White Christmas
I am experiencing a minor renaissance. Life seems to cycle through periods of gradual decay and spurts of rebirth, liberation from not the toil of one day but a sum of chains that signals an early Spring.
In some way I think I am looking for a master. It is obvious when a teacher is not a master, as was the case last night at the “Astral Travel and Dream Yoga” class. More lecture than class, more persuasive flesh than pit of truth, the spotlight pirouetted across dozens of floorboard topics and never once landed on front and center stage. The teacher has experienced, has come in contact with. The master understands utterly, and can lead the student to experience. Starting with a question.
Why undertake a practice of engaging dreams, dream yoga? What is this “conscious astral experience”, why is it profound and why is it meaningful?
Steven from Pushkar concluded: “I realized, when you are able to control what happens in dreams, then you are able to control what happens in reality.” Then he shrugged, as if it were so minuscule or tremendous a revelation.
Astral experience, define it before bandying the term.
For myself, the key is context. Night and day, one day to the next, we slash through the ethereal boundaries between each in sleep. If by chance we force ourselves through the night into the next day, an odd feeling rises in the gut with the renewal of sunlight: something has been misplaced; time has somehow skipped a step. Instead of heralding a new day, the growing light shines on one day; it is one and the same. The one and only ebb and flow of twilight there has ever been. And a yawning abyss threatens to crack open in our minds, and swallow every truth imprinted on our physical reality. The truth of 24 hours exists only in the tiny span of our blue droplet and its relationship with the sun. Yet, in the core of my being, there is no other truth. Strip this context of me, and I will drift forever and nowhere.
The great occupation of making money – all in a day’s work, yes, but is it the sum total of a day’s work? If I wake up on the job, my world of that day folds into my work and cannot extend beyond it, and I am defined by this context. Morning Hatha Yoga practice awakens my body to the greater context of the day; work becomes a bubble of interest within of the whole, grander theme of liberty of intent.
If I wake up in a dream, the world of reality I have believed, no, known previously to wrap the extremity of experience is subsumed into a system of multiple realities. The interface between the realities is a veil of silk; on both sides I breathe the same air, my essence is the context. Not the sprawling expanse of the known universe: simply the bounds of me, my experience, my interiority. Astral experience, like normal everyday experience, is a way to encounter the world through the self. The world in this case is the world of dreams, a volatile one, a convention-smashing artist’s expression of deeply buried emotions.
Other categories of experience on the order of reality: drug-induced as described by Castaneda; near-death states; being filled with the spirit; awakening from breath control, Kundalini rising, and meditational practice. The important point is that every type of experience offers an opportunity for consciousness to observe the self, making possible the process of internal revelation and discovery. We gain awareness of ourselves. In sleep, the logical, anxious mind finally shuts up after chattering all day about a million and one things. Fog of jibber jabber lifted, the underlying layers of our subconscious are left out in plain sight, if only there were some way to see. When we are able to see, to witness, we are essentially meditating in our sleep.
Osho says that all psychological illnesses disappear when we become aware enough to observe them. What then if we observe our dreams?
If you clean it rightly before you go to sleep, dreams will disappear. Because dreams are nothing but the dust gathered the whole day – it goes on moving inside you, goes on creating fantasies, illusions. If your meditation is going right, your dreams will by and by disappear. Your night will become a peaceful sleep with no dreams. And if the night is without dreams, in the morning you will be able to come up very fresh, very young, virgin.
Osho, from “The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 2″
Pause. Well, do my words stand contradicted? Is astral experience an equal of real experience, if through meditation dreams may be completely snipped from the vine?
Reexamine the purpose of conscious astral experience.
The teacher used the term “astral travel” to refer to going to physical places in dreams. She described such travel as exhilarating, as inspiring as traveling in the real world and physically seeing, touching, tasting Angkor Wat, the Taj Mahal, some sacred temple in Rome. A drop-in replacement for real travel for those without the time or means to embark upon such journeys in waking life.
She also related a story of an individual who, after practicing dream yoga for some time, finally achieved a state of lucid dreaming one night. Thereafter this person was not able to repeat the experience, and expressed regret for not having better utilized those fleeting moments of absolute freedom. The boundless creative power harnessed, the power of god! And what were the fruits of omnipotence? “I could have done that. Or I could have done that. Instead, I did this, which, when it comes down to it, was a complete and utter waste of such a precious experience.” Put this way, conscious astral experiences are three wishes granted by a genie. Put this way, they serve to catalyze the manifestation of desire.
It can be fun, it can be a trip, it can be an escape. But that road leads no further, and takes you in the wrong direction. This is why the teacher was no master – she did not even fully understand the fundamental significance of dream yoga before offering to instruct others about it. My conclusion: the degree of consciousness you attain when dreaming parallels the degree of consciousness and awareness you possess when awake. The extent of will you exercise in your dreams parallels the extent of will you exercise in the waking world. If you grasp and want for the thrill of some experience in dreams, you grasp and want for it in reality.
Dreams. A separate reality?
Or another window on the same reality? The reality of the self?