“Learn to light a candle in the darkest moments of someone’s life. Be the light that helps others see; it is what gives life its deepest significance.”
— Roy T. Bennett
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Tibetan Buddhists have been meditating in their dreams for more than a thousand years. Let’s step into the mind-bending world of dream yoga.
According to legend, when Siddhartha Gautama was glowing right after his enlightenment, people asked him if he was a god, a prophet, a rishi, or a saint, and to each he replied, “No.” What he simply said is “I am awake,” and his answer became his title.
The word “Buddha” comes from the Sanskrit root budh, which means “to awaken” and denotes one who has awakened from the deep sleep of ignorance. Thus from the outset, Buddhism has been intimately connected to literal and figurative sleep.
One way to understand the Buddha’s teachings is that we’re actually the most spiritually awake in deep dreamless sleep and the most asleep in so-called waking reality. Unfortunately, most of us have got it completely backward. Spiritual practice, and the nocturnal meditations, can lead us to this realization.
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Oneirology is the study of dreams, and oneironauts are those who navigate the dream world. Just like astronauts explore the outer space of the cosmos, oneironauts explore the inner space of the mind.
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With sleep yoga, your body goes into sleep mode but your mind stays awake. You drop consciously into the very core of your being, the most subtle formless awareness. It’s an advanced meditation and an age-old practice in Tibetan Buddhism.
For most of us, dreamless sleep is the antithesis of awareness. It’s a total blackout. Nothingness. But for a sleep yogi, it’s a mini-enlightenment, a descent into the awakened mind, because it’s a non-dualistic state. The formless awareness of dreamless sleep is not nothingness, but no-thingness (emptiness). We don’t recognize it when we fall into dreamless sleep because we’re so habituated to identifying with the forms that arise in awareness rather than with awareness itself. We identify with thoughts, emotions, and other mental forms, not with formlessness. So when formless awareness is pointed out in dreamless (formless) sleep, we unconsciously say to ourselves, “That’s not me, I’m not nobody, I’m somebody!”—and pass out.
We can learn something about the nonduality of deep inner space by looking at deep outer space. Imagine floating in outer space, where the light of the sun is constantly streaming. If there’s no object placed in that light and space, then nothing is actually seen. The only thing you see is the blackness of outer space. You don’t see the light. But the instant you put an object into that streaming light, both the light and the object (duality) suddenly appear. Physicist Arthur Zajonc explains:
“Without an object on which the light can fall, one sees only darkness. Light itself is always invisible. We see only things, only objects, not light.”
It’s exactly the same with the darkness of the deep inner space of your own mind. Replace “light” with “awareness” in the above quote to see how this applies to your dreamless mind.
The light of awareness, the Clear Light Mind (The Great Eastern Sun in Shambhala Buddhism), is constantly streaming. But if an object, in this case, a thought form, doesn’t arise in that light and space of the mind, nothing is seen. It’s perceived as a total blackout, which is exactly what we perceive in dreamless sleep. In the education of the night, sleep yoga can be likened to graduate school. It gives you a sense of how far these nocturnal meditations can go.
There’s one final destination of the night. Dream yoga and sleep yoga can develop further into bardo yoga, which is when you use the darkness of the night to prepare for the darkness of death. “Bardo” is a Tibetan word that means “gap or transitional state,” and in this case it refers to the gap between lives. If you believe in reincarnation and want to know what to do after you die, bardo yoga is for you.
On one level, all of dream yoga and sleep yoga is a preparation for death. There’s an intimate relationship between the process of going to sleep, dreaming, and waking up, and the process of dying, the after-death state, and being reborn. The Dalai Lama says, “A well-trained person can recognize a strict order in the four stages of falling asleep and is well prepared to ascertain an analogous order in the dying process.” Bokar Rinpoche adds, “The energy governing each element ceases to be functional and is absorbed into the energy of the following element. This process of absorption of the four elements into each other does not occur only at death, it also happens in an extremely subtle manner when we fall asleep or when a thought is removed from our mind.”
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DUST PLUS INITIATIVE
From my understanding of physical reality, when we die, we go into an eternal darkness forever because our eyes turn off when our brain shuts down, so, basically, we go into a nothingness forever, just like when we came out of nothingness like before we were born, remember, before that your father didn't exist, so where was your sperm? Nowhere.
Although your sperm was nowhere, in death, we still re-enter that nothingness, because our brain ceases to work, but not after a bit of suffering first.
One more point: we stay in our body when we die, because I believe that there is nothing out there taking our Consciousness anywhere. Our brain also lacks the capabilities of moving the Consciousness elsewhere. And Consciousness, too is only our brain creating a possible way to think thoughts, words, and images in our Mind.
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A victor only breeds hatred, while a defeated man lives in misery, but a man at peace within lives happily, abandoning up ideas of victory and defeat. - Siddhartha Guatama Buddha
It's a bit of a trick question, as all questions that try to ask about enlightenment are. But I'll play along and try to answer.
You see the same things everyone else sees. You just don't drown out reality with thoughts, preferences, judgements, and opinions. You likely still have all those things going on to some degree, but they are inconsequential to the experience.
Enlightenment doesn't make you better than anybody or special in any way. It doesn't solve all (or any) of your problems. It doesn't give you special powers. It doesn't give you the ability to see magical realms. It's completely ordinary.
So ordinary in fact that it's literally right there in front of everybody's face. Yet nobody sees it.
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Osho is Buddha for the future. The enlightened master who spoke fearlessly.
In Osho's own words:-
When a Buddha moves the wheel of dharma, it takes two thousand five hundred years for it to stop completely. After each five hundred years, it goes on losing momentum. So those are the five ages of the dharma. After each five hundred years the dharma will be less and less, decreased and decreased and decreased, and after twenty-five centuries the wheel will stop again. It will need another Buddha to turn it for the coming twenty five centuries. - From The Diamond Sutra, Ch#3: The Wheel of Dhamma.
Osho's whole message is devoted to the raising of human consciousness.
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WALK BRISK
One hundred and fifty minutes a week. That's the minimum recommended amount of moderate-intensity exercise that the federal government advises the American people to do to optimize their health.
One hundred and fifty minutes a week. That number wasn't pulled out of thin air. There is a bunch of observational data that shows that people who are more physically active have better health outcomes. Those who hit that 150 minutes–a-week mark have around a 30% reduction in overall mortality rates, even when you control for health status at baseline.
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