Integral Deep Listening

According to Buddhism there are three sources of suffering.

They are ignorance or delusion,

attachment or craving,

and pride or self.

The remedies to these are found in six core qualities.

Wisdom and Witnessing are the antidotes to ignorance and delusion.

Develop them and you wake up and become enlightened.

Acceptance and Confidence are the antidotes to attachment and craving.

Develop them and you become free and powerful.

Compassion and inner peace are the antidotes to pride and self.

Develop them and you become all things and sacred.

Integral Deep Listening awakens these six core qualities within you.  It does so by

Anchoring them to the cycle of

each breath you take

your day

the seasons

your life and death.

It also awakens these qualities by

first interviewing them,

then listening to them,

then applying them

as they are personified by your suffering

as it manifests in the dream of your life

both while awake and

while asleep.

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This site, DreamYoga.Com, compares one particular form of dream yoga, Integral Deep Listening, not only to Tibetan dream yoga and lucid dreaming, but to various other points of reference, including shamanic vision quests, Hindu and Chinese dream yogas, psychoanalysis, Jungian, and Gestalt therapies,  Transactional Analysis, NLP, and Wilber’s Integral AQAL.  It also contains a number of short essays dealing with the relationships of Integral Deep Listening to such areas as meditation, lucid dreaming, dream interpretation, epistemology, art theory, psychopathology, creative problem solving, and phenomenology. For a description of the method itself and detailed information about how it is applied, see IntegralDeepListening.Com.

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To be enlightened means to be awake to love and to life.  The goal is to be awake in all levels and states: dreaming, sleeping, after death experience and even waking.  Enlightenment is not lucid dreaming. It is not lucid deep sleep. It is lucid waking, in all states. It is lucid living. Some people think that if they learn to wake up in their dreams or deep sleep they will therefore be more awake in their waking life.

The truth is, there is little correlation.

If you talk to lucid dreamers, Buddhist and otherwise, if you do a broad study of lucid dreaming and talk to a number of lucid dreamers, you will find that there is no correlation between lucid dreaming and spirituality.  Children, criminals, housewives, and business people can be lucid dreamers.  You can be on any level of development and have lucid dreams. You can be a lucid dreamer and not be a very kind, generous, or thoughtful person.

This is because lucid dreaming is one of many aptitudes or lines of development.  It does not necessarily correlate with the development of any other line.  In other words, you can become an excellent lucid dreamer and remain narcissistic, delusional, and deeply asleep as a human being.  When you become lucid you still have the issue of who you are and what to do about “you.”

This is because an awake “you” is like a dry drunk.  You know who you are when you are lucid dreaming: “I am ‘me,’ awake in this dream,” but the “you” that is awake is still stuck.  It remains in drama.  It remains subject to the cultural dream in which it is immersed.  Ken Wilber, in Integral Spirituality, talks about this as Buddha’s enlightenment being conditioned by the context of living in a Bronze age world.  This was also true for Jesus, it is true for your spiritual teacher, if you have one, and it is true for you and for me.  The good news is that your potential for enlightenment is even greater than that of the Buddha or Jesus because you live in a broader, more inclusive cultural context which allows for a broader, more inclusive awakening.

Nevertheless, lucid dreaming Christians, whether from the 2nd or 21st century, make choices in their dreams based on their Christian scripting.  A lucid dreaming Buddhist is one who makes choices in his dreams based on his Buddhist scripting.  A lucid dreaming child of today’s world culture, which we all are, makes choices in their dreams based on her immersion in that culture, regardless of her development. A lucid dreaming criminals, for instance, makes dream choices based on their level of development.  You will experience your dreams tonight, whether lucid or not, based on the cultural assumptions of your childhood scripting, your life experiences, and your particular beliefs.  It’s unavoidable, and this principle will remain true in a thousand years.

Who you are, what you believe right now, is who makes the choices when you are lucid in your sleep and dreams.  If your belief system says, “go lucid and meditate,” you will seek to meditate in a lucid state while you are dreaming.  If your belief system says, “change attacking monsters into attractive partners for sex,” that’s what you’ll attempt to do.  If your belief system says, “use dreams like Milarepa did, to visit spiritual teachers and have amazing psychic experiences,” that’s what you’ll try to do. If your belief system says, “Jesus is Lord and I’m going to see God,” then that’s what your lucid dreams will tend to confirm.

There is no problem with any of this, except that your lucid dreaming reality is driven by your waking agenda, which in turn is based on the belief that your waking assumptions are best, good, and right.  You know that the assumptions on which you base your life are good, best, or right because of some rationalization that you tell yourself: you are intending to do God’s will, you are attempting to follow “God’s word” or what the Buddha taught; because you are following the instructions of some teacher that you respect, or because your intentions are noble: you are a well-meaning, kind person.

The problem is that for the best and noblest of reasons, you aren’t listening. You are instead imposing your waking value system on your experience in whatever state you are in at the moment, including the dream state.  The exception is the deep sleep state, in which you are completely unconscious and are normally imposing a state of unconsciousness.  However, if you have learned to be conscious in deep sleep, as some very clever advanced meditators do, the quality of your deep sleep consciousness is predicated by the degree of your delusional identification with yourself and its value system.  All deep sleep awareness is not the same. You’re still “you” if you become awake tonight while deeply asleep.

If you are successful at becoming lucid, you will impose that same waking belief system on deep sleep reality and any experiences that you have after you die. Your waking identity, its cultural assumptions and its level of development become the filter through which you perceive reality, regardless of what state you are in.  We see this in near death experiences. While many common cross-cultural elements have been identified, such as meeting friends, relatives, and teachers, moving through a “tunnel,” and moving toward a light, these tend to be framed in the world view of the perceiver.  Christians tend to see Jesus; Buddhists tend to see Buddha, a Bodhisattva, or the Clear Light, and so forth. In other words, whatever your belief system, whomever you think you are, you will tend to have experiences that confirm it, meaning you stay deluded, dreaming and asleep within your belief system, regardless of what state of consciousness you are in.

To a certain extent, the projection of your waking scripting, developmental level, and interpretations onto your experience, regardless of whether you are awake or dreaming, alive or dead, is inevitable and unavoidable.  However, it can be minimized.  Integral Deep Listening is a form of dream yoga that focuses on reducing the filters that you place between you and life itself, regardless of your state at the moment.  IDL minimizes assumptions, interpretations, and projections when you are awake and dreaming.  It emphasizes open focus: asking questions, not making assumptions, and most importantly, listening. Instead of assuming you know the proper responses to make in dreams by changing dream events according to your desires or avoiding fear and suffering and maximizing pleasure and learning, you suspend your assumptions and simply listen.

This approach to dream yoga assumes you need to listen because there’s a lot you don’t already know.  It assumes you don’t already know the best way to think, feel, and act in your dreams, even if you believe you do.  It assumes that your perceptions and understandings in your dreams and waking life are most likely incorrect, whether or not you know that you are asleep and dreaming your life.

Phenomenological in nature, IDL suspends such assumptions in favor of deeply listening to what’s going on at the moment.  If you are dreaming, that means you learn to ask questions of the monster, the fire, the building, the teacher, the sacred (Jesus, Buddha, God), the ground, the clouds, or the sky.  You also learn to practice a deeper form of dream yoga that involves becoming that which you are perceiving. In waking life we call this empathy, which we begin to learn through role playing as children. In Integral Deep Listening we do this by taking the role of the object of our experience: if you are a dreaming Buddhist you become the Bodhisattva in the Tanka; if you are Christian you become Jesus or God; if you have a near death experience you become deceased Aunt Sally or that White Light; if you are just experimenting with lucid dreaming you become that monster instead of making it disappear or changing it into something desirable.  IDL is about questioning your waking assumptions that you know who you are, how you are supposed to live, what lucid dreams are, how you are supposed to act in them, and what the path to enlightenment is. You first learn these principles of interviewing and becoming while you are awake to wake up and get unstuck from your assumptions about who you think you are; then you carry them over into your dreams, your deep sleep, and into your life after death.

The interviewing process itself involves an expansion in one’s sense of self as you “become” the other as fully as you can. Taking on the perspective or world view of different self-aspects integrates them into a larger but thinner self, possessing broader and more varied perspectives and therefore able to access more potentials. While such an integration resolves many conflicts with both internal and external realities, more importantly, it compassionately nurtures them within a broader homeostasis.

While the ability to get into role and stay there changes from person to person and from moment to moment during an interview, attempting to do so is itself intrinsically therapeutic, in that it evolves empathy through learning to take the role of the other, objectivity by practicing retroflection, acceptance through the identification with uncomfortable or previously unknown perspectives, confidence through the cultivation of trust, wisdom through consideration of issues from other perspectives, and inner peace as identity rises above the drama of conflicting roles.

Admittedly, Integral Deep Listening has its own set of assumptions about who we are.  It also has its own biases and its own world view, because these are unavoidable. The point is not to pretend that our world views, assumptions, biases, interpretations, and prejudices do not exist, which is what most of us do most of the time, but rather to minimize them by first being honest about them and secondly, doing our best to wake up by questioning them all, in all states.

If you already do these two things – you are honest with yourself about your biases, rationalizations, and assumptions and do your best to question them in all states – then read no more.  Integral Deep Listening has nothing to offer you.  If, however, you are already a lucid dreamer but have problems with money, relationships, health, or confidence, you’re still asleep and dreaming.  You’re not lucid.  You’re not enlightened.  Neither am I!  I’m stuck too!  But this is not about trusting me as some authority on lucidity or spiritual development. What you will find here is a methodology, a spiritual discipline, a yoga, that will thin “you” out as you put it to the test in your own life.  Less “you” means fewer projections, less attachment, fewer reactive choices, and therefore the manufacture of less pain and suffering awake, dreaming, asleep, or dead.  The Buddha recognized this in his amazing principle of anatma, or “no-self.” Integral Deep Listening is here to help you to get more out of your own way so that you can be more awake, more loving, and more alive.

For more information on these and other related topics, see IDL Essays.

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Click here for information about becoming an Integral Deep Listening/Dream Yoga Practitioner