64 How to Fall Asleep Lucidly for the Less and Less and Less Gifted (e.g. me)

B. Alan Wallace, 27 Sep 2014

After the silent meditation we went on with Padmasambhava’s instructions on night-time dream yoga. He suggests different methods for becoming lucid, in addition to yesterday’s method of visualizing yourself as your chosen deity, with a little resemblance of the deity in your throat chakra. This again should draw the pranas into the throat chakra, where they normally are located while in the dream state. Try to keep the visualization with a light touch, but with sustained intent to become lucid. If this does not work, then imagine a lotus with different seed syllables at your throat. In addition to drawing your attention to the throat chakra there might be an effect of the frequency of the sounds that facilitates lucidity. When that works, you directly end up in deep dreamless sleep, and you enter the first dream like a tulku enters the next rebirth, lucidly. Alan takes us here on a short side trip, starting with the example of dreaming, where your first moment of a non-lucid dream starts with a state of unknowing, and therefore the dream from your perspective has no beginning. There is nothing for you to remember, if you started out with unknowing in the first place. In the same way, during meditation when you get carried away by a wandering thought, this wandering thought has no beginning for you. And even on the largest scale, the same is true for samsara. Since it started with unknowing, avidya, it has no beginning. Alan then points out that the habits we create during our lifetime will show up during the dying process. So if you look at your upheavals during meditation, be sure that this is what comes up while dying. Becoming lucid means that you are free, that you have a choice how the story will go on, and this is what lucid dreaming also prepares us for. If the above mentioned methods didn’t work, then try it with a bindu at your throat. And if you still do not succeed, then there might be obstacles, like broken samayas, and you need to purify before your dream yoga practice actually works. The signs that you might be coming closer to lucidity is recalling more dreams, then the dreams become richer, clearer, and then they will be apprehended. Finally we end with an outlook on next week teachings, where we start to learn how to develop our dream lab, exploring siddhis in the dream state. Alan then proposes a hypothesis: once you have achieved Shamatha, if you become a really good practitioner in dream yoga, training your siddhis in the dream state and gaining thereby insight into the emptiness of all phenomena in the dream state, and in addition train yourself in daytime dream yoga, may that be your ideal preparation to display the same siddhis in the waking state as one who has reached the 4th jhana?

Silent meditation cut out at the beginning

Download (M4A / 33 MB)

Transcript

This lecture does not have a text transcript. Please contact us if you’d like to volunteer to assist our transcription team.