Is waking consciousness just a dream within a dream?

Buddha Dreaming by Alice Popkorn – “Our life is shaped by our mind”. Source: Flickr

Earlier this week I was honoured to spend some time as a guest at Night Club, chatting to its founder Andrew Holecek about dreaming, meditation and consciousness. Night Club is an online forum where members learn how to become lucid during their dreams – fully aware that what they’re experiencing is a fantasy created by their own minds. But Night Club offers a whole lot more than this, because the practices and disciplines that can be deployed to cultivate nighttime lucidity also help members penetrate the illusions of their waking consciousness.

Andrew is a renowned lucid dream and dream yoga teacher who has written several wonderful books on this and related subjects. At the request of my publisher a few months ago he had kindly set aside some time to read my own book Am I Dreaming? before it hits the shelves on 1 August, and subsequently invited me to be interviewed for Night Club.

We had plenty to talk about and the interview is now live (see below).

Am I Dreaming? explores the neuroscience of altered states of consciousness, such as dreams, trance, hypnosis, meditation and the psychedelic state, and the role they can play in improving our spiritual and psychological wellbeing. The major surprise that came from my investigation of the latest scientific thinking is that all forms of consciousness, including ordinary, waking consciousness, are based on hallucinatory, virtual reality conjured by the brain and are powerfully influenced by expectation and belief.

Continue reading “Is waking consciousness just a dream within a dream?” →

Everything is not going to be ok

Amaravati

My publisher recently sent me an audio clip of the opening paragraphs of my new book Siddhartha’s Brain (published in the US on 26 April and 2 June in the UK), spoken beautifully by the British actor Steven Crossley. If you fancy a sneak preview, I’ve embedded it below.

As I recall, that morning the nuns’ and monks’ chant in the Meditation Hall of Amaravati Buddhist Monastery actually moved me to tears, though it’s hard to recapture that emotion – or where exactly it came from – when you’re sat at your computer keyboard back at home. So I simply wrote that, far from finding the chant maudlin (“Birth is dukkha [suffering]; Ageing is dukkha; Death is dukkha; Sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair are dukkha…”) I was strangely moved by its honesty.

We have social taboos about admitting publicly all the types of suffering that are inherent in the day-to-day experience of having a body and a mind. Perhaps this serves a purpose, I don’t know, but for me at that moment and in that special place, speaking the words out loud felt immensely liberating. It somehow opened the floodgates, and out came tears of relief and happiness.

Images: Jake Barnes

Go gentle into that good night

Weeds grow on a concrete pathway in a cemetery in Galveston, Texas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas

“How do individuals emotionally cope with the imminent real-world salience of mortality?” wonder psychologists in a recent paper. Or in everyday language, how do people manage when they come face to face with death? The psychologists’ research suggests that, even under the most challenging circumstances, most people manage surprisingly well.

Sarah Hirschmüller and Boris Egloff from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany analysed the last words of people you might expect to bemoan bitterly their fate and “rage, rage against the dying of the light”: prisoners on death row just seconds away from execution. But in fact, more than 80% used a greater number of positive emotional words in their final spoken statements than negative emotional words. Continue reading “Go gentle into that good night” →

Uncanny synchronicity in the brain during near death experiences and meditation

Stone Buddha head enveloped by roots — The Buddha is said to have entered a state of deep meditation as he died

People who have had a near-death experience commonly report a sense of wellbeing and peace, detachment from the world, the feeling of being outside their own body, and seeing a bright light. People who meditate deeply often report very similar sensations. Research reported yesterday in the journal PNAS suggests what may link the two experiences. Continue reading “Uncanny synchronicity in the brain during near death experiences and meditation” →