard to understand is that it's also impossible for them to care about you. That's why they don't mind stealing your stereo or vandalizing your house or cutting your wages or raising your taxes or bombing your office building or choking your computer with spam advertising diet and penis drugs they know don't work. You're outside their Monkeysphere. In their mind, you're just a vague shape with a pocket full of money for the taking. Think of Osama Bin Laden. Did you just picture a camouflaged man hiding in a cave, drawing up suicide missions? Or are you thinking of a man who gets hungry and has a favorite food and who had a childhood crush on a girl and who has athlete's foot and chronic headaches and wakes up in the morning with a boner and loves volleyball? Something in you, just now, probably was offended by that. You think there's an effort to build sympathy for the murderous fuck. Isn't it strange how simply knowing random human facts about him immediately tugs at your sympathy strings? He comes closer to your Monkeysphere, he takes on dimension. Now, the cold truth is this Bin Laden is just as desperately in need of a bullet to the skull as the raving four-color caricature on some redneck's T-shirt. The key to understanding people like him, though, is realizing that we are the caricature on his T-shirt. "So you're using monkeys to claim that we're all a bunch of Osama Bin Ladens?"  Sort of. Listen to any 16 year-old kid with his first job, going on and on about how the boss is screwing him and the government is screwing him even more ("What's FICA?!?!" he screams as he looks at his first paycheck). Then watch that same kid at work, as he drops a hamburger patty on the floor, picks it up, and slaps in on a bun and serves it to a customer. In that one dropped burger he has everything he needs to understand those black-hearted politicians and corporate bosses. They see him in the exact same way he sees the customers lined up at the burger counter. Which is, just barely. In both cases, for the guy making the burger and the guy running Exxon, getting through the workweek and collecting the paycheck are all that matters. No thought is given to the real human unhappiness being spread by doing it shittily (ever gotten so sick from food poisoning you thought your stomach lining was going to fly out of your mouth?) That many customers or employees just can't fit inside the Monkeysphere. The kid will protest that he shouldn't have to care for the customers for minimum wage, but the truth is if a man doesn't feel sympathy for his fellow man at $6.00 an hour, he won't feel anything more at $600,000 a year. Or, to look at it the other way, if we're allowed to be indifferent and even resentful to the masses for $6.00 an hour, just think of how angry the some Pakistani man is allowed to be when he's making the equivalent of six dollars a week. "You've used the word 'monkey' more than 50 times, but the same principle hardly applies. Humans have been to the moon. Let's see the monkeys do that."  It doesn't matter. It's just an issue of degree. There's a reason why legendary monkeytician Charles Darwin and his assistant, Jeje (pronounced "heyhey") Santiago deduced that humans and chimps were evolutionary cousins. As sophisticated as we are (compare our advanced sewage treatment plants to the chimps' primitive technique of hurling the feces with their bare hands), the inescapable truth is we are just as limited by our mental hardware. The primary difference is that monkeys are happy to stay in small groups and rarely interact with others outside their monkey gang. This is why they rarely go to war, though when they do it is widely thought to be hilarious. Humans, however, require cars and oil and quality manufactured goods by the fine folks at 3M and Japanese video games and worldwide internets and, most importantly, governments. All of these things take groups larger than 150 people to maintain effectively. Thus, we routinely find ourselves functioning in bunches larger than our primate brains are able to cope with. This is where the problems begin. Like a fragile naked human pyramid, we are simultaneously supporting and resenting each other. We bitch out loud about our soul-sucking job as an anonymous face on an assembly line, while at the exact same time riding in a car that only an assembly line could have produced. It's a constant contradiction that has left us pissed off and joining informal wrestling clubs in basements. This is why I think it was with a great burden of sadness that Darwin turned to his assistant and lamented, "Jeje, we're the monkeys." "Oh, no you didn't." If you think about it, our entire society has evolved around the limitations of the Monkeysphere. There is a reason why all of the really phat-ass nations with the biggest SUV's with the shiniest 22-inch rims all have some kind of representative democracy (where you vote for people to do the governing for you) and all of them are, to some degree, capitalist (where people actually get to buy property and keep some of what they earn).
Above: Democracy A representative democracy allows a small group of people to make all of the decisions, while letting us common people feel like we're doing something by going to a polling place every couple of years and pulling a lever that, in reality, has about the same effect as the darkness knob on your toaster. We can simultaneously feel like we're in charge while being contained enough that we can't cause any real monkey mayhem once we fly into one of our screeching, arm-flapping monkey frenzies ("A woman showed her boob at the Super Bowl! We want a boob and football ban immediately!") Conversely, some people in the distant past naively thought they could sit all of the millions of monkeys down and say, "Okay, everybody go pick the bananas, then bring them here, and we'll distribute them with a complex formula determining banana need! Now go gather bananas for the good of society!" For the monkeys it was a confused, comical, tree-humping disaster. Later, a far more realistic man sat the monkeys down and said, "You want bananas? Each of you go get your own. I'm taking a nap." That man, of course, was German philosopher Hans Capitalism. As long as everybody gets their own bananas and shares with the few in their Monkeysphere, the system will thrive even though nobody is even trying to make the system thrive. This is perhaps how Ayn Rand would have put it, had she not been such a hateful bitch. Then, some time in the Third Century, French philosopher Pierre "Frenchy" LaFrench invented racism. 
Above: The French This was a way of simplifying the too-complex-for-monkeys world by imagining all people of a certain race as being the same person, thinking they all have the same attitudes and mannerisms and tastes in food and clothes and music. It sort of works, as long as we think of that person as being a good person ("Those Asians are so hard-working and precise and well-mannered!") but when we start seeing them as being one, giant, gaping asshole (the French, ironically) our monkey happiness again breaks down. It's not all the French's fault. The truth is, all of these monkey management schemes only go so far. For instance, today one in four Americans has some kind of mental illness, usually depression. One in four. Watch a basketball game. The odds are at least two of those people on the floor are mentally ill. Look around your house; if everybody else there seems okay, it's you. Is it any surprise? You turn on the news and see a whole special on the Obesity Epidemic. You've had this worry laid on your shoulders about millions of other people eating too much. What exactly are you supposed to do about the eating habits of 80 million people you don't even know? You've taken on the pork-laden burden of all these people outside the Monkeysphere and you now carry that useless weight of worry like, you know, some kind of animal on your back. "So what exactly are we supposed to do about all this?"  First, train yourself to get suspicious every time you see simplicity. Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency. So reject binary thinking of "good vs. bad" or "us vs. them." Know problems cannot be solved with clever slogans and over-simplified step-by-step programs. You can do that by following these simple steps. We like to call this plan the T.R.Y. plan: First, TOTAL MORON. That is, accept the fact THAT YOU ARE ONE. We all are. That really annoying person you know, the one who's always spouting bullshit, the person who always thinks they're right? Well, the odds are that for somebody else, you're that person. So take the amount you think you know, reduce it by 99.999%, and then you'll have an idea of how much you actually know regarding things outside your Monkeysphere. Second, UNDERSTAND that there are no Supermonkeys. Just monkeys. Those guys on TV you see, giving the inspirational seminars, teaching you how to reach your potential and become rich and successful like them? You know how they made their money? By giving seminars. For the most part, the only thing they do well is convince others they do everything well. No, the universal moron principal established in No. 1 above applies here, too. Don't pretend politicians are somehow supposed to be immune to all the backhanded fuckery we all do in our daily lives and don't laugh and point when the preacher gets caught on video snorting cocaine off a prostitute's ass. A good exercise is to picture your hero--whoever it is--passed out on his lawn, naked from the waist down. The odds are it's happened at some point. Even Gandhi may have had hotel rooms and dead hookers in his past. And don't even think about ignoring advice from a moral teacher just because the source enjoys the ol' Colombian Nose Candy from time to time. We're all members of varying species of hypocrite (or did you tell them at the job interview that you once called in sick to spend a day leveling up on World of Warcraft?) Don't use your heroes' vices as an excuse to let yours run wild. And finally, DON'T LET ANYBODY simplify it for you. The world cannot be made simple. Anyone who tries to paint a picture of the world in basic comic book colors is most likely trying to use you as a pawn. So just remember: T-R-Y. Go forth and do likewise, gents.

Dream work has been on my to do list for a long time. Unfortunately when I get serious about it, I end up with insomnia. Its also a mountain I'll have to climb one day. Ultimately it can become a portal to another world. Whether that world is 'just' internal or external I don't know. What are you guys doing and how advanced? Michael

The result of sex intercourse is same as nocturnal emission as long as leakage of jing does happen. It makes no differences whether it happened in sane state or deep sleep; or whether it is accompanied with wet dream or without wet dream ; or, whether via your own hands or via other sex's body. In fact , people who adopt the paying-attention-to-the-dantian way of cultivation are especially entangled by this problem for the more jing and qi they have accumulated at their abdomen, the more momentum /urge that force them to release it , if not in awake state, then it likely in their dreams. The sex drive will disguise as your own self , making you think that you are acting at your own will , for your own interest .

You are experiencing yourself in all the different ways that you can, forever. And knowing who you are not, allows you to know more clearly who you are aswell. If there was nothing outside of you, you would not have the ability to be conscious of self or "other." So there is great value in the variety of the contrast through which you carve out your own unique and personal preferences. The problem only occurs, when one tries to look for their preferences in the contrasting variety that inspired those personal preferences. The "unwanted" reality is not to be dwelled upon, but to inspire you to move towards your greater desire, which in turn will yield new contrast and variety to inspire further expansion of clarity and knowing. And often people look at their reality and think that it is all there is, and so they give up on their wants and preferences, and so they never create the life they were eager to create here before they came into this physical environment. And unintentionally and unknowingly they hold on to the very thing they say they don't want. But this physical reality we perceive has been created from the past. So what you see here is actually not present tense reality. This is actually old reality, for the purpose of inspiring a greater desire than the one we previously had the capability of realising for ourselves. Often people have to die, before the dream can become a reality, and so every new reality only causes people to dream untill they die. However, if one just allows themselves to dream with more deliberate focus, then this power and momentum that comes with consistency accelerates the translation of the dreams into reality. Thus, one can have a dream in this reality and live it in the same reality aswell. And it is ALWAYS like that, eternally. The expansion never stops and the flow never ceases to flow. And if you move with it, unconditionally, you have an enjoyable experience and ride. And if you stop, thinking you are not worthy of the very thing you have realised yourself, you are blocking a current that stems from the Source of All Creation, that is infinite in nature and expansiveness. So the current beats up on you, which in turn yields greater resistance and more pain and suffering. While if you let go with the flow, now all those old grudges dissapear and you lose everything, but you thereby gain everything. You lose what you thought you needed, but didn't need. You gain what you thought you didn't want, but you actually need in order to be happy and live a fulfilled and happy life, through which you have to ability to create your life, rather than regurgitate the life that is already here. In harmonic resonance with the natural current of well-being that is the stream of infinite and eternal existance whom eternity hinges upon your valuable expansion of desire realised after desire! There is nothing greater in value than the value of who you are. For without you, existance would not be complete! It would not be ALL that is! So you have no choice but to awaken fully the all of the desires that have been realised by you, when you die. But more and more, people are beginning to realise that they don't have to die in order to wake up to all that they have become. And that is why we are here, on this location of planet earth, where the party is at. This is currently the leading edge of creation. This is the big happening. Right here and now. Most people think they are being left out of the party, but they are not. To give an analogy to what is actually happening is like this. They are at a party, a huge party. And their vision is completely veiled, and they are dazed. And they have a phone in their hands. And they look at their phone. And on the phone there is a message. The message is an invitation to the party. They find it hard to believe that we're all infinitely and eternally worthy beings. As they look at their phone, their mind races through all of their life experiences that they've had, of which all of it has led to this moment. And they think or believe that they are stuck in the past, unable to allow themselves to move forward, with the deservingness that is already theirs. But in reality, they're not stuck. Infact, in reality, they are already at the party that they've been trying to reach their entire life. And this party is the joy that never ends and is eternal in nature. And unconditional in deservingness. As you look at your physical reality, in its now current state, that is like looking at your phone and thinking about the past. This present physical reality has been created by those who came before, it has nothing to do with who you are and have allowed yourself to become and what you have come here for to create as an infinitely and eternally and unconditionally worthy being and creator of life experience after another. And the side effect are that physical manifestation will occur, yes. But those have never been the primary goal. The only goal that has ever been the goal is the joy of the endless and infinite and eternal and never ending and ever expanding journey that is existance coming to know itself in all the ways that it can in all of the freedom that it infinitely and eternally always has been, is and always will be. You are so free, you can choose bondage. And if you realise you don't wanna do that, you just don't do that anymore. That's it. And then there's nothing left again, but the purity of the truth of the eternally worthy nature of your being. Nothing serious has ever been going on. There has never been a vulnerability of your eternal nature, never an idea that something can go wrong. Just the idea and knowingness that you can choose to experience AS IF something has gone wrong, but that never means something has actually gone wrong. For the well-being abounds eternally and infinitely, and thus immense powerful beings such as the physical humans of this planet have chosen this experience of limitation, as a challenge, for they knew that they could handle it and they knew, that as with their eternally worthy nature of their knowing, that absolutely nothing but good could thus come out of it. And then you have a completely new plateau of joys available to you the height of which has never been reached before, ever, in all of creation, even as all of creation looks on to you, in eager expectation, for their holding the knowingness that you have left behind FOR YOU eternally, so that you have a home to return to, after the long journey. And that home is already here and now, but it is subtle, and part of your greater consciousness, that you will allow to flow fully through you, either in this life, or after. And I fully believe that this life is fully capable of supporting your highest joy, in all the ways that it can. Without any falter. Because when you die, all times exist in the same 1 space. You don't have to die to already know that the future you seek, is already right here and now fully contained within the greater consciousness of all that you truely are, and that you have the full capability in this physical environment, that if you can conceive it in your mind, you can create it, without exception. You just have to understand that the creation is already done, by your greater being. And your task is only one and singular. To align your deliberate focus with that of your highest conceivable joy, by virtue of your heart's guidance system that helps you know wether you are focused in alignment or not with the knowing of your greater being that holds all of the greatness that you have realised for yourself in vibrational escrow, For you, eternally. And beams it out to you infinitely and eternally, always here and now, where all times and all places always exist. And you translate the vibrational alignment/misalignment between your physical body and your greater "soul" consciousness through your most sophisticated sense of emotions, which forever help you and guide you always without falter and in the most meaningful way that is possible for you. The expansion is not in the structure of existance, but the expansion is of the consciousness which is the perspective that existance has of it self, that expands eternally and infinite into more and greater and better, eternally. For the freedom is boundless and the speed is infinite and thus, here you are, perceiving yourself in this unique way that you now perceive, and you do this so effortlessly, that you don't even know you're doing it. That's how powerful you are. So powerful, you can create the experience for yourself of being powerless. And there is nothing you need to do in order to regain your power. There is only everything that you need to stop do, in order to allow yourself to be who it is you already are as an eternally worthy and blessed being of infinite creation. There is great ease and love and appreciation and joy in allowing yourself to fully be who it is you truely already are.

Some thoughts on dreams from C. G. Jung........ "The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness may extend." • Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse. • If, in addition to this, we bear in mind that the unconscious contains everything that is lacking to consciousness, that the unconscious therefore has a compensatory tendency, then we can begin to draw conclusions-provided, of course, that the dream does not come from too deep a psychic level. If it is a dream of this kind, it will as a rule contain mythological motifs, combinations of ideas or images which can be found in the myths of one's own folk or in those of other races. The dream will then have a collective meaning, a meaning which is the common property of mankind. • It is obvious that in handling "big" dreams intuitive guesswork will lead nowhere. Wide knowledge is required, such as a specialist ought to possess.' But no dream can be interpreted with knowledge alone. This knowledge, furthermore, should not be dead material that has been memorized; it must possess a living quality, and be infused with the experience of the person who uses it. Of what use is philosophical knowledge in the head, if one is not also a philosopher at heart? • One would do well to treat every dream as though it were a totally unknown object. Look at it from all sides, take it in your hand, carry it about with you, let your imagination play round it, and talk about it with other people. Primitives tell each other impressive dreams, in a public palaver if possible, and this custom is also attested in late antiquity, for all the ancient peoples attributed great significance to dreams ' Treated in this way, the dream suggests all manner of ideas and associations which lead us closer to its meaning. The ascertainment of the meaning is, I need hardly point out, an entirely arbitrary affair, and this is where the hazards begin. Narrower or wider limits will be set to the meaning, according to one's experience, temperament, and taste. Some people will be satisfied with little, for others much is still not enough. Also the meaning of the dream, or our interpretation of it, is largely dependent on the intentions of the interpreter, on what he expects the meaning to be or requires it to do. In eliciting the meaning he will involuntarily be guided by certain presuppositions, and it depends very much on the scrupulousness and honesty of the investigator whether he gains something by his interpretation or perhaps only becomes still more deeply entangled in his mistakes. • The art of interpreting dreams cannot be learnt from books. Methods and rules are good only when we can get along without them. Only the man who can do it anyway has real skill, only the man of understanding really understands.

~ Ngak'chang Rinpoche ~ Q Could you talk a little more about Bardo? Rinpoche: "Bardo can be misunderstood as just being the interval between successive rebirths, but Bar-do really means ‘gap’ or ‘space’. Bar means some kind of ‘flow’, ‘river’, or ‘movement’; and do means ‘island’. So it’s like a space or particular point. There are many Bardos... there is the Bardo of Death and the Bardo of Life. There is the Bardo of Visions that arise in the Death state and the Bardo of Becoming, of Dream, of Meditation. So Bardo is a very interesting concept. There is the Bardo of every day, of a particular job, a particular relationship, a particular sequence of events; everything is Bardo in that sense, in the sense of a contained experience. Like the Bardo of this interview – here in this tent. This will be followed by the Bardo of the walk to the shrine room and so on. Its like a space or field of a particular quality of experience, which is followed by space, which is followed by space. Each following space has its own unique flavour. Each space is somehow separate and discrete according to the experience of Bardo. When one really enters into Bardo then this is all there really is – it’s really just one Space – here, in this point instant, but stretching out into eternity. Bardo is essentially now. If you’re distracted... say you’ve got something on your mind... then this is not the realized experience of Bardo." Q What is it then, Rinpoche? Rinpoche: "It’s the Bardo of duality. The Bardo of duality wants to homogenize the individual quality of these endless appearing and disappearing Bardos into some sort of solid ground where nothing ever changes. The authentic experience of Bardo is a kind of bubble experience – it’s there, and then its gone... and there’s another one, then another one, and another one. That devolves into smaller, smaller, smaller, and smaller fields of experience until there is only Now. So... there are bubbles within those bubbles. These bubbles of experience, these Bardos, are linked by Emptiness – when you know that... it’s called Enlightenment (laughter). When it’s concept that links Bardos... this is known as Unenlightenment! So... when it’s concept that links these experiential spaces, you want to blur the Bardo experiences out so that there are no different Bardos. You want to have continuous experience rather than have discontinuous experience. This is the desire to experience continuity – but there is no continuity apart from Emptiness! That is the continuity... which is why the translation of Tantra (Gyüd in Tibetan) is ‘thread’ but, it’s Empty Thread."

Hi Klinsly, I hope you're still around and haven't thrown in the towel after seeing how almost every thread unfolds haha. Plus, I hope I'm not writing to thin air, because I have a lot to dissect. Your first question...how do you know when it is full? You will know, my friend. And I can tell from your post that you have a lot of qi kicking about in that body of yours, but it's all over the place. Time to bring it all in, buddy. Your progress hasn't gone backwards. On the contrary. The sensations were really a part of you becoming aware, and it's exciting at first. It is then so easy to remain in this state and fall into disappointment though, so it is time to learn a bit more. That bit more is: what comes next, is something a bit more boring. Stick with the boredom though and then you realise that you no longer need to live with the emotion of expectation, curiosity and excitement. You will feel powerful in and out, and then your state of being will be permanently changed. Your dream was lovely. This brings me back to a long time ago now, when I had a long string of lucid dreams that brought me messages. Never forget that dream, but don't get caught up in it. The trouble is, you're activating upper dantien by staying in that realm...so it's time to bring it all down. It's like going to university/college. You take a lecture, get filled with wonderful ideas and feel inspired. Later down the line, you're going to need to hit the books, study and eventually refine you knowledge into a skill which eventually becomes your thing. So, advice time. Echoing everyone that's ever known anything about anything: find a good teacher. No hurry, no pressure. In the meantime, ask yourself why you're practicing in the first place. What is all this qi for? You're far from overflowing, so don't worry about that. Meditate 2x daily for 30+ minutes and breathe into the LDT, this time, allowing sensations to come and go. Then, go about daily life. Experience life from a different and more powerful place, and watch how different things become. Probably master some other skill as well; cooking, a musical instrument or something of that kind. That's all I can say because that's all I'm up to (bar mastering cooking/instrument...that's going to take a bit more time) But that should keep you busy for years while you find your teacher. Or your teacher finds you PS I love how at the end of your dream you were patted on the stomach. Reminds me of when I was staying at Dragongate and one kid came up to me one day and poked me in the belly with curiosity, maybe a few weeks into training. It's amazing how this stuff is noticable in each other and thus you can communicate without knowing each others' language

Since the text is a translation, you may have a point here regard a mistranslation but keep in mind that words clearly become inadequate as one goes deeper and deeper into meditation. The key point in Ramana's statement was a description of the process in which individual entities appear as "apparently" separate entities. There are obvious implications in accordance with the "As above so below" and "Man is made in the image of God" principles. You referenced the Mandukya Upanishad, which is one of my favorite Upanishads. As you duly noted, "he (Ramana) is explaining the process of waking world, dream world, deep sleep state, and the turiya state beyond those three as described in the Mandukya Upanishad. Having been stirred to practice "conscious sleep" by the Mandukya Upanishad, I have been able to observe how dream-objects manifest in the dream-world. In validating Ramana's statement, I came to the same conclusion that he did but am still thinking about what are the best words to describe the formation of the entity --- brain, mind, consciousness, etc. In any case, Ramana's statement seems to be quite accurate and that is what I did personally to initially validate what he said via the dream experience .... before going further.

And furthermore Chuang Tzu said: Those Who Dream Of The Banquet Wake Up To Lamentation And Sorrow How do I know that love of life is not a delusion after all? How do I know but that he who dreads death is not as a child who has lost his way and does not know his way home? The daughter of a king was sent for marriage to a frontier officer. When the duke first got her, she wept until the bosom of her dress was drenched with tears. But when she came to the royal residence, shared with the duke his luxurious couch, and ate rich food, she repented of having wept. How then do I know but that the dead may repent of having previously clung to life? Those who dream of the banquet wake to lamentation and sorrow. Those who dream of lamentation and sorrow wake to join the hunt. While they dream, they do not know that they are dreaming. Some will even interpret the very dream they are dreaming; and only when they awake do they know it was a dream. By and by comes the great awakening, and then we find out that this life is really a great dream. Fools think they are awake now, and flatter themselves they know; this one is a prince, and that one is a shepherd. What narrowness of mind! The fools who think they know are but dreams; and I who say they are dreams; I am but a dream myself. This is a paradox. Tomorrow a Sage may arise to explain it; but that tomorrow will not be until ten thousand generations have gone by, yet you may meet him around the corner.

Very nice 3bob, it makes me think I read Gibran far too long ago, when I knew hardly anything. “If you could hear the whispering of the dream” reminds me of one of my favourite lines from one of my favourite texts, “When the green immortal spirit passes over and communicates with me, there is a distant echo.” There’s something that I do want to hear and see, and it’s not emptiness, and it’s not a void, and it’s not even primordial space, its more akin to spirit pointing to the actualising of spirit within my body.

I have an interesting little story. From time to time, I do a little lucid sleeping, and I used to spontaneously do it before I became a Buddhist. Back in college, I had a recurring dream. I was stuck in an empty void full of crackling energy. I had no body, no mind, no nothing. It was utterly terrifying. At the time, my primary paradigm was the Christian one, and based on some research I was fairly convinced that I was dreaming about Hell. Jump forward some decade or two, and I have a similar experience when a dream breaks apart. But now, it doesn't feel like hell at all--- it feels like an emptiness full of pregnant possibilities. The exact same experience, two very different results. The fear and terror I felt in college was a result of having nothing to grab onto. However, after practicing for some time, this "nothing to grab onto" feels liberating. Almost every Buddhist teacher I've held in high regard has said something similar. It is interesting to see how many things I discounted as ridiculous now seem to be quite plausible (rebirth being the biggest one for me).

Interesting. I started with lungs, then kidneys, etc.. You said that I need to purge, tonify and regulate, so I think I am missing the last one. Last night I did the lung practice and then went to bed and had a dream I can remember until now, it was very clear and seemed like I was really having that experience. I remember there was a part where I wanted to say something but I couldn't, my voice just vanished and this morning I woke up with a feeling of pressure in my throat, this is the part that marked me the most although I don't see the relation with lung practice and voice/throat(I'm trying to find a meaning to my dream lol) I'm sharing this because it was a looooong time ago when I had my last vivid dream experience like that, and coincidently it happened just after my first healing sound and inner smile day practice.