hackedperception

Just over a year ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Lucid Dreaming expert, Charlie Morley, for Hacked Perception’s YouTube channel. When I spoke with Charlie last year we touched on many subjects that naturally relate to lucid dreaming practice such as the nature of consciousness, death and reincarnation and astral projection.

For those who have not seen this you can watch the full interview here:

https://youtu.be/OwpPbZZxFwY

Something I didn’t get the chance to discuss with Charlie at any great length was the concept of Mutual Dreaming; that is the idea that two or more people can share (and also potentially interact) in the same dream environment (a concept that was immortalised by Hollywood in the movie “Inception”).

The reason for this particular blog came from a number of experiences where I have noticed that after a period of time sleeping beside someone there appears some level synchronisation of dream intensity and theme’s; one could argue that this is just a byproduct of shared life experiences (which for the record, I’m not denying is a contributing factor) but I feel there is something more complex at work.

Dreams (and consciousness for that matter) are still such a mysterious subject, one which I personally don’t think can be distilled primarily to “day residue” or sexual repression that Freud’s early dream analysis models suggest. The reason for this belief is rooted in a wider exploration of consciousness, where the most plausible of models (defined in disciplines as wide ranging as Hinduism, Southern American Shamanism to Quantum physics) indicate that consciousness may be the very fabric of our universe.

There are numerous organisations exploring the mutual dreaming experience and conducting experiments such as the work of Dr Rory Mac Sweeney and his ongoing Mutual Dream Experiment, whereby dreamers are asked to choose a “dream password” and attempt to exchange it with another dreamer on a specific night. These passwords are recorded and matched online and dream content is exchanged to further validate a match.

If you would like to read more or get involved in this please check out the Mutual Dream Experiment here:

http://www.wakeupinyourdreams.com/mutualdream/?error=Please+log+in+to+access+the+connected+dream+experiment.

Do I think such experiences are plausible?

Some of my personal thoughts on this would suggest one or more “paranormal explanations”, such as the dream world itself being an “external construct” or human beings having the capacity for communication (telepathy?) in dream states, both of which I don’t see as being impossible if I am to hold true to the idea that consciousness isn’t just “something in our heads” but something that we both exist in, and give existence to, simultaneously.

I wonder how much we can learn about ourselves and the perceived external universe by examining dream states…and if we can wake up in those dreams who knows what we will be capable of…

Sweet Dreams.

As much as I enjoy the intellectual play of exploring the colourful and exciting landscapes of mysticism, philosophies and psychedelia, aspects of my personal life in the last year have brought my attention very firmly to the day-to-day realities of the joys and pain in this life.

Coming to terms with the fact that my mother is still very sick and the road to recovery might not be as much on the horizon as I had originally hoped (or perhaps even the destination I once thought) and paradoxically the incredible joy of finding the most perfect and true love with my wife Katy doubled (quite literally) with us expecting twins has been, and still is, both a beautiful and challenging journey.

Love is quite literally at the heart of all of this and it got me musing about what it means to love, the challenges we face and why it can be so hard to allow ourselves to let it in to our lives.

I feel that intrinsically we as human beings are creatures of love – literally born of it – but as our life conditioning begins to set in we move further away from this natural state.

I think we need catalysts to get us back on track, in many cases these can be significant life events that are often not necessarily enjoyable experiences, such as great loss or sickness in personal or professional life.

For me personally, I think the most significant inhibitors to loving fully in the past have been a lack of self-knowledge, not having the courage to be true to myself and being too afraid to give myself fully for fear of it not being the right decision.

The combination of my personal life experiences to date and a deep desire to understand the nature of human existence through philosophical, spiritual and shamanic exploration brought me to realise at 32 years old I don’t think I had ever allowed myself to give or receive love fully. I had somehow cheated myself of this experience, confusing it with other things –  infatuation, addiction, fear, excitement and loneliness to name a few.

And whilst this isn’t new or revolutionary, I realised, for myself, that you can’t have love if you don’t know who you are, you can’t know the joy of love if you are clouded with fear and that you really do have to be prepared to take a chance and risk losing it all – nothing held back, its all or nothing.

Love is our true nature and nature itself is manifestation of love.

To quote dear old Terence “nature loves courage”, so be brave, and love yourself. 

I have often battled with concept of spiritual practice, particularly of the eastern variety that puts forward the notion that true freedom or “enlightenment” is attained through detachment.

At a very rudimentary level, it would seem questionable as to why our very being and nature affords such a susceptibility to attachment via our senses, our fascination to seek pleasure, and furthermore our obsession with capturing all of this experience for us to reminisce over.

Our sense of “self” is defined by a combination of this remembered experience, that is, we only know who we are through memory, or to put it another way, our reality only exists because of resonance.

There are schools of thought that suggest the process of detachment is to cultivate a way of being that remains “in the now”, neither clinging to the past, nore longing for a particular outcome in the future. Could we say that even our memories of the past or projections of future actually only occur ‘in the eternal now’?

If so, could it be possible to ascertain a state of being that could, rather than denounce the game of memory and aspiration, actually strike some kind attachment/detachment balance that allows us to fully embrace our senses, desires and pleasures, as “spiritual practice”?

Having discovered Tantra two years ago I have started to wonder whether the concept of detachment is only one side of the complete picture. If we are here as incarnations or facets of the divine as almost all spiritual systems would have us believe, is it not our very purpose to experience this life through all the apertures of our being to allow “God/The Universe” to be able to have an complete experience of “itself”?

Why label some elements of our life experience as outside of “spiritual practice”?
My personal experience of Tantra is that sex, sexuality and sensuality can be a more that just gratification of desire but a practise of self enquiry, understanding of others and even meditative states of bliss.

I feel that true spiritual living must be all inclusive, an ebb and flow of attachment and detachment, and wonder whether there could be a more perfect practise or physical metaphor for this than the union of masculine and feminine energy in the “sexual now”.