Lucid Living Topic - part II

Hmmm, so it is questioning everything you do to see the fundemetal reasons behind why we do things. I think I get it now (ish :happy: )

And yes, not only do I just look at things, I note how I feel wheen I see something or someone doing something. I look outside now and see the sun shining through the clouds and notice how it makes me feel (like there is some new revelation in me, trying to break through the clouds of my own ignorance (hey, where did that come from??!)) I also notice the greenery outside the window, for some reason I find green a very relaxing colour… I am aware of both myself and the external world, so I suppose I do understand something of what you mean.

Having not yet had a LD I don’t have anything to compare this to, hopefully soon I will get the idea. LL seems like a very interesting concept to me. I’ll go away and think about these things carefully.

Sam :smile:

I dont’t think ‘Lucid Living’ has a fixed definition at the moment.

Yeah, I noticed :content:

Yes, I don´t think we all mean the same when saying LL, but similiar things (it´s allways about an increase in awareness while waking).

When I say LL, I mean that I try to feel how unreal waking world can be.Basically it is just changing my perception.When I do so, things really look different in a way, like when you are high on nicotione or something

Traumgänger

Subjectivity is relativity, there is an infinite number of ways to interpret the world. If LL is increasing awareness then awareness of what? I think the structure of your subjective world compared to the objective world (if there is such a thing).

I´d say LL is increasing the awareness of all perceptions that “come in”.

Usually, you have those filter that keep all the “useless” information out of your counciousness.The information that comes through those filters gets compared to and adjusted to memories of similiar things.

So, LL means (imho!) that you try to “deactivate” the filters and associations.You pay attention to all perceptions coming in, without simply adjusting them to your memories.
This way you notice many things you haven´t seen before, and everything get´s some alien feeling to it, since it isn´t matched with the things you already know.

Ok, that´d be my theory to explain LL at the moments, feel free to add something, change it or develop one of your own :wink:

Traumgänger

edit
Something to back this up a little, or give an example:

I wear glasses all day.I usually don´t see them, sometimes I don´t even know wether I wear them at the moment or not.I am just so used to it that it´s always “blacked out” from my filters.
When I do LL, I see the glasses in front of my eyes all the time

Lucid living… to me, is acutally controlling those emotional feelings in the waking world. If you can controll your emotions over something, then you are definately aware of your emotions over that certain thing, and therefore more self aware.

LL is about being able to fully controll yourself and the experiences you have in the waking world, just as LD is fully controling yourself and the experiences you have in the dream world.

You can control the experiences that you have about certain things, by controling (changeing) your thought about it. For example, if you say “today i will not get angry at my boss even though he is an asshole, i will continue to be happy no matter what the fuk he does”…
so what im tryin to say is… you dont HAVE to be angry, you can feel whatever emotion you want. But you have to be self aware in order to do this…
so then… could another word for Lucid Livng be Self Awareness :eh: ??¿¿?¿

SpiritualMaster, I know what you are talking about.I also try to do this, although I find it pretty difficult sometimes (but I am getting better).
I agree, the word LL seems to fit, kinda.
I just never used it in that context myself, so we probably should talk about what the relatively new term LL should mean.

How about you others, in which way do you use LL now, and how would you like to define it for further use?

Traumgänger

Sorry I’m late. I took a small vacation. I’m very pleased to see what has happened with this thread.

First, the definition of Lucid Living. I put one up about a year ago and I have recently been thinking about rewording it (all of this board’s definitions are on the “Lucidity Intro” forum). The concept is: whatever feeling you get when you are Lucid Dreaming should be recreated in waking life. (It may be that the feeling is so varied from one person to the next that a precise definition isn’t possible.)

In trying to define and understand lucidity I’ve found it very valuable to try and understand exactly what it is that I am doing in an LD. And for me it seems to always come down to a unique control of my awareness/attention/consciousness/perception. The more I understand it the more exactly I can duplicate it in waking life. For me it isn’t anything vague. I know exactly how it feels and I know how closely I am duplicating it.

Xetrov: As far as “free will” goes, I am going to assume that it exists. Some people who haven’t had a Lucid Dream don’t believe LDs exist. I’ve used my free will so I know it exists (I really like that psychology experiment I talked about in my opening post that suggest the power of choice is different from our thoughts and feelings).

Æzen: No, not read the book, but will check it out. I like the title.

foolish: Since you haven’t had an LD yet you’ll just have to work with the descriptions that everyone else gives. One of them will give you that “ah Ha”. (you will find mine in Part I of this topic).

SpiritualLucidity:

Exactly, when you are controlling your emotions you are deciding what to feel or not feel. That is power of choice, free will. I am finding more and more that most of the thoughts and feelings I have are pretty useless. As I’m worrying about how much money I have in the bank I find myself asking: “Do I really need to be thinking about this?” (ps. I really like your user name!)

For me a very critical component of lucidity is maintaining a level of self-awareness, and by that I literally mean that I am aware of myself as I am doing whatever. One of the exercises that I like to do is look in a mirror (that’s me, looking at me, looking at me). I get a strong sense of pure “self” when I do that, I’m aware of myself but without thoughts or feelings. In my recent LL practice I’ve found that this sense of self is more important than I had first thought. Originally, as a rough estimation, I felt about 10% of my awareness was focused on myself with the remainder focused on the environment. It seems more like a 50/50 split now (but that may be because I haven’t been working at it for a while).

Another factor that may come into play is “levels”. There is a general consensus that there are different levels of lucidity in dreaming and this should also be true for LL. It may be that as different levels are experienced the components and the definition may change. Something to think about.

Nice defintion DustMote, it covers quite a lot different “styles” of doning LL.I think I´ll use it in the future :smile:

Traumgänger

To me, Lucid Living (I sure like that term :happy: ), is the process of knowing that you are in a dream, RIGHT NOW and at every moment. To me, an LD is a dream within the dream. Being aware that all that you see and feel and say and do is one giant dream in waking life, would sure do well to make you aware in a “sleeping” dream.

So I say feed your imagination and so-called, “waking” consciousness with that possibility. Who knows, if enough of us do it, we might just all wake ourselves up. :peek:

I agree, there are different alteratons in our sense in a dream as opposed to waking life.

Especially after having at least 1LD, one person can differentiate the dream from the waking life, and then compares those as a way for a quick reality check.

Are you aware of the fact that lucid living is pretty much the same thing as “Enlightenment” ? :eek:
Lucid dreams, dream yoga and sleep yoga are used in some tibetan traditions to progress towards enlightenment (Tenzin Wangyal : THE TIBETAN YOGAS OF DREAM AND SLEEP )

Lucid living is alot like mindfullness meditation, used by many people. Good idea to use it for lucid dreaming, it can only help

I’m actually just reading the Tibetan Yogas of dream and sleep and I’m finding it very interesting. I also just finshed a book on ZEN and it dealt with what this thread has labled lucid living.

I’ve been trying it lately with not that much sucess in inducing lucid dreams (but there is no rush) but I do think that it works well during new or pressure situations.

Just a question for anyone (since a lot of the posts from this thread seem quite old) have you found lucid living a helpful wasy to induce ludic dreams?

ypm.

in this topic everybody’s tell his of her definition of Lucid Living, but i’d like to see some “techniques” to Live Lucid,…

yeah the thing that comes up in my mind is zazen-meditation, or mindfullness mediation in general, but i personally find it hard to practice it, because it’s difficult to see how much benifit you get from zazen.

i mean, if i saw progres, it would keep my motivation up.

Do you have any ideas to determine how aware you are? At what level your awareness is?
It would help me a lot to practice zazen again because then i can say: hey, look at that, i’m being more aware than last week!

Yes it helped me a while ago. Although it takes more time before you notice any difference (when compared to other techs), I think LL can have a deeper impact on the long term. I used the method of Atisha (it’s a very simple one: treat everything as if it were a dream) combined with attempting to live in the Now (by condensing thoughts and the perception of space-time in the moment itself). Although I only had a few glimpses of the Now, the practice itself had some beneficial effects: if you try to grasp the moment, you develop more awareness in carnal perceptions, and your worries disappear entirely. Even your thoughts diminish so you can start living fully conscious of your being at that moment (it also inspired me to make poems about it).
This exercise increased general awareness in my dreams, so I became lucid not by some dreamsign, but by the dream feeling itself.
I’m glad you asked that… it reminds me to practice it again :smile:

Hi mystic thanks for the response. I am currently trying to practice lucid living using the instructions from “The Tibetan Yogas of dream and sleep” and I agree with what you wrote about lucid living.

I think your explaination actually answers Isaac’s question, the reason that it is difficult to practice is becuase the progress seems slow, even though in the end it is probably the most rewarding.

One peice of progress that I have noticed in my dreams is an increased “mental” presense. I don’t seem to be as flighty or “fooled” by things, this has occured since I began practicing this in conjunction with meditation.

I’ve had two lucid dreams this month (not too many) and they have both been as a result of this. I also noticed that in the past when I became lucid I was usually excited and the dream woudl often fade. Since practicing lucid living I have been relaxed and more in control during my two lucid dreams.

Is this the atisha method that you use: https://www.osholeela.com/meditation/atisha.html

If you start practicing lucid living again be sure to post any progress here, I’m sure it will help isaac and I (and any other practitioners) to know what progrss “looks” like.

ypm.

I am still a little unclear on what lucid living is.

I can recreate the exitment of being in an LD by really looking at my real life enviroment, and pretending it’s a dream. I can look at it and say, it’s not real, but picture quality is real. I feel “all powerful”.

When you say “choose” to have an emotion, I don’t agree. What you are actually saying is “Should I choose to react and ponder upon this emotion?” It is a judgement of each emotion, and clarifying whether you want to experience it any longer.

Because, ofcourse, you can never stop yourself from feeling emotions.

Now, onto awareness. I thought the idea of the conscious was to be aware of a singal thing. It would be very very hard to take in all the information and consciously study it, compare it to stored data, and file it as you feel fit. Our sub-conscious does this for us. I don’t think that we have the mental ability to process that much information at once.

On top of this, you would have to take stored data, and reajust it to fit the new template that the current data could have created. This could involve reading, and gaining of vocabulary.

The subconscious could process this in one of two ways:

  1. Reanalyse all the data it has got
  2. Reanaylse data based on a list of data to eb reanalysed. So that when the data coems up it is reanalysed before beign submitted to the conscious.

This would contribute to the slow alteration of memory. It would also be extreamly hard to consciously do. You would have to do thsi data analysis, whiel still concentrating on all your senses.

However, it is possible to train yourself to focus on one sense, with information coming in from another sense.

Now which one is it that is lucid living?

ypm: no that’s not the method I used… I used this one:

(from kagyu-asia.com/t_7points_atisha.html )

Technodreamer: Lucid living isn’t about analyzing every perception coming from your senses (at least imo). In fact, true lucid living goes beyond the analytical mind. Instead of clinging to every perception, you have to let it all go through you. Don’t get attached, don’t analyze and try not to think about it, but become aware of it and just let it be. There’s no need to think about it. It isn’t about perceptual recognition but about letting it all go, accepting the perception as it is without trying to grasp it. Like a mirror, the things you perceive doesn’t affect you in any way, but are reflected back by your mind, which remains undisturbed by their existence.
Also, realize you’re not living in the future, nor in the past but that you’re here Now. I say realize, not visualize or think about… To feel your awareness is far more important than to think about it, because that would cause too much identification with the world and keeps the mind away from the Now. Realize it doesn’t help you anything if you keep distracted by your thoughts, which always reside in the past or the future, but never in the Now. The mind is always escaping the Now, thereby creating lots of distractions and mental suffering. In essence, lucid living is exactly about residing back into the Now, to find back that ungraspable stillness. And you can only do that if you let go of the future and the past, because staying there only creates a gap between where you are and where you want to be… If you can do that, you’re very intensely aware of and in peace with the world as it is Now, without any distractions from the analytical mind. I think this is the very core of lucid living… Although it may take years of meditation and practice before you reach it, the way along is also very colorful and rich of nice experiences, glimpses of what’s yet to come.