Dream Yoga

The point of doing the dream yoga, etc, isn’t really about having lucid dreams, or out of body experiences—these are sort of ‘teasers’ to keep a practitioner motivated. It’s similar to doing yoga practices to develop siddhis—supernatural powers and abilities—people see these as the goals and do the practice ardently, but usually when they get to the goal they find they’re not interested any more. In fact, as I’m sure you know, many schools stress the avoidance of pursuing siddhis because they can be such a trap. Anyway, the point of doing the dream yoga, or of doing one-pointed concentration, etc, is to develop what is called ‘witness-consciousness’—where you never lose yourself in what you experience and in doing so identify with the experience, ie, take on the identity of the experience as being who or what you are.

When you start to become steady in this state you’ll have the sensation of always being the same, of always being yourself, of always being the “seer”, the witness—you say ” it makes no difference whether I close my eyes…I can still “see”..”—same thing. And yes, it’ll make you sad, because you’ve been looking for something in all your experiencing, and all that experiencing just turns out to be “experiencing”—and whether you experience this world, or an astral world, or absolute nothingness, or nirvana, there’s still you being the experiencer.

Remember I used the image of a central ‘sun’ ? And remember I wrote to you back in November about being immersed in this overwhelming love, and how I got there, etc? If your attention and identity are focused on the body, as most beings here are, you’ll experience the sun as the fulfillment of bodily goals, which is primarily eternal life (all life strives to live forever, all life develops infinite survival strategies to try to guarantee a chance of living forever, either as an individual organism, or as a species, or as an ecosystem, or as a creation); if your attention and identity are focused on your emotional center, your heart, you’ll experience the sun as infinite love, as the fulfillment of everything you’ve longed for in terms of emotional nourishment (everything wants to be loved—heavens and hells are defined by the presence or absence of love); if your attention and identity are focused on your identity, your third eye area, then you’ll experience the sun as your true self, as who you really are. A lot of traditional yoga paths follow this last way to the sun—which is why there’s such a strong emphasis on developing the ajna chakra—and the ajna chakra is also where you begin to experience ‘witness consciousness’—the more you isolate yourself in the ajna the more you’ll experience the witness state—but the more you isolate yourself in anything the more you’ll begin to experience things solely from that standpoint. The problem with the witness state is exactly what you’ve run into—well, here I am, what do I do now? And right there is the main thing—what do you DO? All life, all planes of existence from the physical to the mental to the super-mental to the buddhic to nirvana, are all DOING, they are NOT Being. All spiritual striving, all yoga practices, all going from discipline to discipline, teacher to teacher, life to life, is DOING. You can hang out in witness consciousness and look for what to DO next and what you will get is more doing. What you have to do is not do—you have to let go and just be. I’m not talking here about how you live your everyday life, I’m talking about letting your awareness let go of looking for the next doing—especially when you’re in the witness state. It’s like trying to fall asleep—the more you try, and the harder you try, the more you’ll stay awake—when you finally stop trying to fall asleep is when you usually do. You have to go from the witness state and trying hard for the next doing to a sort of falling asleep into the sun, and you do that by not doing, by just being. And then you’ll experience yourself as the sun, as the source of being, as the source of consciousness, and as the source of love. After that it’s between you and the sun—you may simply merge into it—the classical samadhi thing; or you may become a sort of bridge with one foot in the sun and one in the world, which is where I seem to have wound up.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.lightseekinglight.com/1995-letters/dream-yoga/